Thanksgiving painting by Norman Rockwell

Quick note on Thanksgiving to readers of The Lean Saloon.

As the turkey takes on its last few minutes of sun tanning in the oven, I wish all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Most of us have in our lives the people for whom we’re grateful and the things for which we’re thankful. The first Thanksgiving in November of 1621 was in celebration of the Pilgrim’s survival of hardship, malnutrition and starvation, and also of the kindness of the American Natives for their gifts of food.

Today, on the night of Thanksgiving, we still have many things to give thanks to, including the way American history unfolded itself and all the Americans along the way since 1621… especially those who fought for the freedom for us to sit and enjoy the food on our table tonight, the freedom that gives us the opportunity to make choices in the kind of food we eat the other 364 days of the year.

Remember, each time we sit down at the table to eat, we sit down with that freedom to make choices of what we put into our bodies. For tonight, and for the rest of the year.

Eat well, live well. Happy Thanksgiving.

If you are, or have been, as overweight as I used to be, then you know the insatiable feeling even after a full meal.

A new study shows that obese people fail to activate their “will power centers,” the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which inhibit the drive to eat. Further, postprandial (post-eating) blood sugar activates the PFC and ACC in order to stop cravings, but this fails to happen in obese subjects, leaving them with less will power against further consumption.

It’s well-known that low blood sugar naturally stimulates the thalamic and hypothalamic regions to activate the drive to eat, thus promoting survival. After eating, however, the natural increase in blood sugar deactivates this drive while stimulating the PFC and ACC to return will power against further cravings.

This study demonstrates that postprandial blood sugar and the insulin response trigger satiety in lean people (yes, insulin triggers satiety) but fail to do so in the obese. It appears that, even after eating, the obese cannot turn on the PFC and ACC to inhibit food craving. In fact, in the obese, the very regions that drive food craving fail to deactivate.

What’s interesting — and what’s important in our culture — is the relationship between blood sugar and external food cues. It seems lean people are more sensitive to external food cues only when their blood sugar is low, while overweight people are sensitive to external food cues when blood sugar is low or normal. In other words, obese people have lower will power agains external food cue, regardless of blood sugar.

This speaks volume about our culture’s obesogenic environment. There’s food everywhere, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is one of the contributing factors.

Cyber Space Pseudo-Science

The differences in mechanisms between the lean and the obese are not well understood in serious science, yet if you suspend yourself long enough in cyber space you’ll read claims to all kinds of theories and hypothesis at war against each other. And this unnecessary war has left the world in weight-loss chaos.

The reality is that no one in the area of obesity truly has a single patent on causality. 100 experts will give you 101 reasons. And they’re probably all correct to a degree.

At the risk of sounding guru-esque, I’ll throw in my small, common-sense list of reasons for overweight or its perpetuation, with the stance that overweight is actually a multivariable phenomenon with endless contributors. But, for brevity, a few reasons for the flab:

• Food availability and abundance
• Low-quality, low-cost ingredients
• Commercial, social, and familial pressure to eat
• Conditioned belief and perception of eating
• Diminished demand for continuous movement (total 24-hour energy expenditure)

The Typical Environment

Most of us dedicate an entire room in our homes to store food; in fact, in America, the primary living-space to consider when buying a home is the kitchen. Shopping malls dedicate an entire wing to food. Cities and towns dedicate entire blocks to food.

Commercial food enterprises enjoy profits that are proportional to their sales of cheap calories. Many of us have an instinct to get the most food for the lowest dollar, with buffets, super-sizing, and $1.99 flap-jacks leading the way.

Many of us believe we must eat all day because our body is incapable of using stored calories, and we must eat seconds and thirds because there’s a famine lurking behind the Golden Arches and beyond the food court.

And there are those of us who will use reasons of metabolic disorder, genetic deviation, or evil food groups to avoid the actual work required for self-improvement and to maintain the status quo of excess flab and diminishing health.

Put on The Shoes and Do the Work

Look, no one understands why the obese cannot inhibit their food craving, and one more study won’t change the fact that, if we want to lose weight, we’ll still have to put on our shoes and do the work. We know what that work is and I’ve been saying it here for a couple of years now.

To lose weight, find a way to eat less. Chose mostly quality, whole, real ingredients. Stock your kitchen differently. Stay away from food court. Allow yourself to enjoy a delicious desert here and there. Find a diet that you can live with for the rest of your life, without becoming socially maladjusted, or a militant.

Sustainability will get you there… and keep you there. Intermittent fasting helps.

Almost all exercise machines will provide an activity far superior to what a couch can give you. Having said this, many equipment manufacturers make claims that serve only to prey on the uninformed, effectively spreading more misinformation to create a population of missinformed consumers. Nothing bothers me more.

In the video below, featuring the Jacobs Ladder (likely produced by the maker itself), you can see the claims made with grossly inaccurate soundbites.

Click on the video section at 1:10 to hear their claims of benefits. And below are point-by-point analysis.

Jacobs Ladder video promotion

The claims in red:

“It puts the user’s back at a 45 degree position, therefore placing the spine at a more neutral position.” 

A 45-degree position has nothing to do with a neutral spine, which can be achieved at nearly any angle. It’s a meaningless claim.

“Since the user is in a positive climbing motion, the Jacobs Ladder workout has very little impact on hip, knee, and ankle joints that are susceptible to wear and injury.”

Impact has nothing to do with increased wear and injury, as the body is designed to withstand and thrive on impact (it is bad technique in any exercise that predisposes the user to injury). Impact is an essential stimulus to musculoskeletal and joint health, and the removal of normal impact can result in diminishing strength and integrity of these structures. If this 1980s myth were true, then we need to remove dancing, walking and most form of natural, earthly movement from humans.

 “The ladder rungs are spaced 12 inches apart, forcing the user to use a full range of motion.”

12 inches of limb movement is hardly full range of motion, so this claim is an outright lie. Here are normal values in range of motion for the hip:

Hip flexion: 120 degrees
Hip extension:  30 degrees
Total range of movement: 150 degrees

Hip Abduction:  45 degrees
Hip Adduction:  20 degrees
Total range of movement:  65 degrees

Hip internal rotation: 45 degrees
Hip external rotation:  35 degrees
Total range of hip rotation:  80 degrees

The shoulder joint, naturally more flexible than the hip joint, has even greater range of motion. I won’t go into how false the claim made in this video is in regard to the shoulder joint, but you can click here to see for yourself that a “12-inch ladder spacing” fails to achieve a range of motion value anywhere close to what the shoulder joint can and should achieve in exercise.

The point is that the Jacob Ladder works the body in a restricted range of motion while many other methods and modality can achieve much greater range of motion while still providing the same or greater musculoskeletal and metabolic demand.

“The close-chain motion of the upper body recruits core stabilization muscle groups to simulate function and to provide strong exercise in the rehabilitation of the back, shoulder and lower body injuries.” 

The concept of close-chain mechanics here is miss-used. The motion demonstrated on the ladder is actually a combination of open- and close-chain, but the true definition of each also depends on load and what’s occurring at the other end of the kinetic chain, the feet. This is just meaningless mumbo jumbo to confuse the consumers into thinking something magical is happening. Any exercise, done in the right phases of recovery and with appropriate technique and proper progression, can provide a powerful rehabilitative tool. Effective rehabilitation involves many important variables such as: isolation activation, isometric stabilization, dynamic integration, multi-planar motion, variable acceleration, and variable load patterns.

In other words, the Jacobs Ladder is only one tool for rehabilitation — but considering its size, cost, and restricted use of motor patterns, it is probably not the most efficient, cost-effective, or even the best tool for rehab or for meaningful “core” stabilization — as there are numerous other exercises and methods requiring only basic equipment that can accomplish almost all of the above variables.

“The unit is self-paced, ensuring that the user is neither underworked or overworked.”

Almost any exercise can be self-paced. That’s just inherent — it’s like claiming that an apple is cholesterol free. Today’s smart consumers are more sophisicated than this… it’s generally the desperate consumer that seems to hear magic in these claims. (I hope for fewer desperate consumers and more informed consumers.)

“…The Jacobs Ladder (is) an excellent tool for training athletes, aerobically or anaerobically.”

I haven’t seen an athete that must climb a ladder for any duration, but yes, the Jacobs Ladder is a good way to train the aerobic and anaerobic systems. There are, however, numerous, superior methods that train the same systems to the same intensity, simply for their efficiency at providing significantly more adaptable variables — such as maximum and relative power output, selective speed of movement, real-life acceleration, greater range of motion, multiple planes of motion, greater metabolic output, and improved muscular, cardiorespiratory and metabolic endurance, all of which support athletic performance.

“The Jacobs Ladder… raises the user’s heart rate into the target zones faster than almost any other cadio piece on the market today.”

It’s not a matter of “cardio pieces” or machines that raise the heart rate quickly but a matter of physical output of the exerciser. Raising the heart rate can be achieved with an 8-pound medicine ball, a kettlebell, or just the body weight alone. It’s a matter of knowing what to do.

One certainly does not need a $4,000 machine for which you’d have to wait in line forever to get your turn at an overcrowded “health” club. There are more accessible exercises and methods that offer superior physiological effects, for much less footprint and dollar amount, and possessing greater movement freedom.

Lori and Baby

A few posts back I mentioned that my wife and I are expecting. Lori’s pregnancy is at 39 weeks now, which means our hospital bags are packed, the gas tank is full, and I’ve got the driving route to the hospital so memorized that it’s all I dream about.

In this post I write about Lori’s journey as it relates to her diet, her “modified” intermittent fasting, and her usual exercise routine.

Pregnancy in Later Life

I’m in my early 40s and Lori’s 38. At this stage in life, fertility is generally a concern. And if the woman manages to become pregnant, doctors group her pregnancy into the high-risk pregnancy category.

All this, of course, is based on statistics. But we also knew the stats are based on factors that can be controlled, especially in pregnancy where nutrition and lifestyle have a significant influence.

So even before we attempted to make a baby, Lori implemented a diet I’ve promoted for years — mostly whole, real food. This simply means she generally eats food that’s closest to its natural physical state.

In particular, she minimized (but not eliminated) refined food. This means she ate very little grain-based food, such as bread, pasta, etc, even if labeled “whole grains.” Here she followed the Paleo principles of avoiding phytotoxins such as lectin and anti-nutrients like phytates, found in un-sprouted, un-soaked grains, legumes and nightshade vegetables.

We are not, and have never been, militant about the Paleo diet. We still enjoy non-Paleo items, just in reasonable amounts. The primary key has been for Lori to consume nutritious food and to avoid excessive weight gain.

Nothing has changed from what The Lean Saloon has been promoting.

Intermittent fasting

I haven’t seen studies proving short-term fasting (~12 to 18 hours) is dangerous to the mother and fetus, and there are countless case reports throughout history of women fasting for religious reasons and yet experiencing successful full-term births to babies that grow into healthy, normal adults.

I’ve searched through the literature on short-term fasting and pregnancy, concluding ultimately there’s no concern for us, and that the best plan was for Lori to listen to her body.

And perhaps the greatest benefit she gained from her prior experience with intermittent fasting was learning to let go of an arbitrary eating schedule and the stress and obsession that typically come with one. She eats mostly whole, real food and she eats whenever she feels hungry.

Exercise

She exercises twice a week, each time doing a combination of strength training and some metabolic conditioning. On other days she just moves around a lot. She and I walk often to our favorite coffee house, Philz, to sit in their outdoor patio, enjoying the sun and a good cup of coffee (yes, Lori drank quality coffee throughout her pregnancy).

Her exercise in summary: she lifts some weight, she elevates her heart rate for short spurts, she walks a lot, she moves around. She is definitely not obsessive with working out.

What has been Lori’s experience?

• At her age, Lori was quite fertile — got pregnant super easy. (Because we ate the same diet, I probably remained happily fertile, too.)
• Her glucose tolerance tests were consistently perfect — zero sign of gestational diabetes
• Her urine tests (at every doctor’s appointment) showed normal proteins, etc.
• Blood tests, heart rate, blood pressure, etc., always well within normal limits
• Fetal growth and stats were consistently normal
• Fetal heart rate was consistently within normal range
• All ultrasound sessions could not make the doctor any happier
• Lori has not experienced the common negative symptoms of pregnancy, such as morning sickness, cravings
• She has not exhibited the negative physical changes commonly observed in pregnancy, such as swelling, varicose veins, mood swings, etc

Life as Normal

Perhaps the most liberating part of the experience was that Lori experienced physical “normalcy.” (I would not be so presumptuous as to write this post without Lori’s personal account.)

For Lori there has been no strange cravings. Her maternal weight gain has been well within normal. She experienced absolutely no fatigue. She moves like she’s not even pregnant. I often suspect that she’s hiding a medicine ball under her shirt.

As of this writing, Lori is 3 centimeters dilated, yet today we walked a couple of miles at Stanford Shopping Center, enjoying the sun, the beautiful weather, and even shared a small cup of Hagen Daz ice cream.

A wonderful afternoon.

Perhaps we ought to knock on wood, as there’s still the big moment to come. As such, our hospital bags are packed. I think Lori’s had enough of the baby’s roundhouse kicks to her bladder.

Conclusion

I’m not claiming that a Paleo(ish) diet and intuitive intermittent fasting made Lori’s pregnancy smooth sailing, but her pregnancy is a reflection of how a healthy body can support the rigor of pregnancy.

And we all already know what to do to create a healthy body.

I’ve been a little caught up with other things but I plan to update this blog intermittently with links to articles that are relevant to the message The Lean Saloon has delivered for over two years.

Overweight and obesity have many causes, much of which relating to eating habits, including mindless shoveling of food into our mouths and not remember even eating it.

Slow down. Chew. Enjoy the food.

Don’t let life go by so quickly. Including food.

Every now and then, when I suffer cognitive arrest, I wander onto blogs and forums about diet and weight loss. (And each time I emerge dumber than I already am.)

Of course, there are some very useful blogs written by some intelligent individuals. But often the discussions that ensue in the comment sections are a glimpse into the deep confusion surrounding diet.

Readers of these blogs leave comments — sometimes in the form of rhetorical questions — that imply their well-read perspectives, or that suggest a single resolution to weight loss. Never mind that there are bio-individuality, epigenetics, psychology, and multiple other factors.

Complex mechanisms probably exist and contribute to our culture’s expanding underbelly, and I’ve read about some compelling evidence even among the weakest of hypothesis.

But I’m not here to debate for or against them. I’m here to tell you that, while blogs and forums crackle with debate and reek of pedantry, it’s time for us to take accountability for our own weight loss.

No single diet works for everyone. But the one that seems to work really well is the classic one that grandma told us about: Eat our vegetables, and don’t snack because it will ruin dinner. (There’s nothing cutting edge about it.)

What grandma was saying is this: eat mostly whole, real food, and don’t eat more than we need. And she might have even said: eat less if we’re getting “a little pudgy.” (Her description, not mine.)

It was that simple.

But in today’s free market, mass consumption permeates our environment, courses our blood, and covers our dinner plates. Two-thirds of our population have allowed it to expand the waistline and the hips, and in effect facilitated a billion-dollar market of diet books and weight-loss programs, unwittingly burying grandma’s simple advice like a dandelion in a hurricane.

It’s no longer easy to hear and to follow grandma’s advice. If we want to get back to those days of simplicity, we now need a lifestyle change:

• Purchase mostly whole, real food
• Don’t frequent places that sell crap food with low-quality ingredients
• Don’t go down the aisle that sell packaged calories
• Go for a walk rather than go for a snack
• Have a “walk date” rather than a lunch date
• Keep yourself busy (create something, build something, do your work)
• Limit internet time
• Slow down and enjoy your meal
• If you can’t slow down and enjoy your meal, then don’t eat it
• If you’re going to eat your sinful dessert, then thoroughly enjoy it
• Whether you finish your dinner or not, there will always be starving children somewhere (change your belief)
• Stop reading hypothesis and theories on what makes you fat, and do what makes you lean
• Exercise a little, move a lot
• Watch less TV
• Get up more often
• Be positive in life
• Get more sleep
• Live a balance life
• Be kind
• Enjoy each other

You need a lifestyle change that brings you back to the basics of consuming less and of losing weight.

While losing weight is simple in concept, it isn’t easy in practice — and that’s probably why so many fail: an absence of a long-term lifestyle change.

This is what makes dietary debate of today so addictive: in it we are guaranteed to find an excuse for our failure, whether they’re real or not. (Oh, it’s my broken metabolism. Oh, it’s the carbs.)

Let’s take on accountability. Make a long-term lifestyle change. Eat mostly whole, real food. Don’t overeat. Eat less if you’ve become “a little pudgy.”

Let them debate, and let us lose weight.

Hi Everyone,

This picture was taken late morning today (happy Independence Day!).

My wife and I were enjoying a cup of coffee in the sun, 14 hours into my intermittent fasting, and I decided to grab the ol’ leather ball to do some casual wood-chops. Nothing vigorous. Just stimulating vascular flow and cellular respiration — the stuff of good health.

Regular movement — be it formal exercise or just incidental activity — helps with energy regulation, and is a strong predictor of health and even longevity.

Long-term readers of TLS know what I’ve said for years:

Eat mostly whole, real food. Do intermittent fasting. And move more. It’s that simple.

Yes, this blog is still alive.

From Jonas Peterson's Photos

I’ve been studying the basics of fatherhood, which is probably a good idea since in about a month someone tiny will make her way into the world and call me daddy. I’m trying to give myself the best chance to earn that title.

The worldly things that once mattered — horsepower in cars, friends on facebook, weight lifted, wine on the list, literature and art, price of gas, peace in the Middle East – have all been overshadowed by something still in utero.  My concern for all matters expansive or contractive in the entire universe pales in comparison to the hope that my daughter arrives safely into this world and takes her first breath.

Baby Changes Everything

As I face fatherhood, my perspectives are changing. Everything now takes a backseat to the little bundle of the self-insufficient human being that will be my daughter, whose delicate flesh I’ll sacrifice myself to keep safe.

This primal devotion can often trip a typical new father into shell shock and descend him into self-neglect. Perhaps this is why a new father tends to settle for a steady diet of increasing girth and declining health.

Surely it’s good intention, in light of his endless social, professional and financial obligations. Ten, twenty, or 40 pounds of excess body fat is a small price to pay to keep his child warm, safe and fed, and to maintain a roof over her head. A parent will sacrifice much to shield a child from the rain of the literal and the proverbial kind.

I forecast this paternal path for my own fatherhood and I must admit I’m worried about the health and fitness I’ve earned and enjoy (in possibly their final months). Fatherhood means severe sleep deprivation, poor food choices, and utter sloth. It means changing a diaper instead of changing the pin on a weight stack. It means the dreadful creeping of bodyweight and diminishing health.

A Reminder: Simplicity

But as I clicked through the archives of The Lean Saloon, it slowly came to me that everything I’ve written within shall be the ultimate saving grace as I enter the lockdown schedule of fatherhood.

This blog has breathed simplicity into an exercise and diet lifestyle that otherwise has been encumbered with modern information and obsession. The ease of use and the simplicity within The Lean Saloon makes weight loss and weight management realistic and hassle-free.

Less Obsession, More Time for Important Stuff

Less obsession on diet and exercise leaves us with more time and resource to dedicate energy to other pressing matters of life, without sacrificing body, health, and relationship. This leaves me time to be a father while preserving my physique and health.

If you want a lean body with a rational amount of muscle, there’s little need to spend more than 20 or 30 minutes doing formal exercise. That’s a western gimmick.

If you want to stimulate muscle, then create muscle tension through physical activity. In other words, get active, lift something, accelerate something… even if it’s just your body. Or an old medicine ball. Do them with genuine effort.

If you want to have less body fat, then eat less. Do intermittent fasting to make eating less simple. Eat mostly whole, real food; but also enjoy the delicious essence of culture.

Getting lean, staying that way, and becoming healthy cannot get simpler than that.

What I’ve Been Doing and Why There’s No Excuse to Stop

In the past 6 months, my primary exercise equipment has been a trusty 9-pound leather medicine ball. It’s a classic beauty that can be displayed in the living room without looking out of place — it’s a decor item when not in use. But when it’s in use, it takes a beating like… well, an old leather medicine ball.

The Classic Leather Medicine Ball that I've used almost daily. It's like an old buddy. Everyone should have one.

Five days a week for the past 6 months, I simply grab this leather medicine ball and accumulate 100 wood-chops. I do them in segments of 25s, four times through the day, or all at once. I typically do them at high speed. (Force = mass x Acceleration.)

I don’t consider the 100 reps of wood-chops formal exercise; I look at them as purposeful incidental activity. I just do them. This gets me out of the chair to metabolize some fat and sugar. This allows me to let go of the cultural urgency and obsession placed on formal exercise.

As for formal exercise: I perform some bodyweight exercises periodically, and lift a barbell infrequently. Sometimes I go for weeks without formal exercise. It’s because I know that leanness is more about staying active through the day and not overeating.

Focus On the Meaningful Stuff

Don’t complicate and obsess in areas that can be kept simple. There are other things deserving of greater work from us. Counting carbs and counting reps aren’t them. Keep this part simple. Enjoy that part of life that won’t be around forever.

My awesome lovely wife, Lori, 8 months and counting.

With our 5-year-old boxer, as energetic as she was at 5 months. Yes, she does intermittent fasting quite naturally and intuitively.

And, of course, it wouldn't be Johnny at The Lean Saloon without the impromptu shirts-off shot. (It's nice to just whip the shirt off and look decent without having to obsess with diet and exercise and all that ridiculous preparation.)

On The Lean Saloon I don’t discuss complicated theories of energy-regulatory feedback loop, because mostly they’re unproven. But I do believe that weight gain and weight loss are affected by hormonal regulation, genetics, diminishing incidental activities (pdf), food choices, environmental factors, and internal and external cues. Yes, it’s complicated and they all lead ultimately to overeating and weight gain.

So the much discussed feet or fork, the chanting of eat less, move more, or the basic calories-in, calories-out are all based on oversimplified concepts. They’re like soundbites for dummies, but they may actually help the process of losing and managing weight.

Look, the drivers of overweight and obesity, as well as the hurdles to weight loss, are incredibly complex, so we have to find simple solutions. It doesn’t make us dummies — it makes us smart humans.

Intermittent fasting is wonderfully effective at helping those wishing to lose the extra weight. In the face of pedantic discussions on the multifactorial drivers of the national obesity epidemic (or the stubborn fat you want off your ass), intermittent fasting is the simple and practical solution.

No matter which factors drive the overeating (which may be different from person to person), the simple conscious decision to turn off the valve for a predetermined period makes eating less a little more manageable.

Intermittent fasting. Simplicity to overcome complexity.

Move toward Goodness. You won’t regret it.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Toledo and creates a hurricane in China. It’s a theoretical concept that describes a causal effect within a nonlinear system, like that of the weather.

The same effect can be seen in the popular media system — from magazines of the past to the internet of today.

Schwarzenegger’s chugging of milk became the Weider’s supplement spark, a dietary concept that spread through the bodybuilding subculture and eventually pervaded into today’s popular culture of health and fitness enthusiasts:

Ya need to consume massive protein and carbs after your workouts, for hope of building a little muscle on that pathetic pile of shit you call a body.

It’s the gospel driveled by The Church of Bodybuilding Supplement — or for short, The Church of B.S.

The Church of B.S. makes its home in a multi-billion-dollar industry, preaching that an ounce of muscle is built on a tub of protein. The Church of B.S. elaborates on this further with quazi-scientific minutia such as when, why and how much protein and carbs you must consume.

Of course, as living, breathing, and functioning organisms that like to boink and reproduce, we do require a sufficient intake of protein and other macro- and micro-nutrients. That much we learned from a textbook in high school biology. Unfortunately, The Church of B.S. pushes for excess, a profitable exaggeration beyond normal biology. (But then a textbook doesn’t seek to sell us a cement bag of Mega Mass 2000.)

The sweaty flapping of the “Schwarzenegger Wing” has created an industrial hurricane that dispenses a modern gospel of strict exercise routines and rigid eating rules — a doctrine having its utility in perhaps the obsessive subculture of bodybuilding freaks, meatheads and the boyz and girlz of Jersey Shore, but it’s excessive for the rest of us average folks whose only hangup is whether our hair-gel or spray is making us look a bit too much like The Situation or Snookie. (If in doubt, leave your oversized sunglasses at home.)

Hardcore muscleheadz with your neck originating from your inner-ear canals, exit stage left with your doctrine tucked under your pec. Your sport requires impressive work, no doubt, but it’s not the feature of TLS.

The rest of us who merely want a healthy, sharp-looking, muscularly defined body, let’s abandon the convoluted and overzealous discussion of meaningless gospel, and let’s start doing the work.

• Lift things
• Sweat a little
• Don’t overeat
• Go live life

After each workout, don’t go into a head-spin about whether we should eat this or that. Eat if we want. Don’t if we don’t. Going for several hours without a post-workout meal will not make or break us, as normal, non-obsessive healthy people merely in search of a fabulous physique.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if we’re not competitive bodybuilders (like the monsters hired by supplement companies to promote their protein powders, in between abuses of Dianabols and at the completion of a Winstrol cycle), then rest assured our muscle manufacturing process is turned on by the strength training stimulus itself, and that favorable protein turnover lasts for up to two days.

Relax. For us, there’s no such thing as a post-workout eating window (unless we’re planning on doing another workout in 3 hours). A study, among others, suggests that protein synthesis does not indicate actual muscle growth.  Here’s a statement from the abstract:

Ingestion of only small amounts of amino acids, combined with carbohydrates, can transiently increase muscle protein anabolism, but it has yet to be determined if these transient responses translate into an appreciable increase in muscle mass over a prolonged training period.

Note also, that it doesn’t say you must consume a buffet banquet of grass-fed Wagyu or a cement bag of protein powder, either. Quite the opposite: “… only a small amount of amino acid… can transiently increase muscle protein anabolism…”

But that’s a mute point, given the closing remark: “…but it has yet to be determined if these transient responses translate into an appreciable increase in muscle mass…”

Keep it simple. Don’t obsess. Lift, sweat, and eat a little; and then go live a lot.