BEGINNERS DON’T PROGRESS FASTER: THEY’RE JUST BAD AT TRAINING (A DISCUSSION ON BEGINNERS, INTERMEDIATES AND ADVANCED TRAINEES) PART I

 

I’m completely late to the party on this one, but it’s one of those things that sorta dawned on me while I was thinking to myself (because, again, something is broken in my brain and this is what I default to) regarding the way we perceive beginner trainees vs advanced.  Beginner trainees are constantly provided a basic linear progression program as a novice program in order to “get their newbie gains”.  These programs will use a limited number of movements, to give the trainee less to screw up and more to focus on, along with a limited number of sets and reps, because the effective dose to get a beginner to progress isn’t significant.  As we’ve observed in the sphere of physical transformation: pretty much ANY physical intervention will result in progress, something that Alexander Bromely highlighted well in his “Base Strength” book discussing a trainee who undertakes 100 push ups a day in an effort to change.  And along with this bare bones approach to training, the trainee is instructed to add weight to the bar every time they train.  Keep the sets and reps the same: just keep adding 5lbs total per workout.  If you’re training 3x per week, in 6 weeks, you’ll have added 90lbs to each lift (in theory).  By about week 12, you’ll have “milked your beginner gains” dry, and be ready to progress to a REAL program: one that does things like balance fatigue against recovery, employ a variety of exercises, a range of sets and reps, etc etc.  But when asked why only beginners use these programs, we’re told the same line: “beginners can progress faster than advanced trainees/advanced trainees need slower progression”.  And we believe it, because it certainly APPEARS this way.  However, upon review, I think we have this wrong.  I don’t think beginners can progress faster than advanced trainees: I think beginners are so much worse at training than advanced trainees that they never generate significant enough fatigue in the first place to NEED more time to recover.

Granted some beginners DO have supernatural recovery abilities...

 

That was a long climb for this slide, but I don’t think it’s going to get any better, so strap in.  As I previously mentioned, training is a game of balancing stimulus with fatigue with recovery.  We have to generate enough stimulus to trigger a growth response, but doing so necessitates accumulating fatigue from the stimulus triggering (training), and we have to ensure we’re able to recover enough from the bout of training to be able to train again and generate the stimulus.  If we’re too fatigued from the previous bout of training, when we go into the next round, the body won’t be able to divert recovery resources to IMPROVEMENT: it’s going to still be working on recovery from the previous session.  And so now, we’ve dug the hole of recovery even DEEPER, and we just keep going further and further into recovery debt until we eventually burnout and crash in some sort of horrific manner and are FORCE to just plain take time away from training and focus SOLELY on recovering.  We can employ recovery interventions as safeguards to mitigate against this withing a training block (ala a deload/recovery week, increase sleep/food/make use of drugs/etc), but that’s just getting into more advanced methods of recovering against the fatigue.  Regardless, we understand the interplay between these systems as it relates to training.

 

Alright, cool, so what?  The “so what” here is that we acknowledge that training itself is what generates the fatigue, but we must ALSO acknowledge that you have to be GOOD at training to be able to generate a LOT of fatigue.  Similar to how anyone can throw a punch, but a trained boxer (following under the instruction of Jack Dempsey) understands how to actually put their weight into their punch in order to have more devastating effects, someone who is capable in the ways of training is able to generate MORE fatigue THROUGH training than someone who is new to training.  We refer to this as “neurological efficiency”, the notion of someone being better able to recruit available motor neurons to more effectively express available strength/strength potential in an effort, and consider this to be a FEATURE for an advanced trainee…but it may, in fact, also be a bug.  A powerlifter who is more neurologically efficient at the powerlifts is going to be able to dig much deeper and access further levels of strength when it comes to executing the big 3 lifts compared to a newer trainee, but, in turn, that means they will generate greater FATIGUE by digging so much deeper in the process.  This is why the advanced trainee is unable to follow these novice programs as written: the fatigue they generate in one training session cannot be recovered from in the time allotted for the next training session.  They will either need a longer gap between training sessions OR to train at a lower percentage than the true novice does, such that their training does not generate unrecoverable amounts of fatigue.

Just because you SAY it's light doesn't mean it is

 

But why this is enlightening is due to what it points out about our assumptions on the realms of training.  When discussing percentage based systems, it would appear that the percentages of a novice do not match up to the percentages of an advanced trainee.  An advanced trainee’s “90% of 1rm” may actually BE something like 90% of their 1 rep max, but a novice trainee’s 90% may actually end up being more like 60% of their 1rm, and that’s because they can’t generate enough force when attempting 1 rep to actually get WITHIN the realm of their 1 rep max potential.  The strength is there, latent in their system: they simply lack the tools to realize this.  It explains why training maxes are a necessity for some while an obstacle for others: some folks actually CAN achieve close to their maximum potential when they try and, in turn, training can be incredibly fatiguing when training around their max loads, while others are near their max loads simply because they’re so bad at training that their “max” isn’t anywhere NEAR their potential max.

 

But beyond this, it also explains situations wherein a trainee undertakes a novice program and stalls out much faster than another novice who achieves ABSURD levels of strength.  The individual in the former more rapidly progressed in their ability to realize true maximal strength within their training sessions and, in doing so, found a way to generate unrecoverable fatigue within the timeframe of the training program, whereas the latter is simply someone gifted with an abundance of strength while still struggling to maximally realize it.  If you think of an ape in the wild, they are significantly stronger than us humans, but they do not invest the types of efforts we do in learning how to maximally express their available strength.  Were they to undertake such training, they could progress for a LONG time adding 5lbs per session before they eventually finally started working within the realms of the max capabilities, generating too much fatigue to be able to recover and being forced to undertake a different training modality.

And if the ape is alone in the woods and no one is around to see it lift, does it still get +1/+2?

 

Which, in turn, means that the internet witchhunt that occurs when a novice trainee stalls out early in a novice program is even sillier than usual.  All we are observing, when this occurs, is someone having found a way to generate more fatigue than they have available recovery.  Now, yes, part of the intervention here COULD BE to engage in some manner of physical fitness improvement in order to improve one’s ability to recover in general (because many raw beginners in this era come into training incredibly unfit) but it can ALSO be to acknowledge that this individual simply outpaced their available strength with advancing neurological efficiency. 

 

When you think about “natural athletes”, these are simply people that are blessed in such a way that they are able to rapidly adapt to the demands of a new activity.  Their bodies are simply more aware and capable at learning physical skills compared to us of the more oafish persuasion.  If we acknowledge that such individuals exist, surely there is the case where one such individual could be naturally gifted as an athlete AND they’ve squandered their gifts through a sedentary lifestyle.  What we’d have there is the perfect storm for early novice burnout: a trainee with minimal strength potential that can be rapidly realized.  Within a month of the novice program, this individual has figured out how to more effectively recruit available motor units than the average trainee, and soon enough they’re just digging the recovery hole deeper than the next guy can.  This isn’t a failure at all: this person has graduated early!  The internet will chide this, saying that someone with a 135lb bench is still a novice and just needs to keep on eating more and doing their 3 sets of 5, but that’s absolutely slapping a bandaid on the problem (effectively just making the trainee heavier so that the weights they are moving a reduced percentage compared to their bodyweight, ala the “mass moves mass” mantra).  Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that this trainee needs to move onto a protocol that allows them adequate time to recover between training bouts WHILE shifting emphasis to improving their strength potential.  They’ve realized all the strength they have: it simply isn’t much.

Time to accumulate

 

And then the theory can get REALLY interesting when we consider how to reverse this and get an advanced trainee to employ a novice progression program.  Primarily because Dan John, by way of Pavel Tsastouline, already figured this out: Easy Strength.  Easy Strength looks a LOT like a basic linear progression program, especially when trained 3x a week (which is within tolerances of the program).  3 sets of 3 of a limited number of movements, trained 3x a week, for 40 total workouts.  HOWEVER, the load of Easy Strength is what makes the difference, for the trainee is told to NOT strain during this lifting (hence “Easy” strength), which, if we use percentages, can put the load around 50-60%.  However, again, with an advanced trainee, this is a REAL 60% load, which is a GOOD thing, because it means it’s enough to generate the STIMULUS to create change yet won’t cause such excessive fatigue that there is an inability to recover.  It’s why Easy Strength is set up the way it is and works the way it does: we took that same novice program and simply set up a training load that won’t floor the advanced trainee.  In turn, novice programs won’t work solely on novices because of some unique ability to progress faster than advanced trainees: they work on ALL levels of trainees, so long as the actual appropriate load is implemented.

 

I originally thought I was done at this point and wrote a concluding paragraph, and then I came back and wrote another 1500 words or so, so let’s call this “part I” and stay tuned for part II.

RED MEAT AND BLACK COFFEE

Once again, I have engaged in some nutritional experimentation and wanted to share my approach and outcomes with you.

Maybe one of these days I'll copy his idea with the worms instead and REALLY get jacked

 

BACKGROUND INFO

It goes back quite a ways

On 6 Jan 2026, I returned from a New Year’s Disney Cruise vacation.  Leading up to this vacation, I was in a gaining phase of training (my birthday is late October, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas soon after that, I leverage that timeframe for gaining/feasting), and the morning after my travels home I weighed in at 89.1kg: a gain of 6kg in 15 weeks.  Now it was January, which is an excellent time to lose weight, because the WHOLE WORLD is doing it, so no one is going to question/judge you for doing so.  But along with that, I had a strongman competition on 21 Feb to prep for, and the kind of training I do for that is the kind of training that DOESN’T require the excess food that gaining training requires, so I knew I was going to reduce my food intake.

 

It's 29 Jan as I write this, and I weighed in this morning at 81.4kg.  Now, already I’ll cop to the huckstering going on here: the 89.1kg weigh in is a post travel weigh in, and we all know that traveling bloats us and this morning’s weigh in was after a 90 minute ruck, so there’s a sweat element involved.  HOWEVER, if my goal was to make weight for a weight class, none of that would matter, as all that counts is what the scale shows.  But, along with that, my performance in training hasn’t suffered (and, in fact, I’ve continued to make steady progress) and I’ve achieved “non-scale victories” as well, primarily that latching the lever on my lifting belt is no longer a workout in and of itself and my clothes are fitting better.  So with that, allow me to document the approach I employed, which I am referring to as “Red Meat and Black Coffee”…primarily because I love how well that syncs up.

 

PRINCIPLES

 

Flexibility is key

·       Don’t get hungry.  This isn’t white knuckling.

·       When you eat, eat carnivore/animal.  You’re going to need to maximize opportunities to get in protein, and being ketogenic/fat adapted will limit hunger.

·       When you DON’T eat, allow yourself black coffee.  Don’t add sweeteners/cream/butter/etc.  This is fasting with an aid.

·       Eat after lifting weights.  Don’t eat after conditioning.

·       2 meals a day on non-fasting days, 1 meal a day on fasting days.

 

THE METHOD

He probably could have stood to have a little less coffee

 

Put very simple: twice per week, instead of breakfast, I have black coffee.  And all my meals are carnivore.

 

But now let’s expand.

 

Prior to this, I’d settled into a pattern of eating 2 meals per day: a breakfast and a dinner.  I still like that approach, so it’s the framework I operate within.  Understanding that, it seemed logical that, if I did NOT eat one of those 2 meals, I’d be taking in less food, and the outcome would be weight loss.

 

Shocking, I know, but I’ll continue.

 

One of the things I like about a carnivore approach to nutrition is how satiating it is.  When you eat ONLY animal products, you have limited opportunities to spike your blood sugar.  This means you don’t experience the compensatory crash that coincides with the spike, which means you never get “hangry”.  Hunger does eventually show up, but it’s a slow burn, in the background, easy to ignore unless it becomes dire.  It sounds like how people describe GLP-1 agonists shutting off “food noise”.  It makes any manner of fasting pretty easy, which is something I noticed on my travels during long flights.

 

Along with that, there is something of an “opening the floodgates” when it comes to eating.  Once we START eating, we get a taste for it (pun unintended but whatever) and want to KEEP doing it.  If we never really start the process, we just remain at baseline.

 

And then, along with all that, black coffee is a known appetite suppressant.  Part of that is the caffeine content, but even decaf can have the effect.  And since it’s winter, a warm beverage is honestly a treat, and can go very far to satisfy cravings for comfort that can be misinterpreted for needs for food.  And much like pain medication, I don’t drink coffee when I feel hungry: I drink coffee before I feel hunger.

 

All this having been said, I want to make it ABSOLUTELY clear that at no point am I actually HUNGRY during this process.  This is NOT about white knuckling my way through hunger to achieve a fast.  I feel like that’s an unsustainable AND problematic approach to fat loss.  This “works” because I’m able to reduce food intake WITHOUT actually ever being hungry.  That’s the ideal fat loss solution.

 

THE HOW AND WHY

Sometimes it really is all that simple

 

I’ve paired this nutritional approach with the Tactical Barbell Operator program, which, without going into too much detail, is 3 days per week of lifting.  I train first thing in the morning, fasted.  After the lifting workouts, I’ll have a post training breakfast, and then, about 10-12 hours after that, I’ll have a dinner.  I’ll also have some protein before bed (more on that later). 

 

During a standard workweek, this means I have 2 days where I DON’T lift weights first thing in the morning.  On those days, I do conditioning workouts (a 90 minute ruck on Thursdays, and a fast/short high intensity conditioning workouts [HIC] on Tuesdays).  On these days, I don’t have breakfast: I just have a black coffee (usually mixed with unflavored electrolytes).

 

From there, I try to limit myself to only 2 cups of coffee on lifting days and 3 cups on non-lifting days, primarily because I have an addictive personality and things can quickly get out of hand, but I honestly see no issue with drinking however much black coffee one wants so long as it’s not having consequences (primarily sleep impacts, but also digestive any otherwise).

 

Weekends, I allot for having a breakfast and a dinner (primarily because my wife is an absolute saint and will make breakfast for the whole family on both days), but if an opportunity presents where I can fast through one of those breakfasts (we all slept in and the day is getting away from us), I’ll just go with the black coffee.  As far as training goes, for this particular experiment, I was doing the Crossfit WOD “Grace” on Saturdays, while Sunday was a down day (at most, getting in a long walk).

Yeah, I suppose that works

 

So we end up with effectively a 2-3 meal deficit over the course of the week.  COULD that same end result be achieved by keeping the meals the same and simply eating less at them?  Yes, of course…but I find that this requires willpower to be able to accomplish. One has to actually STOP eating, even though they are STILL hungry for more food.  And, ultimately, I believe that a nutritional protocol that is reliant upon willpower is one that will ultimately fail, as willpower is a finite resource.  And then, along with that, ONCE willpower fails, there is a compensatory counter-binge that occurs as a means for the body to “correct” what has been done to it through willpower.  This is how/why people end up going on junkfood benders after sustained periods of intense dieting. 

 

Instead, I am able to eat to satiety at all meals: I simply have fewer meals.  Mark Bell has a good quote that “after you fast, you have to pretend like it never happened”, which is a cautionary tale to avoid gorging after fasting under the premise that you get to “eat back” all those calories you didn’t eat.  This IS good advice, because it’s very easy to undo the caloric deficit of one skipped meal with a binge, BUT, this is where the “red meat” portion of the approach is helpful.

 

As previously stated: animal foods tend to be more satiating than others.  Dr. Ted Naiman has discussed the notion of a protein threshold that compels us to hunger and that, upon reaching it, hunger fades.  Yet we ALSO are all familiar with the concept of a “dessert stomach”, wherein, no matter HOW satiated we are, we tend to find room for desserts at the end of the meal.  So by eliminating sweet/carby sources of nutrition and focusing purely on animal foods, we put ourselves in a position wherein, even eating just ONE meal a day, we can reach satiety BEFORE we put ourselves at risk of overconsuming.  But let’s dig even deeper.

 

One of the concerns regarding eating only one meal per day, for someone interested in physical pursuits, is not getting in adequate amounts of protein.  Well here’s another 1-2 punch: by ONLY eating animal foods at our one meal, we allow for the possibility of taking in a significant enough amount of protein to have a sufficient amount to ward off muscle sparing AND there is evidence that ketones THEMSELVES are muscle sparing.  And given the nature of this diet (fasting mimicking AND fasting legitimately), there is a fair chance we will BE in a state of ketosis.  Plus, those 2 meal days give us ample opportunity to REALLY overload on protein, which can carry the water on those days where we’re only having one meal.  And on top of all this, one those 1 meal days, we can find ourselves a little hungrier come dinner time compared to the 2 meal days, so we may end up taking in even MORE protein than usual.  Yes: this means we’re not achieving a FULL “2-3 meal deficit” if we’re eating like a 1.5 meal at the end of those 1 meal days…but we’re STILL achieving a deficit, because it’s quite challenging to eat 2 meals worth of food in the span of 1 meal.  Yes: I’ve done it before…but it’s not something I can do EVERY day.

 

But, aside from that, I DO have a protein feeding before sleep as well.  Some could classify that as a meal, and feel free to do so if that helps you understand the system, but this was initially a scoop of Metabolic Drive protein powder mixed in water, and has now become the same scoop of powder but mixed with 170g of full fat Greek yogurt/skyr.  Stan Efferding’s “Vertical Diet 3.0” book (recently reviewed) convinced me on the value of bringing this back into my nutrition.  This gets in a little extra protein AND gives the body something slow absorbing to work on while we sleep.

 

QUICK SUMMARY

Yeah this is pretty much it

Monday/Wednesday/Friday: Lift weights and eat 2 carnivore meals per day (post training and one other) along with one pre-bed protein feeding.

Tuesday/Thursday: Train conditioning and eat 1 carnivore meal per day along with one pre-bed protein feeding.

Saturday/Sunday: Short high intensity workout on Saturday, allow up to 2 meals on each day, but free to skip 1 meal on one day, still include pre-bed protein feeding.

 

On all days: allow for black coffee as a beverage.

 

 

YOU CAN’T ACHIEVE PEAK HUMAN POTENTIAL BY DENYING YOUR HUMANITY

This is a bold topic for me to take on as a self-professed misanthrope, but I have constantly remarked that what I despise most about our species is our unwillingness to realize our TRUE potential, and this segues perfectly into that discussion.  What ultimately triggered this thought was my reading of a “fitness hack” online the other day, which advised those tracking their macros to save themselves frustration through the following approach: instead of tracking everything you eat in a day, calculate everything you’re GOING to eat FIRST, put it in the tracker, and THEN eat it.  …and it was the most alien, NON-human idea I had read in a LONG time.  That someone actually sat down and wrote it thinking it was a legit “ah hah” sort of realization made me think that this specific “person” couldn’t pass the Turing Test.  I would have thought for sure that this was some off-brand AI currently experiencing the robot equivalent of a stroke were it not for the fact that several OTHER “people” chimed in with what an EXCELLENT idea this was and how they’ve been doing the same and it TOTALLY revolutionized their results.  Folks: we’re in this to maximize our human potential: how are you going to do that by doing very NOT human things?

HE achieved peak human potential the AMERICAN way: with dodgy research pharmaceuticals 

Yes yes, I know: here I go to rally against calorie counting/macro tracking again, but come on people: we HAVE to admit that it’s weird.  My most recent post on “all diets are fad diets” spoke to this.  There is literally NO other animal on the planet that has to live this way.  Every other animal KNOWS what food it’s supposed to eat and EATS THAT FOOD, and it eats it until it’s had enough, and then it doesn’t eat again until it’s time to eat.  If we are unable to do the same, isn’t this indicative that something very WRONG is afoot?  What’s one of the drivers here?  Scheduled meals.  Again: the only OTHER animals that operate in such a way are the ones we’ve domesticated, and, in turn, those are ALSO the only other animals that are at risk of obesity and diabetes.  Why are we eating lunch?  Because it’s “lunch time”.  Are we even HUNGRY?  Although, truthfully, the answer to that question is often “yes”, and it’s from a combination of issues.  Either it’s because we ate a “breakfast” of processed sugar stacked with sugar (remember pouring sugar ON TOP OF rice crispies?) so our blood sugar massively spiked and crashed and now we’re absolutely starving OR we didn’t eat upon waking because last night’s sweets binge right before bed had us wake up nausea and hungover, plus we slept until the VERY last minute because our sleep in general is abysmal due to a combination of poor sleep hygiene and caffeine abuse…primarily because our sleep is awful.  Do you SEE how these cycles of “non-humanity” perpetuate? 

 

So yeah, let’s dive deeper into the weirdness of pre-logging your food.  This, again, hinges on the idea that you’re going to eat pre-designated meals at pre-designated times IRRESPECTIVE of if you’re even hungry at the time or in need of the energy.  And again: this is because we’re loading up on stuff that is so alien to our species that our body doesn’t know how to respond appropriately to be able to send us the proper signals to engage in any sort of natural manner of nutritional regulation.  And we’re doing all this in an attempt to get CLOSER to our end potential?  What sort of sense does it make?  We should be moving BACKWARD, closer to our origins, in order to be better able to realize our species’ potential.  Whatever it is that we’re becoming as a result of these practices, it certainly isn’t “more human”, unless it is to be understood in the Blade Runner sense of “more human THAN human”.

And YOU thought it was just a great White Zombie track

 

And this extends into the sphere of training as well.  Allow this to be the rallying cry for auto-regulation and intuitive training because, again, folks are missing out on the human aspect of this.  And let’s even extend it further as to WHY periodization is a thing, because we humans exist WITHIN nature, and nature operates in seasons and cycles that, again, the REST of the animal world fully embraces and WE attempt to deny, once again, in some sort of backwards attempt to realize our maximal human potential.  But folks want to outsource their training to an APP and to AI: they want a program (not in the training program sense, but in the computer program sense) to decide their path toward becoming their best human possible.  Can this possibly make any sense?  No matter how much data you feed the machine, it’s simply not going to know how to “go by feel” as it relates to an athlete: it’s why coaches are coaches.  Inexperienced trainees like to think that coaches are just information ATMs that know ALL the things and just administer them as needed, but, amazingly, many coaches AREN’T that knowledgeable academically and, instead, simply know the fine and delicate craft of ATHLETE management.  They know how to tell when an athlete is having a good day and it's time to push, when it’s time to backoff, how to tailor the training to meet the PSYCHOLOGY of the specific athlete (some guys ALWAYS need to move, so they find filler junk to keep them occupied without compromising recovery, others need little achievements throughout a training session to pursue, etc), and they know how to keep them fit enough to be able to perform when it’s time to perform.  And this simply comes from years of experience: it’s not something that can be programmed into an algorithm and spat out.

 

And it all mirrors up into something I’d discussed so many times: we need to make the NUTRITION match the TRAINING.  Which, again, all other animals but US understand.  An animal that has worked hard will eat more, because it needs to recover from the hard work it performed.  It will drink more, because it is thirsty.  And when the activity drops, so does the food, such to the point that SOME animals will enter a state of torpor and eat NOTHING.  Whereas us humans would set an alarm to make sure we’re STILL eating every 2-3 hours to “maximize protein synthesis”.  We’ll decide “time to lose weight!” and engage in some alien caloric restriction protocol wherein we have to employ hacks and tricks to overcome hunger (hello GLP-1 agonists), a sign our body is CRYING out for nutrients, and then double it up with some sort of soul crushingly exhausting training protocol to try to burn every last calorie in our system and get us TOTALLY diced for summer…and then experience a necessary compensatory binge after the fact that leaves us in a worse place than where we started, as we hemorrhaged off our lean tissue during the weight loss and put on a bunch of additional fat mass during the binge.  Or we’ll decide “it’s time to gain weight!” and, of course, put LIMITS on how fast we accumulate the weight, train hard, underfeed ourselves because we don’t DARE bypass the holy limit of weight gain, run ourselves into the ground due to inadequate recovery, and, when the whole process is done, we need such a break from training to ACTUALLY recover that we lose what minimal lean mass we accumulated and end up in the perpetual skinny-fat cycle of “bulking and cutting” the same 8lbs over and over again.

This is a terrible physique advert but actually ok if you're selling tanner

 

Match it all together: train with some auto-regulation and intuition, wherein you can HAVE a structure to operate within while also allowing yourself to call the necessary audibles based on your body and brain’s real HUMAN inputs.  Train seasonally, the way that nature moves, so that you HAVE some form of periodization.  Eat real HUMAN foods, such that your body and brain will send you appropriate signals for when it’s time to eat, and then eat based on those signals SO that you actually eat in a manner that supports the training you’re performing.  This could mean actually SKIPPING a meal or 2 during a fat loss phase (how bizarre!) because you’re not training so hard that you NEED all those meals.  This could mean actually putting away some food during a gaining phase because (surprise!) your body NEEDS that food to recover.  Spend some time actually BEING human and you may, in fact, find yourself becoming the BEST human you can be.            

EVERY DIET IS A FAD DIET

Oh boy here we go again.  I’ve been on the nutritional fringe since 2002, because a lot of my early “education” in physical transformation came by way of the GameFAQs martial arts message board.  By 2002, I had already been engaging in regular exercise for over 2 years, and had lost 25lbs through portion reduction (still eating the same foods, just less of them) and had been training in Tae Kwon Do since 1994 while also being a massive video game nerd (among other hobbies), which is how I ended up in this specific corner of the internet.  And for reasons I myself am not particularly sure of, at this specific moment in history, the Atkins diet had gained a resurgence in popularity, and the loudest members of this corner of the internet championed it and ketogenic diets in general.  And exposed to this “radical” idea (in truth, my Grandfather and Grandmother had both already employed the Atkin’s diet a few years earlier and successfully lost a significant amount of weight with it, while my family considered them all nut jobs at the time), I drank up ALL the (low-carb) Koolaid, employed a terribly stupid attempt at it by living off of lunch meat and fast food burgers without the bun, and thus my journey into nutritional fringe was well underway.  And over 20 years later, I still find I prefer low/no-carb diets and tend to look, feel and perform my best in this manner, and I STILL find people chiding me for “falling for a fad diet”, to which I retort that, today: EVERY diet is a fad diet.

It's amazing how you had to be around in the 90s to even understand this

 

How so?  Well let’s examine the initial argument.  Those that deride low/no-carb/paleo/intermittent fasting/carb cycling/etc nutritional approaches tend to prose that the NON-fad approach to nutrition would mean simply counting one’s calories and eating the right amount of macronutrients based on one’s goals (weight gain, weight loss, or weight maintenance).  Some will simply end the conversation there, existing in a camp of “If It Fits Your Macros”, whereas some will further contend that it’s ideal to eat nutritious foods in this pursuit, which tend to be those foods that are NOT hyper-processed, and, instead, exist in a mostly whole/unprocessed state.  Eating in a manner OUTSIDE of this confine is considered a “fad diet”.

 

Ok, so now let’s look at what a fad is, and in doing so I’m going to employ the horrible trope of using the dictionary.  Oxford defines it as “an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze” and Merriam-Webster goes with “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal”.  So why are ketogenic diets, paleo diets, intermittent fasting, etc etc “fad diets” while calorie counting and macro tracking are non-fad diets?  Because of their recency in employment?

I have that talent

 

Well hold onto your butts folks: when did we discover the calorie?  In the early 1800s, Nicolas Clement created the definition of the calorie as it related to thermal energy, but it wasn’t until 1887 that Wilbur Atwater used a calorimeter to measure energy in food, and it wasn’t until the late 1890s that he published food composition tables to allow for the measurement of calories in food for public consumption.  When did we first see ketogenic diets employed?  The first documented case was Dr. Russell Wilder in the Mayo Clinic in 1921 YET we had William Banting recommending a low-carb/high-fat nutritional approach in his “Letter on Corpulence” in 1863.  This means that macronutrient restriction, as a form of nutritional intervention, predates calorie counting OR, at most, is only 30 years behind.  And when you factor in that we emerged as Homo Sapiens about 300,000 years ago, we really can’t let 30 years make or break what is and is not a “fad”.

 

But let’s go even FURTHER down that rabbit hole, shall we?  What of those that are claiming to quit being so weird about nutrition and just eat a healthy whole food diet?  Healthy whole foods ARE a fad.  If we’re judging fads as short-lived/followed for a time with exaggerated zeal, the modern food environment is INCREDIBLY faddish.  Because if you’re eating any vegetables TODAY, those things flat out were NOT around for our ancestors to eat.  Almost every vegetable we eat today is derived from Brassica oleracea, a type of wild mustard plant that we, as a species, SELECTIVELY bred in order to create the vegetables we WANTED to eat, vs what nature actually provided us.  Modern fruits are also a total abomination, with bananas that are almost pure sugar and seedless, compared to the heavily seeded bitter monstrosities that our ancestors had access to.  Apples have been engineered to ridiculous proportions, and we have grapes that taste like cotton candy for the love of god.  And don’t think I’m letting the carnivore community off easy here too: modern livestock and farming is abhorrent from a historical-biological perspective, with animals selectively bred to remove all biological defensive advantages and effectively only exist SOLELY as a food source, fed on a diet of bioengineered feeds and shot up with all manner of substances to improve their yield.  And even if you try to hunt, you’re STILL not out of the woods (pun partially intended), because your game meat is most likely getting into our frankencrops and eating that stuff.  I know the deer here get into the sweetcorn and will end up with marbling in their meat: that should NOT exist in nature.

Even Bobby can tell this isn't "natural"

 

And all of this is if you are TRYING to “eat clean, healthy whole foods”.  If you’re eating ANYTHING out of a box, you’re DEFINITELY eating a “fad diet”.  Food processing is a VERY modern advent as far as our nutrition goes, with the very basics of it dating back to dehydrating/salting meat to preserve it but the more contemporary approaches resulting in us having stuff like “blue raspberry pancake syrup” amongst other monstrosities.  Count your calories while eating your Pop-Tarts and explain to me how you’re not eating a “fad diet”.

 

Because we, as humans, have constructed an artificial food environment such that there is NO diet that ISN’T a fad diet.  If you look at any other animal on this planet, NONE of them have to think about how they eat: they just do it.  They know WHAT they’re supposed to eat, and they know how MUCH they’re supposed to eat.  The only fat animals that exist are the ones that we domesticate, and that’s primarily because we feed them the foods that WE made, similar to how we, as humans, have gotten fat and sick eating our own foods.  We, unfortunately, no longer exist in an environment where we can just eat what we’re supposed to eat until we’re done eating it and move on with our lives.  Unfortunately, SOME manner of nutritional intervention is necessary in order to survive this environment we’ve created, and ALL of them are fads.

Meanwhile, Crom laughs at your modern solutions

 

With that being said, it means there’s no shame in following a fad diet: simply follow the one that suits YOU.  EVERY manner of nutritional intervention that exists is a VERY recent form of intervention, for it’s only very recently that we’ve created this impossible environment for us to navigate.  300,000 years ago we arrived on the scene and knew what to eat and how  much of it to eat, but as time went on and we got “smarter”, we stupidly tried to circumvent the system and ended up with quite the Faustian deal.  So if your way of surviving is to try out this new-fangled calorie counting so that you can make sure you don’t eat too much of the weird mutant “food like substance” we have to live off of: go for it.  If your approach is “I’ll eat the animals but not the plants”, that’s cool too: you’ll probably avoid a lot of bad stuff by cutting out so much stuff.  If your approach is “I’ll only eat during THESE times”, you’ll probably eat LESS of that weird stuff, since you’ll be eating less in general.  And when the new fad comes out, give THAT one a go and see how you like it, because it looks like, for the foreseeable future, there really isn’t going to be any other solution readily available to us.             

BOOK REVIEW: THE VERTICAL DIET 3.0

I was a good boy for Christmas and this year Santa, by way of my in-laws, brought me Stan Efferding’s “Vertical Diet 3.0” paperback book.  I’m aware that Stan has gone on to release a 4.0 version, but it’s currently an e-book only, and those aren’t fun to unwrap on Christmas morning.

 

I promptly took this book with me on my family’s New Year’s Disney Cruise (which I’m sure I’ll also write up about) and read it in what was one of the finest bits of irony while dinning on keto bricks and biltong while traveling and enough meat and eggs to put Conan AND Gaston to shame.  But I read through the book quickly, because it was honestly very enjoyable and easily digestible, which, yes, is a wonderful and topical pun as it relates to the book.

 

Bottom line is: buy the book.  Again, I’m specifically referring to 3.0, which is available on amazon as a paperback for $25 as of my writing this.  As far as value per dollar goes, this is well within that range.  I cannot speak to the $100 4.0 e-book, as I have not read it.

 

WHAT I LIKE

I mean, yeah

 

·       You know my bizarre approach to nutrition, and its current state is very carnivore forward.  With that background, I very much appreciated how Stan approached the topic of nutrition.  He’s incredibly practical and pragmatic, and is willing to slaughter sacred cows along the way if it means getting to (what he proports) is the right answer.  He doesn’t say “eat your veggies: they’re good for you”, it’s “eat THESE specific veggies for THESE reasons, whereas THESE ones may be causing you some issues to watch out for”. 

·       This ultimately pulls from Stan’s motto of “compliance is the science”.  If you aren’t going to stick to the diet, it doesn’t matter if it’s “the best one”.  So Stan presents his reasoning and justification for what is and is not part of the Vertical Diet, and even provides some examples of acceptable substitutions, but ultimately drives to the reader the importance of being able to comply with the diet.  That said, he hopes to outfit you WITH a diet that CAN be complied with.  It aims to eliminate decision fatigue, flavor fatigue, and energy/satiety concerns that tend to come with nutrition plans.

·       What’s included in the plan seems quite beneficial as far as nutrition goes, with minimal controversy irrespective of where you fall on the nutrition spectrum.  I read this as a pro-keto/carnivore person, and could appreciate the arguments Stan made for what was in the book, and honestly felt like this was a great general nutritional protocol.  It’s also scalable depending on goals of gaining/losing/maintaining weight. 

·       Despite being called “The Vertical Diet”, Stan goes on to discuss sleep protocols, resistance training, cardiovascular training, injury recovery, etc.  It’s not QUITE an all-in-one manual, as there isn’t an actual workout split/protocol provided for the resistance training, but enough of an overview to get just about anyone going.

·       There is also a recipe section in the book, which I’m always a sucker for.  They are simple, but that’s kind of the point: it’s not a complex nutritional approach.  It’s sustainable.  Stan also includes instructions on ordering out and still surviving, along with traveling and staying on the program.

·       You also have to appreciate the source of the information.  Stan talks the talk, walks the walk, and has coached those in the highest levels to do the same.  And in that regard, he writes incredibly well: the book is VERY easy to read and enjoyable.

 

WHAT I FOUND ODD

I honestly don't know what I'm more afraid of

·       At the end of many sections of the book, Stan does a great job of providing a quick summary/checklist of all the points he covered.  In turn, I REALLY wish the end of the book contained this.  Basically, a “Vertical Diet Checklist”.  Primarily because, I felt like the most valuable part of the book was the HORIZONTAL diet that Stan lays out: all those foundational foods that you SHOULD eat before you focus on getting your macros from steak and rice.  In the book, Stan lays out all this information, but that’s the thing: it’s IN the book.  When I finished reading, I remembered things like, I should eat potatoes…but how many per day?  Bell peppers were recommended: what amount?  How many baby carrots?  How much Greek yogurt?  I can easily go back to theses sections, re-read them and take notes to compile all of this in one handy spot (and I intend to), but it would have been a great way to end the book with an overview.

 

·       In that regard, the sample diets that Stan provides are an absolute trip, because there’s no internal logic/consistency to guide them.  It’s awesome that he provides sample diets in 250 calorie increments starting with 1500 all the way to 4000, but when examining each “step” of the diet, there doesn’t appear to be any logical method on HOW to advance the 250 calories up.  The primary example is that the 2750 calorie diet has the HIGHEST protein total of any other diet in the book, to include the 4000 calorie diet.  In the book, Stan recommends pushing protein up to increase satiety if the goal is to lose fat, but what if the person eating 2750 calories was actually doing so to GAIN weight?  In a similar manner, because the protein is so high, the carbs are far lower on this diet compared to the 2500 calorie diet right before it, whereas the 1750 calorie diet and 2000 calorie diet have almost matching carb totals.  I understand these are just sample diets, not gospel, but for someone looking at how to progress their diets upward or downward depending on their shifting goals, it doesn’t really lay out a practicable example of what changes to make along the way.  There are enough words in the book to help guide a trainee, but this was just tricky to sort out.

 

·       In the exercise section of the book, Stan has some photos of band exercises that are incorrectly labeled.  This honestly stands out just because the rest of the book is very well edited.  As an exercise nerd, I knew what he meant, but a newb would be left stranded.

 

·       Stan brags about how the Bibliography in the book has over 200 sources, and he’s absolutely right.  It’s massive…and never once within the book is any of it referenced.  It’s on you, the reader, to go look up every single study/source listed there and see how it applies to the book.  I’ve got a Masters Degree: I can tell when someone is academically filibustering/bluffing.  Jamie Lewis has managed to cite his sources in his own works: I know Stan can too.  And maybe he did that in 4.0, and maybe that’s why it’s $100.

 

·       Stan must have gotten burned bad by a physical therapist at one point in his career, because his view on their value as far as injury recovery goes strikes me as bizarre.  He appears to be opposed to their worth, claiming that whatever aid they provide is temporary and can make problems worse, and that most injuries will resolve over time without intervention.  Part of me feels that the issue may be that Stan is only approaching this from the lens of a back injury, as that is what he discusses as his own personal experience.  He goes into further detail on recovery of back injuries, how stretching does not help back injuries, how back injuries require stability, etc.  All of this may be true, but as someone that has had surgery on their shoulder and knee alongside chronic knee pain: I’ve absolutely experienced the benefit of physical therapy first hand, and it SHOULD be doing the things that Stan advises FOR recovery: strengthening weakened areas and improving mobility.  I think it’s good that Stan addresses injury recovery, but I feel personal bias may be clouding his judgement.

 

·       I’m not a fan of what Stan recommends for improved satiety to improve compliance with the diet.  Specifically when he discusses employing water and roughage as a means to fill the stomach to increase satiety.  We’ve observed enough that this just plain doesn’t work: at most, it provides a VERY temporary relief from hunger, but more often it causes severe digestive distress as one fills their stomach capacity to fullness while they STILL experience hunger because they are lacking in nutrients.  Stan addresses the difference between hunger and appetite (the former being physiological and the latter being psychological) elsewhere in the book, and I feel he should lean further into that.  If you’re HUNGRY, you need to eat something with NUTRITION in it: not lettuce and water.  If you’re BORED, you need to figure out something to occupy yourself that ISN’T food.

 

IN SUMMARY

 

I mean, it's good enough for these two...

It seems like I wrote a lot of negative stuff about the book, but that’s honestly a bit of “survivor bias” at play there.  The book itself has so many positives that it’s hard to dial it down to just one thing, whereas the negatives are so precise that it’s easy to discuss them.  “The Vertical Diet” would be the perfect gift to anyone struggling with “how/what do I eat”.  The horizontal structure it lays out provides an excellent general purpose guidance for eating to be healthy and energetic, and the vertical framework provides a way to eat toward more specific goals.  The emphasis on general activity and resistance training gives helpful guidelines to achieve the majority of one’s goals, in a manner similar to what Dan John prescribes in his Armor Building Formula and Easy Strength books.  In fact, this would be a wonderful pairing of such books, giving a well fleshed out nutritional protocol and training protocol for “real people”.