RESTRICTION: NOT DENIAL

I write this post knowing full well I have a post titled “body by denial”, but, hopefully, longtime readers of the blog will recognize that, ultimately, these past 14 years have been a process of my thoughts changing and, ideally, evolving over time.  Starting off with rough edges and getting refined through experience and exposure, often times with me doubling back right back to where I began, but with a different lens, similar to that “Newgame+” post I wrote previously as well.  And in that regard, I wish to discuss the distinction that exists between restriction and denial, and how it relates to the path of physical transformation.  One of my readers pointed out that all effective training programs and diets employ some manner of restriction.  For nutrition, this restriction can come in 3 different variants: energy restriction (amount of calories we eat), nutrient restriction (cutting out 1 or 2 of the 3 macros) and time restriction (fasting).  In the realm of training, restriction is more far reaching, but ultimately it’s employed in a manner to balance stimulus, fatigue and recovery in a manner wherein we achieve enough stimulus to promote growth without requiring more fatigue than we have the ability to recover from.  We can either push our limits and restrict ourselves by employing a deload week, meaning a week where we DON’T get to push our limits, or we restrict ourselves by always employing a reasonable degree of stimulus so we don’t overfatigue, meaning we don’t get to always go balls to the wall.  But in all these instances, the operating word is restriction: NOT denial.  Because when we restrict, we merely temper the destructive drives for the sake of achieving something greater, but when we deny, we set ourselves up for the inevitably counter-reaction of denial, which tends to set us back further than we progressed, taking 2 steps back for every one step forward.  Let’s continue to discuss.

Had it just been restricted, we wouldn't be in this mess

 

What are the key operating differences between restriction and denial?  I’m going to be terrible and use the word IN the definition, but quite simply put: restriction does NOT deny.  Restriction ACKNOWLEDGES, whereas denial ignores, and as anyone that has ever raised a child understands: ignoring something only makes it become more powerful and urgent.  And it is this underlying understanding that guide the implementation of successful restriction WITHOUT denial.  We must understand that it is imperative we do NOT ignore in our quest to employ restriction, but that we instead acknowledge, so that we can,  in turn, strategize and effectively overcome and succeed.

 

Ok, that’s all pretty conceptual: let’s get to brass tacks.  In the realm of training, let’s say we have that athlete who HAS to go balls to the wall in their training.  They wanna huff chalk and smash their skull on the barbell and they have an ammonia habit that could send a kid to college.  If we tell this trainee to go do Dan John’s “Easy Strength” program, what we do is deny.  Easy Strength is an incredibly effective program, it has a proven pedigree and track record, and, if followed correctly, will make a trainee stronger.  But “if followed correctly” is the operating premise here, and we have to face facts.  Telling Johnny Cocaine that he needs to never come CLOSE to failure and the weight should feel easy for 40 training sessions in a row of the same 5 lifts is flat out denying his nature, and, most likely, he’s going to get through 2 workouts before he decides to make Easy Strength into “Hard Strength” and make all sets absolute and total grinders, and, assuming they SURVIVE the end of the 40 days, they are going to be ground to dust, with a fried out nervous system, a bunch of joint and ligament damage, and completely and totally weaker than when they started.  We attempted to deny this person’s nature, giving them “the best program”, and in doing so, we did them a disservice.

This is NOT how we should look before a set of Easy Strength...

 

For this individual, restriction would be to acknowledge their psychology and find them a program that suits it while putting in the necessary restrictions to keep them from self-destructing.  As previously mentioned, the simplest avenue would be structured deloads, which already are quite an ask for someone like this, but when presented with the idea that “you do these deloads so that you earn the right to be able to smash PRs in training”, we are at least ACKNOWLEDGING this individual for who they are, vs if we give them Easy Strength and say “It doesn’t matter what you like: this is the best way to train”.  And other interventions exist too: some have speculated that “dynamic effort” work at Westside was honestly just a method to get those meatheads to cool down a few days a week, Dan John’s “bus bench-park bench” openly acknowledges the dualistic nature of a trainee and gives them the opportunity to unleash as needed, Super Squats gives you 6 weeks of low rep work to rechamber for the next round of insanity, etc.  And, of course, it all works the other way as well.  We’re not going to take granny and tell her she HAS to do Super Squats if she ever wants to grow, but we will, at some point during the run of Easy Strength, let her know that the weight DOES need to go up at one point, and we can’t just stay in our comfort zone forever. 

 

And we, of course, see this all the time in the realm of nutrition as well.  We like to use the term “overly restrictive” when referring to dietary approaches, but “overly restrictive” simply means “denial”, because it says “no” not “not now”.  People, in the pursuit of physical transformation, will engage in nutritional protocols with SIGNIFICANT amounts of denial, primarily because ANYONE can diet hard for ONE day, or one week, or one month: it’s the consistent, day-in and day-out over the long haul that gets us.  And, consequently, it’s our consistent habits that ultimately define our outcomes: NOT the month long “lettuce and water” diet.  These “diets by denial” can achieve their intended short term outcome, but the long term consequence always leaves the trainee worse off than where they started.  In the realm of fat loss, hardcore crash diets result in the shedding of a significant amount of weight, yes, but this includes a significant degree of lean tissue, primarily because, when you tank the body’s hormones by piling significant stress on it through severe caloric denial, it compensates by prioritizing fat storage and hemorrhaging all that inefficient lean tissue.  So congrats: we’re now a smaller version than we were when we started: not a leaner version.  And while we’ve been denying our hunger for so long, as soon as we allow ourselves to eat again, we enter a compensatory state of hyperpagia, because “the house always wins” when we attempt to deny.  The body has a setpoint, and it wans to get back to that NOW, and it doesn’t care WHAT kind of mass it takes to get there.  So now we gain RIGHT back to our original bodyweight (most likely a little heavier) with LESS lean tissue than before: a significantly worse body composition.  And then, like idiots, we repeat the cycle AGAIN, except this tie we need to eat even FEWER calories to get that weight loss result, because we have less metabolically active lean tissue, which means MORE denial, which means GREATER compensatory binge, etc etc.

It's so predictable we actually have multiple television seasons of it to observe

Successful nutritional strategies do NOT deny: they restrict, and in doing so, they ACKNOWELDGE the individual where they are at.  In the realm of fat loss, we can NOT deny hunger.  Attempting to white knuckle it just results in what I wrote above.  Instead, we acknowledge it and find methods of restriction that manage it.  Some find time restriction the solution: allowing them to eat to satiety by limiting the window of time allowed, such that they can only physically stomach so much food and it happens to allow for fat loss.  Some operate better with macronutrient restriction, finding that, in the absence of carbs or fats, they do not get the same hunger triggers they experience compared to when combining those two macros together (notorious for creating hyperpaltable foods).  Some find that they are “volume eaters”, and can operate well in an energy deficit so long as they are consuming large quantities of food, figuring out methods to take low energy foods and consume large quantities of them.  No singular strategy is “the right one”: it’s the right one for the right individual, and attempting to employ one that is a poor fit simply because we feel it’s “the best” is an act of denial, and, in doing so, an act of sabotage.  And, of course, this was all in the discussion of simply fat loss: you should see what I deal with on the weightgaining subreddits telling trainees that they don’t HAVE to eat their “daily required fiber intake” while in a gaining phase and that it’s OK to eat a protein source that ISN’T chicken breast.  Social media has created so many artificial barriers and methods of denial that I’m so glad I grew up in an era where I was told to drink a gallon of milk a day and I’d be like Milo of Croton.

 

Honestly, this could go on forever.  It’s taken me QUITE a while in my own life to realize and discover this, but there is always a trial of breadcrumbs to follow.  Success leaves clues, as does failure, and I’ve seen firsthand the compensatory binges that happen as a result of denial (reference by 2 year fast food bender after making weight for my last powerlifting competition), and I’ve seen how I thrive when I operate within self-imposed restriction.  Funny enough, I got inspired by this post as I was driving to pick up my favorite Friday meal of a double order of pork spare ribs, sliced and chopped brisket from my favorite local BBQ place after a day of fasting, acknowledging how, due to the restriction I had employed with the fast, I didn’t have to deny myself the joy of delicious BBQ.  I’ve lived pure denial before, and it’s just plain not worth it.

Not when you have a place at home that serves this

A life without restriction is hedonism.  A life of denial is asceticism.  Somewhere in between is humanity, and it’s achieved with restriction.  For we cannot achieve our maximum human potential by denying our humanity, but we must restrict in order to refine, focus, and overcome.