ON “GETTING FAT”

 

 

This has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while, and I think I’ve finally built up a headful of enough steam to really just pour out about it.  I genuinely cannot stand it whenever someone brings up the concern of “getting fat”, and it may be because I’ve actually DONE it a few times to the point that I find worrying about “getting fat” to be akin to worrying about accidentally becoming a bodybuilder.  Size, irrespective of if it’s fat or muscle, does not “just happen”: it takes work.  And it may not SEEM like work when people eat themselves into obesity every year, but trust me: they’re putting in the hours to get there.  No one accidentally gets fat: it’s through a dedicated campaign of poor decisions repeated over and over with minimal breaks in routine or deviations from the plan.  Yes, just like getting jacked, you gotta employ some effort, consistency and time in order to “get fat”.  So let’s go even further down the rabbit hole to find out why people worrying about “getting fat” are being silly.

Some even manage to fat AND jacked

 

Two of the most notorious programs for generating the “getting fat” comments are Super Squats and 5/3/1 Building the Monolith, primarily because both come with some intense nutritional advice attached: a gallon of milk a day (on top of a diet heavy in food) for the former, and 1.5lbs of ground beef and a dozen eggs a day for the latter.  “If you eat like that, you’re just going to get fat”.  Alright, so here’s the thing: if you can “get fat” in 6 weeks you were already fat.  No one goes from not fat to fat in 6 weeks: you instead go from fat to fatter in 6 weeks.  If you start out “not fat” on one of these programs and actually FOLLOW them (which means doing the conditioning work in Building the Monolith and actually taking the 3+ deep breaths between EVERY rep in Super Squats) you will not get fat.  In fact, while running Building the Monolith, I had to go ABOVE the recommended minimums for meat intake, to around 2-2.5lbs a day, just to recover from the intense training, and managed to put on about 4.5lbs in 6 weeks.  No one that is training hard is going to get fat in 6 weeks and, in most cases, they’re actually going to be STRUGGLING to put away enough calories to recover from that sort of training.  I know when I ran Deep Water my life revolved around eating for 12 weeks, because I NEEDED calories to recover from my training demand.

 

Going even further though, “getting fat” also shows up ALL the time when people talk about longer timelines of training outside of those two aforementioned programs, to which I am forced to cop to the idea that, yes, on a long enough timeline, getting fat IS possible.  But so what?  For one: if you end up “getting fat” in the pursuit of muscular gain, it’s assumed that, while you were “getting fat”, you WERE engaging in some manner of regular, intense physical training.  You weren’t like the dudes riding around on scooters at your local Walmart: you were overeating while you were also pounding away at the training.  You got fat but you ALSO got muscle.  Congrats: muscle is HARD to build.  Far harder than all that fat was.   And, in turn, fat is easy to lose.  Far easier than muscle is.  All you need to do is eat LESS than you were eating.  And if you were doing things RIGHT, this is going to be a blessing.  FINALLY, a break from all this goddamn eating.

Homer, seen here, hard at work

 

Which is the other thing that I find goofy: people always refute the idea of losing fat (aka: cutting, as much as I loathe that term) because it’s time spent NOT building muscle.  It’s seen as some sort of failure if you ever divert away from building muscle and spend time losing fat instead.  To this I say: you aren’t training hard enough if you feel that way.  If you think spending ALL of your training time building muscle is in any way sustainable, viable or desirable, you’re screwing around in the weightroom and not actually training effectively in the first place, so your opinion on the matter is totally moot.  Anyone that has spent any dedicated time to REALLY seeking to build muscle KNOWS that breaks NEED to happen.  This is why you see this concept expressed by any individual and program of worth.  Super Squats is 6 weeks followed by 6 weeks of a low rep 5x5 style program before you start it up again, DoggCrapp employs “Blast and Cruise” protocols in training, 5/3/1 is heavily built around rotating programs, John McCallum wrote about the value of “softening up” before heavy training phases, Stuart McRobert wrote about starting light on your next training phase after maxing out the value in your current one, periodization is a thing that’s been realized by EVERY country that fields successful athletes, etc etc.  The only people who DON’T suggest a break from gaining are youtube charlatans trying to sell you a product because it sounds sexy to ALWAYS be gaining muscle.  Don’t be gullible.

 

Which goes to show the fundamental misunderstanding when someone asks “how do I eat to make sure I don’t get fat while I’m gaining muscle”.  Your lean bulk fantasies are cute, but they’re telling as well.  You’ve already admitted that you have NO intention of actually training hard enough to put on any muscle at all during this muscle building phase, because your concern is on riding some sort of razor’s edge of nutrition so that you eat JUST enough to put on muscle without accumulating fat, rather than asking the question of “how the hell am I going to eat enough to be able to recover from this insane training demand I’ve placed upon myself?”  If you followed Elitefts in the mid 2000s, you know that this was what a LOT of Dave’s writing was dedicated to: how to actually get in enough calories, because those dudes were trying to overcome a ridiculous demand in order to grow.  It’s why there are articles dedicated to how to eat a package of Oreos in 10 minutes, the most effective way to eat Reeces’ peanut butter cups, the first telling of J M Blakely’s “extra large pizza with half a bottle of oil” diet, etc etc.  The people that are planning on succeeding aren’t asking how to eat to not get fat: they’re asking how to eat so that they can get enough calories in their gut before it explodes.

There is a reason Elitefts created this mascot in the first place

 

Don’t worry about getting fat: worry about why you’re worrying about it.