COMING FULL CIRCLE PART 2: THE EATING

 Amazingly, it seems the training was really the "easy" part of this story, for when I finished writing out about how my eating has come full circle yet again, I discovered just how many goddamn circles I'd go on through these past 25 years.  Hopefully you can pick up some lessons from this and save yourself some time having to make these mistakes.

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The eating went full circle as well.  I grew up a fat kid, which, if you may recall, I later discovered I had a few factors working against me from the start, to include having cereal put in my bottle as a nursing infant so that I’d fatten up and sleep through the night, meaning I really didn’t have a chance from the get go…but I ALSO didn’t do myself any favors with my love for fast food, candy, and literal Koolaid vs the Pavel Tsastouline kind, drinking pitchers of artificially flavored and colored sugar water.  At the same age I took to lifting, I took control of my nutrition using, once again, the only tools at my disposal: effort.  I white knuckled it and cut my food intake to 1/3 of what it was before, which was easy to measure, since I was eating so much it was a matter of eating 2 slices of pizza instead of 6, 3 tacos instead of 9, etc.  I still had absolutely no idea WHAT to eat, and was operating off all the stuff I learned from television: a healthy breakfast of juice, bagels with peanut butter, breakfast cereal, lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, tins of fruit and protein bars, and whatever my parents served for dinner.  In doing so, I went from a bodyweight of 176lbs as a 5’9 14 year old to 152lbs over the span of the summer between my high school freshman and sophomore year, which also inspired me to quit football (where they ONLY thing I had going for me was my bulk) and take up wrestling (where my ability to control my food intake was quite valuable).  Wrestling would prove to probably be the most physically beneficial thing I ever did for myself, but that’s a post for another time: onto more tales from my nutritional journey!

A bow of Captain Crunch, 2 slices of buttered white bread toast, a tall glass of skim milk, a glass of juice, a bowl of fruit and a muffin...yes, we were told that THIS is what a healthy breakfast looked like in the 90s...

 

At some point, my interests in martial arts got me online, and I found a martial arts forums where, for some reason, low carb dieting was popular, and since this was the late 90s/early 2000s, we all knew that as “The Atkin’s Diet”, which, funny enough, I had learned about from my grandfather a few years earlier, but we all just thought he was crazy because he was eating bacon and butter and losing weight.  But, THIS time, I had internet access and could “research”, and had decided that THIS was the most absolute best way to eat because it made so much sense to me.  It was all these goddamn carbs were making everyone fat!  That wasn’t the wrongest conclusion to draw, but it’s clear the lack of nuance that such a ham-fisted approach achieves.  Still, I knew what I needed to do: cut out carbs!  Problem: I didn’t actually know what carbs were.  Sure, I THOUGHT I did: it’s bread, sugar, rice and potatoes…and yeah, those are SOME carb sources, but not all of them, nor did I realize just how many things I THOUGHT were safe contained these things.

 

Because there I was, in college, with a meal plan, thinking I was CRUSHING this low carb thing when I would go to the dinning hall and get my bacon and eggs for breakfast, and, since they eggs were more “egg loaf” since they were using powedered eggs, I’d use a healthy amount of ketchup to make them more edible.  The same ketchup I’d put on top of my stack of cheeseburgers (no bun, of course) I’d get for lunch.  With, of course, entire BOWLS of peanut butter for dessert, because there’s no carbs in peanut butter!...right?  And then, when I was hungry between meals, I’d hit up the on campus restaurant and ALWAYS get the chicken strip basket and make it a point not to eat the fries, because the FRIES were the carbs, of course…oh crap, why do they call it “breading” anyway?  I figured: they were CHICKEN strips…that’s pure protein, right?  It was the same when we’d sneak off campus to Panda Express, and I’d make sure to get the large ala carte Orange Chicken and avoid all that carby rice: pure protein baby!  And speaking of protein, I was making sure to take down my daily protein shake, using that delicious late 90s/early 2000s vanilla protein that tasted like wallpaper paste that I had to mix with a handmixer…alongside the care packages my parents sent me of Atkin’s cookies and treats that were none too pleasant on my digestive system.  Keep an eye on those Atkin’s treats: they’ll show up again sometime.

With enough denial, we can convince ourselves of anything!  

And let’s talk about the saint that is my mom, because as you can see: she was always a provider.  I’ve never questioned how much that woman has loved me, and she loves by providing, to include that cereal in my bottle, those care packages, and a house that was ALWAYS stocked with some amazingly incredible junkfood.  The best/worst of which were the gigantic cookies and muffins that Costco stocked, which were a quick lesson to me in just how much you CAN’T out train a bad diet, because one summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I decided I wanted to get a six pack, and I would do it by burning off all my fat by running…sixteen miles a day!  Yes: I had an 8 mile run that I would do twice a day, and even then I’d also skip rope and do other training during this time.  And, when all that training was done, BOY did those cookies and muffins look good, so of course I indulged in my share of them.  Hey, I earned it. …yeah, no six pack that summer, but I DID get a pretty awesome stress fracture in my foot.

 

But while we’re on the topic of my college dinning hall, it was in my senior year of college that I did my first ever run of Super Squats, which was a great place to do it, because I could drink all the milk I wanted and eat as much as possible in that dinning hall.  At that point, the carb restrictions were gone and I was just going with the book’s recommendation of a LOT of food, which, at least with the dinning hall, it was far less processed than the “Dave Tate Method”…which is exactly the method I employed after I graduated college, got married, and decided to quit my pursuit of martial arts and fully invest myself into lifting, and, by extension, “getting huge”.  I made a home gym, was married to a wonderful woman that would cook and bake whatever I wanted, and suddenly had disposable income, which I disposed of at all the wonderful fast food locations in central coast CA.  3 double doubles from In n Out was a regular for me, as was 4-6 cheesy gordita crunches from Taco Bell, 4 sausage biscuits at Burger King, 6 double stacks from Wendy’s (you can tell this was back in the era when we still had $1 burgers at value menus), to say nothing of how I’d take the mini banana bread loaves my wife would wrap in tin foil and upwrap and eat them like candy bars.  While Super Squats had me put on 12lbs in 6 weeks and finally see more than 200lbs on the scale for the first time in my life, this way of eating got me from 190lbs to 217 in my desperate attempt to see 220 on the scale, because Matt Krocazleski was the same height as me and competed at 220lbs, and I was convinced that I’d look the same and be just as strong if I could weigh the same…

Surely I was just 3 burgers away from this!

 

…yeah, after 2.5 years of living and eating this way, I was done.  I remember the exact moment, having just put away my usual dinner of 2 “simple life quesadillas” from my work’s cafeteria that were comprised of just chicken, very low quality cheese and a pound of grease that I drowned in sour cream, alongside 2 apples and 2 servings of green beans (healthy fruits and vegetables), laying on my side in bed and wondering “Why am I doing this to myself?”  I decided to get back to what I knew: food and carbohydrate restriction.  This time, I at least had a better idea of what the hell a carbohydrate was, and was far better at kicking the junk out of my diet and, when I went and got fast food (because, truth be told and unbeknownst to me at the time, I was totally addicted to it), I at least knew how to operate portion control and restriction to make these visits NOT total disasters.  It was from this point I cut my weight down to a lean 190lbs…which was actually exactly where this blog initially started.  Those intro photos were the end of a long and gradual fat loss phase that had me at my leannest I had been up until that point.  It was from that level of leanness I was able to cut to 181lbs, take “best lifter” in my final (as of this point) powerlifting meet, set national records in the total and deadlift…

 

…and go on a 2 year junk food bender.  Apparently, my life has been marked with a constant cycle of “binge and purge”, as I am a man of extremes.  But really, the lesson I needed to learn (and this will come back a few more times) is that you can only white knuckle and deny yourself for so long before the body eventually DEMANDS payback.  And the longer and harder you do it, the more intense the demand.  My bender began with just grabbing a burger at Hardee’s after my meet, to celebrate my win, and it spiraled for years.  I, once again, abandoned my low carb principles, and instead discovered a newfound fondness for red velvet cupcakes, alongside dark chocolate Reese’s peanut butter cups, Quest Bars (hey, it’s protein!), post workout Poptarts and cereal, etc etc.  This also correlated with me transitioning to strongman, so I had the perfect excuse to justify this: I “needed the fuel”.  And again, it’s interesting to discuss all this, because you regular readers were there alongside me the entire time, to include when I would go on journeys to become lean again by employing those same principles that had worked before, only to balloon back up again when I was tired of being lean.

 

Spaghetti DID get me in and out of this jam...

At one point, in that journey, I discovered Jon Andersen’s “Deep Water”, and it REALLY clicked for me.  Stupidly hard training paired with low carb eating: EXACTLY what I want.  Jon also talked about small, frequent meals to keep the metabolism humming, which was actually something I picked up from my dad with a fad diet he followed in the 90s that I always employed as well, since I was ALWAYS hungry and perpetually grazing seemed to help with that.  However, my previous weaknesses shined through, as I completely glossed over Jon’s point about organic/grassfed high quality meat and, instead, found myself eating 2 bunless double quarter pounders from McDonalds, because they were “low carb”, along with all sorts of low carb frankenfoods via protein bars, quest treats, peanut butter powders, etc etc.  Despite all this, it STILL worked, because the training was so intense and I was still doing a decent job managing MACROS even if my micronutrient values were terrible that I got immensely big and strong running this program and was able to validate that I did NOT “need” carbs for energy…although I DO recall that I’d still have a weekly cheat meal the night before the hardest workouts of Deep Water, which, the weekly cheat meal itself was a habit I picked up during the powerlifting weight cut saga, and it was ultimately more a “binge eating episode” vs a cheat meal.  Once again: I took a LONG time to learn these lessons, but that’s how the circles get smaller: we learn lessons and make new mistakes.

 

And speaking of mistakes: strongman eventually led me to a competition that had an awesome event: a 275lb keg clean and press.  At the time, I could manage a 200lb press, and this competition allowed me to move up a weight class…so I dedicated myself to adding 75lbs to my keg clean and press in 12 weeks, which I was going to achieve by eating EVERYTHING.  I went right back to my Dave Tate style of eating that “worked” so well in my early 20s, but DID manage to use some of my lessons learned from my previous trips around this circle.  Fast food was still there (there’s that addiction again), but wasn’t the cornerstone, as I instead DID try to make use of whole foods, to include oats (PROTEIN OATS by Kodiak, of course), heavy cream, honey, peanut/almond butter, blueberries, etc, but there was also breakfast cereal, sourdough bread, and way too many quest frozen pizzas (they’re the GOOD for you frozen pizzas…right?).  I also really tucked into the “frequent meals” thing and found myself having a pre-pre workout meal, and then a pre-workout meal, and then a post workout shake, then a post-post workout meal, alongside my traditional breakfast, lunch and dinner, late night snack, and other foods.  And again, it worked, because I became the strongest presser I’d ever been in my life, nailing a 250lb keg clean and press in training along with 5x241 and 1x266 on the axle press.

5x241, 1x256, 1x266 and a near miss at 276, filmed like a snuff film

 

…and then I got an annual physical, my blood lipids were messed up, my doc put me on a statin, and I went on a VERY ill-informed attempt to resolve all of this through nutrition and lifestyle changes.  Once again, I leaned into what I was very talented at: restriction, and ultimately went on a low fat AND low carb diet…which, for those of you paying attention at home, is a TERRIBLE idea.  Yes, I got my blood lipids on track, and I got as lean as I possibly could, and horribly compromised my health through the process.  I also leaned into old habits of eating SO much frankenfoods in my attempt to avoid all the evil meat, eggs and animal products my doctor informed me were causing my blood lipids issue, basically living off of processed foods because the macros were sound, despite the fact the ingredients read like a horror movie. 

 

This kept up until I eventually reached a breaking point after my third run of Super Squats, trying to survive the intensities of that program through a diet of protein/keto bars, protein supplement enhanced nut butters, sunflower butter, “keto bread”, and basically all other manner of keto treats, cheats and hacks.  Remember those Atkin’s treats I talked about before?  There they were again, and I basically wasn’t eating ANY real food.  I eventually got sick of having to shop at 5 different grocery stores per week in order to get all my weird foods, so I decided to streamline everything by hopping on the Velocity Diet, since I had read Dan John’s glowing reviews of what a reset this was.  The most current version allowed for one healthy solid meal a day…and now that I could only eat food once a day, I no longer wanted to waste it on “food like products”: I wanted ACTUAL food.  This meant actually eating some for real meat, along with all those healthy veggies I had stuffed myself with when I was eating low carb/low fat as a means to chase away the all consuming hunger that was always present when I was eating that way.

When you're only eating once a day, there's no room for this nonsense

 

This, eventually, transitioned itself to Jamie Lewis’ Apex Predator diet, because I always wanted to try that as well, and it was basically just a more directed version of the Velocity Diet with the HSM.  And then, this naturally led itself to carnivore, since the Apex Predator’s one meal a day was pure meat, and I suddenly discovered that, the more meat I ate and the fewer plants I ate, the better I felt. …and that, for the first time in my LIFE: I wasn’t hungry.  I was finally eating the food that I WANTED to eat this whole time, and when I gave my body what it wanted, it stopped being hungry.

 

And THERE was the biggest lesson I learned from going full circle.  And what a BIG circle this one was.  I was a fat kid who was eating whatever I wanted, but what I wanted was a product of my environment.  I started off behind the 8-ball, weened on processed foods that just continued to perpetuate and lead to consistent and frequent poor decisions, and each and every time I tried to overcome my drive with just willpower and white knuckling, the rebound just became harsher and harsher.  Low carb kept calling to me for a reason: because it was transitioning me toward the foods my body was in NEED of eating in order to feel satiated.  Restricting myself would always result in a binge as a response, and when I binged, it was never on the food I NEEDED but on the foods I was addicted to.  Despite the fact that a carnivore approach may appear restrictive, it’s been the opposite to me: I’m finally eating the foods I WANT to eat, in the amount I want to eat them.  I wrote recently about how, during my “Operation Conan” experiment, where I gained on a carnivore diet, I went on a cruise and was totally OVER the idea of feasting, since I’d been doing it for so much time leading up to it, that the novelty of overeating was gone.  I was satiated: I’d had “enough”.  I’m back to being the same fat kid who is just eating whatever he wants: it just so happens that what I WANT to eat is the stuff that’s actually suited for me.

 

This IS a valuable lesson for sure

And for those of you that have stuck around this long, both through this post itself AND through the years of this blog: thanks for taking the time to read and enjoy this journey with me.  It’s not over yet!  I’m back at the start of this circle: let’s see how long it takes me to get back here again!