Before I really get into the exact methodology and science behind my approach to bulking, I’d like to address conventional bulking diets.  I’ve dabbled in them, cutting them off when I thought I was gaining too much fat, and as a result never really saw a whole lot of steady muscular bodyweight gain.  Sure, I gained a bit of muscle over the course of about 8 years, but it wasn’t until I really started dabbling in nutrition, experimenting with different macronutrient profiles, and tinkering with everything from my calories to my eating frequency, before I started to really see an increase in my lean mass gains.  Thus, here’s a short appraisal of conventional wisdom regarding bulking diets.

From suck to suck and man-tits.  Out-fucking-standing.

GOMAD– The great-grandpappy of all modern bulking diets.  This seems to have grown out of the turn of the century strongman’s penchant for drinking milk- all of them seem to have drunk a great deal of the shit, and Saxon took it a step further and drank heavy cream.  Historically, milk has been considered to be a near-perfect food for humans, given its high calcium and protein content, and the fact that raw milk is tremendously easy for a healthy person to digest.  Hippocrates advocated a raw milk diet to cure tuberculosis, and both the Masai and Swiss based their diets on milk (the Masai consuming primarily cow milk and blood, supplemented with meat and maize). (Bieler, 212)  

Building on the belief that raw milk is the stuff of greatness, a writer for Strength and Health, John McCallum, penned articles touting raw milk as the way to grow (later compiled into the book The Complete Keys to Progress.  Randall J. Strossen, editor of that book, took that idea a step further, and suggested that everyone drink a gallon of milk a day and do his 20 rep squat program.  It’s my understanding that Strossen merely repackaged McCallum’s ideas about milk and squats, which would make sense, as it was still legal to produce and transport raw milk in the US in 1965 (when McCallum penned the book).  In retrospect, I’d imagine the fact that Pat Casey (the first guy to bench 600 lbs raw) and Doug Hepburn (the first guy to bench 500 raw) drank 6 quarts of milk a day factored into the belief that a gallon of milk a day is the way to super-strength as well, as it really drove home McCallum’s suppositions.

No matter who invented it or why it became so popular, the adoption of that diet in this century is fucking ridiculous for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that it’s impossible to purchase raw milk easily in the US, and pasteurized and homogenized milk borders on indigestible for most people.   Whereas raw milk merely ferments in your intestines (which actually makes it better for you), pasteurized milk putrefies. (Bieler, 211)  Additionally, pasteurized milk is shown to be among the top three food allergies, and has symptoms ranging from ear infection and bad breath to asthma, admonial cramping, diarrhea, croup, and asthma, even in people who are lactose tolerant.(Audette, 58)  Throw into the mix the fact that even skim milk contains 205g of sugar per gallon (and has a higher GI than fatty milks), and you’ve got a fucking recipe for disaster.  Thus, in straining the shit out of your digestive system, you’re getting a paltry 145g of protein for your efforts, not all of which will be digested, due to the fact that the fat molecules in homogenized milk are broken down into smaller parts and become a stealth delivery system for the proteins that puts them directly into your bloodstream, causing allergies.  Pasteurization takes care of the rest, killing all of the enzymes that would aid in the digestion of this chemical monstrosity, putting the final cards in place to facilitate the transformation of milk from a benevolent Dr. Jekyll into a slavering, soul-rending, baby-raping, eviscerating horrorshow of a Mr. Hyde.  At best, it’s a quick way to get fat as shit, in my opinion, unless you swing a sledge all day long at work, or you’ve got the most freakish metabolism of all time, and at worst, you can pretty much wreck every one of your body’s internal systems with GOMAD.

Uh… hanging gut and abs?

The traditional bodybuilding bulking diet– this generally consists of the diet that was popular in 1990 amongst everyone, for some reason, but in massive quantities.  Low fat, high carbs, moderate protein (though they’ll assert it’s high).  Thus, you’re eating brown or white rice, veggies, and chicken breasts, in amounts that will afford you 1-1.5g protein per lb of bodyweight, 2-3g of carbs per pound, and .5-1g of fat.  All day.  Every day.  Does it work?  For those amongst us with stout metabolisms, and who do an inordinate amount of daily cardio, apparently.  Perhaps those who flourish on this sort of a diet are carb- or mixed-type metabolisms.  I know that I never really gained much weight on this diet, nor was I particularly lean.

The see-food diet– the favorite of guys like Lee Priest, who appear to be circus fat men with some muscle beneath their blubber in the off-season.  It will put muscle on you, but eating garbage all day long is neither conducive to good health, nor does it make for a particularly attractive physique.  As the goal of the enterprise on which we’ve embarked is to lean bulk, this diet’s useless to anyone who isn’t running massive amounts of clenbuterol, test, and GH… and looking at Lee Priest, it doesn’t work all that well for those guys, either.  While it might work for putting on sheer mass, it’s not useful for lean gains, and the fat you put on is a pain in the ass to take off later.  

Franco stayed lean year-round.

My bulking and cutting approaches are remarkably similar, and are the outgrowth of the works of a number of people, including Ray Audette, Dan Duchaine, Warren Willey, Mauro Di Pasquale, and even a bit of Torbjorn Akerfeldt, all under the umbrella of Wolcott’s Metabolic Typing.  My carb and calorie cycling approach is essentially an amalgamation, then, of Warren Willey‘s Zig Zag and MCD (modified carb drop) diets, Audette’s Neanderthin recommendations, and Duchaine’s Body Opus, with a bit of steering from Wolcott when picking my macronutrient profiles.  

As I’m a protein type, I trend my protein extremely high(2g+/lb of bodyweight), followed by fat and carbs.  If you’re a carb or mixed type, you might want to tinker with my recommendations to better suit your metabolism.  Through hard training and the gradual introduction of more protein in your diet, Wolcott asserts that anyone can become a protein type, but the change is apparently extremely gradual.  In any event, kicking off the basics is Willey’s Zig Zag diet, which is based on a three day rotation of low-even-high calorie days, using the BMR to determine total caloric intake and working backwards from there.  I’ve already stated that I have massive problems with BMR calculations, but for the sake of exposition, he uses the BMR as a baseline, and then multiplies that by .8 on low cal days and 1.2 on high cal days.  He then uses an isocaloric macronutrient ratio to determine protein/carb/fat intake.  Personally, I think Zone dieting is the single fastest way to mediocrity, but I liked the underlying theory behind his plan.  

In defiance of the gods and any clinical evidence I’ve seen, these broads look sick on a Zone diet.

In re my protein recommendation, there would appear to be a great deal of “evidence” to show that no one needs the massive amount of protein I recommend.  As I’ve got mountains of anecdotal evidence backing me, I’m inclined to tell those parties just to go and get fucked, question their manhood, fuck their girlfriend, and possibly leave them in a gutter broken and bleeding, but I’ve also got science on my side.  Like my contention regarding BMR, a 2004 meta-analysis of protein studies called “Protein and amino acids for athletes” concluded that there are too many factors that enter into setting protein requirements, “including the timing of ingestion in relation to exercise and/or other nutrients, the composition of ingested amino acids and the type of protein.”(Tipton)  As such, they suggest that athletes go with the “more is better” philosophy, as there’s no evidence whatsoever that high levels of dietary protein will have a deleterious effect on a healthy individual’s performance or overall health.  This is why I’m going to 2g/lb of bodyweight, and then working my other macros around that.  

What protein could be more bioavailable than human flesh?

Though Willey would likely disagree with my take on protein, Lyle Macdonald would not.  Despite our protein dispute, I still like the guy’s ideas, and like the modified carb drop Willey recommends, which consists of 2 and 3 day keto runs followed by high carb days.  As I’d used this to great effect, and have blogged about it in the past, I felt that combining these two diets might be efficacious.  To further increase this, however, it seemed that the inclusion of a paleo day in the place of the occasional fast might provide a simple method by which one could create a caloric deficit while still remaining anabolic, flush any toxins one might have accumulated, have a day easy on the digestive tract, and balance blood glucose levels that might have been out of whack with the high-carb days and/or cheat windows.(Paleolithic)  Finally, I threw in the two cheat windows, which I’ve found make the entire fucking diet awesome- they speed my metabolism, (Matsumoto) allow me to eat my fucking face off, replenish my glycogen stores, (Bowden) and increase my thyroid, adrenal, and sex hormones, (Poehlman) in addition to providing and awesome forced break from clean eating.(Westrate)  Though he provides no citations of any kind, Lyle Macdonald is also a fan of the cheat meal, though to a far more limited degree than I am.  I will suggest, however, that the effects I described above are really only seen in people who are already fairly lean- if you’re fat (15%+), I would limit your gorging during cheat meals, as they’re not going to have quite the same effect.  In fact, there’s a very real possibility that they’ll have a fat-deposition effect rather than a fat-reduction effect, in addition to the fact that it will renew your love of food.

Side note:  I’ve stated on a couple of occasions that I disliked working with the obese or women on diet.  This is due in large part to the fact that their dieting issues are far more psychological than physical.  They’ve a love of food, and emotional response to food, that I fail to understand or for which am I willing or able to account.  If you call yourself a “foodie”, you probably can’t be trusted around cheat foods, and a cheat meal is likely to become a week-long binge that ends in type 2 diabetes.  Thus, you should stick to eating clean foods, and seek psychiatric help.  Clearly, as I have only two emotions, happy and super-ripshit pissed, I’m not the guy to help you through your repressed emotions, fear of abandonment, and sitophilia.

Alright… maybe there’s something to food fetishes.
There’s nothing like big titties covered in pudding.  Either that, or she just got bukkaked by the 100 guys who work at a plant that makes nothing but Yellow #5.  Either way, that pic is awesome.  In order for a guy to have enough nutrition in order to drop a gallon of nut on some broad, he’d need to eat fairly regularly.  I know a number of you out there are enamored of Martin over at LeanGains, as his philosophy lends itself to a somewhat less structured approach to dieting.  I’m unconvinced, however, in the efficacy of the theory backing intermittent fasting, though they seem to work wonders for him and for the progenitor of that theory, Ori Hofmekler.  The human body is designed to store bodyfat for use during periods wherein one cannot find food, so his methodology seems apt to fail, given that you’re training your body to expect daily famines for which it must store fat.   According to the science I’ve seen, regular feedings, as opposed to infrequent feedings, improve one’s insulin profiles, thermogenesis, lipolysis.  (Farshchi, et al., Yunsheng, et al.) This is important, as these frequent feedings should speed your metabolism enough to aid in keeping your bulking phase lean.  Old-school strongmen will contend that this will retard your gains, but I’d suggest that the utilization of my method allows for far great lean mass gains without concurrent fat gains, which makes it far more efficacious for our original goal.

Physique you get from three meals of a half gallon of milk,18 eggs, and a bunch of bananas every day.
As we’d probably like to guard against too much encroachment into muscular gains by the thermogensis created by frequent feedings, it would behoove us to ensure that this is not going to negatively impact anabolism.  Science to the rescue again, as studies appear to show that protein utilization and anabolism is decreased when one force-feeds rather than spreads their nutrient intake throughout the day (Cohn et al).  The delivery can either come in the form of slow-digesting protein a couple of times a day, or faster digesting protein at regular, frequent intervals, but studies do seem to show that protein utilization is improved if it’s spread throughout the day, rather restricted to infrequent, large feedings.  (Mosoni and Patreau) 

So, with what are we left?  Flexibility.  I’m not talking about stretching your muscles- I’m referring to stretching your mind.  Obviously, dogmatism really never enters into my dietary or weightlifting regimes, as I pull from a wide variety of clinical studies and esoteric sources.  I’m constantly evaluating both my performance and appearance (I don’t test my bodyfat levels), and tweaking my diet therefrom.  I’ll tinker with a macronutrient ratios, timing and frequency of cheat meals, the number of my meals, and any number of variables in my workout routine.  To fail to do so would be beyond insane, but I’ve heard umpteen stories about people following bullshit diets for months on end, seeing no results, and bitching about the failure of their diet, their genetics, and virtually everything on Earth other than their own failure to evaluate and adjust their diets to suit their needs.  It’s akin to putting your car on cruise control and then going to sleep, thinking that the fact that the road is straight means you’ll arrive at your destination safe and sound.  
Progress in diet and in lifting is far from a steady progression- it’s more like a sine wave, though you’re hoping to end up more above than below the x-axis.  The key is to recognize downward trends and adjust your diet and training accordingly, to thwart your body’s continual efforts to return you to homeostasis and mediocrity.  If you can do that, while keeping your goal in sight and refraining from the urge to spend all of your time online dithering about what to do, rather than simply doing it, clean bulking should be a goal entirely within anyone’s reach.
Thus endeth my longest blog.  It was a bitch to write, but I hope you fuckers enjoyed it.

Just because that’s about the pinnacle of awesome.
Sources
Audette, Ray.  Neanderthin.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Bieler, Henry.  Food Is Your Best Medicine.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 1965.

Bowden VL and McMurray RG. Effects of training status on the metabolic responses to high carbohydrate and high fat meals. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2000 Mar;10(1):16-27.

Cohn C, Joseph D, Bell L, Oler A.  Feeding frequency and protein metabolism.  Am J Physiol 205: 71-78, 1963.

Farschi, HR, Taylor M, MacDonald I.  “Beneficial metabolic effects of regular meal frequency on dietary thermogenesis, insulin sensitivity, and fasting lipid profiles in healthy obese women.”  Am J Clin Nut 2005 Jan;81(1):16-24.

Lindeberg S, Jönsson T, Granfeldt Y, Borgstrand E, Soffman J, Sjöström K, Ahrén B.  “A Palaeolithic diet improves glucose tolerance more than a Mediterranean-like diet in individuals with ischaemic heart disease.”  Diabetologia. 2007 Sep;50(9):1795-807. Epub 2007 Jun 22.

Matsumoto T, et al. Comparison of thermogenic sympathetic response to food intake between obese and non-obese young women. Obes Res 2001 Feb;9(2):78-85

Mosoni L, Mirand PP.  Type and Timing of protein feeding to optimize anabolism.  Curr Opin Clin Nut Metab Care. 2003 May; 6(3): 301-306.

Poehlman ET, et al. Genotype dependency of the thermic effect of a meal and associated hormonal changes following short-term overfeeding. Metabolism 1986 Jan;35(1):30-6.

Tipton KD, Wolfe RR. Protein and amino acids for athletes. J Sports Sci. 2004 Jan;22(1):65-79.

Westrate JA, Hautvast JG.  The effects of short-term carbohydrate overfeeding and prior exercise on resting metabolic rate and diet-induced thermogenesis.  Metabolism. 1990. Dec;39(12):1232-9.

Yunsheng M, Bertone E, Stanek E, Reed G, Hebert J, Cohen N, Merriam P, Ockene I.  Association between eating patterns and obesity in a free-living US adult population.  Am J Epidemiol 2003; 158:85-92.

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