‘Eat little and often’ they tell you.
You’ll hear of bodybuilders eating anywhere from five to eight small meals a day, which to most normal people sounds like hell.
But you might not need to have your face permanently in a plastic tub full of chicken if you’re looking to get ripped.
One meta-analysis of nutrition studies has already cast doubt on this ‘golden dietary rule’ – arguing that just sticking to a particular diet consistently might more important while arguing the amount of meals you eat is down to personal preference where body composition is concerned.
If anything backs this up it’s the diet personal trainer Max Lowery ate on the way to getting ripped.
The PT was eating just one meal a day and still managed to get down to 5 per cent body fat, according to his interview with The Sports Review.
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It was something he discovered totally by accident while travelling in South America he told the site – but it got him in the shape of his life.
It’s based on intermittent fasting, which has incredible health benefits from increased fat loss to cell repair and boosted brain power (we explain all in this handy feature).
He told The Sports Review how he would train all day in Brazil and then just eat one big meal per day in the evening to save money.
“I didn’t really know or think about what I was doing but I just got shredded. I was really, really lean and I’d never been like that before.
“I was training a lot and I put on muscle mass even though I was eating less than usual. I got back home and weighed myself and I was around 80 kilos, which is really light for me, and 5 per cent body fat.
“But I still didn’t really know what I was doing. I went back into eating three meals a day, cooking my own food – low carb most of the time because I just like eating like that and I’d had good results from it – and I went back up to 86 kilos, from five per cent body fat to around 13 per cent.
“I wasn’t nearly as lean or shredded.”
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He did his research and found there was a community of people also into intermittent fasting which means going anything over 16 hours without eating (although a portion of that is overnight when you’re asleep).
While you won’t just have to eat one mega meal to get all your calories in, it just means you have a smaller ‘eating window’ to do your day’s eating.
So you might fast from 9pm at night to 1pm the following day and then you can get tucking into your food in that eight hour period.
He explained in a blog post on his website how he thought cutting out breakfast would be the hardest thing he’d ever done.
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“I thought this may be a struggle, I am someone who has always ‘needed’ to eat breakfast in the mornings. I used to think my whole world would collapse if I didn’t have my eggs in the morning.
“However, it was surprisingly easy and I got into the swing of it within a few days. I very quickly started to become leaner and I was visibly losing body fat without losing any muscle mass.
“To my surprise I was actually less hungry than before. No longer was I constantly thinking about my next meal or worrying if I wasn’t going to have time to have breakfast or lunch.
“Added bonus – as well as time, I was saving money! I stopped having to pay to have a substandard, unsatisfying lunch grabbed from whatever was near me in London.
The most useful benefit I found from IF (aside from fat loss) was the stabilisation of my energy levels. Digestion actually takes up a lot of energy and once you free up that energy, fasting can give you a “buzz”.
“Before IF I, like most people would start crashing in between breakfast and lunch (even with a low carb diet). Now I am on a constant energy level all day and that’s without any caffeine. I wake up full of energy and that lasts until I go to bed.
Max is preparing to launch his The Fit Fast -Guys plan on July 10 based on fasting and functional exercises to get down to single digit body fat.
