Okay, that goes some way to explain it. I don’t have any personal experience with regaining lots of muscle mass (mostly because I’ve yet to gain lots of muscles in the first place!) but what I’ve read does indicate that regaining muscle is easier than building up for the first time.
To be totally honest, I think Arnold’s books on weight-training are excellent.
Schwarzenegger? I’ve read his Education of a Bodybuilder. Quite entertaining, and his exercises do look realistic – for him. Most of his exercises require the trainee to be very robust and strong to begin with. (Arnold was incredibly muscular at age 15!) The sheer amount of exercise he recommends is also completely beyond mere mortals.
The biggest problem with training regularly is giving your body time to recover (and as you get older, your body needs additional time to recover from an intense work out). Steroids are incredibly effective, but what they do primarily is increase muscle recovery time, and accordingly allow you to work out harder and more intensely than you otherwise could (and sustain more muscle mass than your frame would normally accommodate).
Decrease recovery time you mean. Yes, Schwarzenegger’s advice might work very well for someone with good genetics and steroids. But not many people have those genetics (I don’t), and I don’t really want to take growth drugs either.
I’ve always worked out on a three-day system, working out different muscle groups on each day (chest/legs; biceps/triceps/forearms; back/shoulders), with abdominals and some cardio each day – gives your muscle groups adequate time to recover since you’re not directly working them more than once every three days. When I stick with my system consistently, I can get in pretty amazing shape in under a month. Again, that’s probably easier because I’m largely just regaining prior form, but anyone can lose a lot of weight and acquire a great deal of muscle mass by sticking with that program.
Hmm… I really recommend you read some of McRobert’s stuff. You’re definitely someone he would classify as a rare exception. :)
From Dartmouth - ““Drink at Least 8 Glasses of Water a Day” - Really?”
Valtin thinks the notion may have started when the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council recommended approximately “1 milliliter of water for each calorie of food,” which would amount to roughly two to two-and-a-half quarts per day (64 to 80 ounces). Although in its next sentence, the Board stated “most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods,” that last sentence may have been missed, so that the recommendation was erroneously interpreted as how much water one should drink each day.
At the same time, he stresses that large intakes of fluid, equal to and greater than 8 x 8, are advisable for the treatment or prevention of some diseases, such as kidney stones, as well as under special circumstances, such as strenuous physical activity, long airplane flights or hot weather. But barring those exceptions, he concludes that we are currently drinking enough and possibly even more than enough.
Other claims discredited by scientific evidence that Valtin discusses include:
Thirst Is Too Late. It is often stated that by the time people are thirsty, they are already dehydrated. On the contrary, thirst begins when the concentration of blood (an accurate indicator of our state of hydration) has risen by less than two percent, whereas most experts would define dehydration as beginning when that concentration has risen by at least five percent.
Dark Urine Means Dehydration. At normal urinary volume and color, the concentration of the blood is within the normal range and nowhere near the values that are seen in meaningful dehydration. Therefore, the warning that dark urine reflects dehydration is alarmist and false in most instances.
On the Atkins diet: IMHO it works because it cuts down on simple carbs (e.g. simple starches and sugars). I personally think it goes overboard, completely restricting things that actually only need to be reduced.
On water intake: The Krebs Cycle (the cellular process to produce ATP - aka chemical energy for your body) uses water as a main reagent. Water is kind of like fuel.
On meals: Supposedly breakfast should be your biggest meal of the day, followed by lunch and then dinner. Sure it’s what you eat, but also when you eat it.
I don’t know about the arcana of water intake but I’m drinking about three bottles of mineral water a day regardless because, well, I like to. :) However, isn’t it good for the kidneys to drink lots of water, because it helps them process the junk in all the other food? That’s what I’ve heard.
On meals: Supposedly breakfast should be your biggest meal of the day, followed by lunch and then dinner. Sure it’s what you eat, but also when you eat it.
I’ve heard that advice but that’s just not possible for people like me who get sleepy when they’ve eaten a lot. The less I have for breakfast, the more productive I get. Making breakfast the biggest meal, while still staying active in the morning, would mean I’d have to eat pretty much nothing all day long.
I’m thinking that I should try some form of a high protein diet for a while. Like I said in my previous post, I’ve stopped losing and started gaining again since the holidays, and this time of year it is really hard for me to control my eating. The cold and lack of sunlight makes me crave all the bad stuff, so I’m hoping I can make a change at least until spring, when I find my motivation for dieting goes up as the temperature increases.
So, does anyone have a reference to a free source of information on this style of diet? I would prefer to not have to buy another book, because I am cheap and broke. Thanks.
Whatever the deal is with whether you NEED that much water, the fact is that it does make you feel full, so drinking a lot of water (within reason) is a good thing if you’re trying to lose weight.
Slothrop,
You can find the paperback version of Atkins in almost any used bookstore, for about $2 to $3. It’s sold millions of copies, so just about any paperback shop will have a few.
I don’t know about the arcana of water intake but I’m drinking about three bottles of mineral water a day regardless because, well, I like to. :) However, isn’t it good for the kidneys to drink lots of water, because it helps them process the junk in all the other food? That’s what I’ve heard.[/quote]
Fortunately, water is one of those things that no matter how much you drink, you aren’t going to hurt yourself too bad [li]. You can’t overdose on water, you will simply live in the bathroom getting rid of it. The point is, as has been said earlier, it may not be required to drink that much water every day for good health, but it can’t hurt you in any way [].
[/li]
[size=2][] By this I am referring only to health issues. If you must, feel free to come up with some bizarre bursting stomach/drowning scenario on your own to “win”![/size]
Fortunately, water is one of those things that no matter how much you drink, you aren’t going to hurt yourself too bad [li]. You can’t overdose on water, you will simply live in the bathroom getting rid of it. The point is, as has been said earlier, it may not be required to drink that much water every day for good health, but it can’t hurt you in any way [*].
[/li]
[size=2][li] By this I am referring only to health issues. If you must, feel free to come up with some bizarre bursting stomach/drowning scenario on your own to “win”![/size][/li][/quote]
Actually :) I remember an E.R. episode where a kid came in who had O.D’d on water. They said that drinking too much water too fast can make a person “drunk”. The kid was trying to beat a drug test by diluting his urine. I saw it on TV so it must be true!
It actually is true. There are cases of people who’ve been “addicted” to water (it’s entirely mental) to the point of trying to drink gallons in just a few hours. If you drink enough water, your body-salt levels get all wonky and you can seem drunk.
As for dieting, pretty much the consensus of ideas here are all good, and they all boiled down to:
Eat less. Eat larger meals earlier in the day. Avoid complex carbs and fats. Exercise. Eat 4-6 small meals instead of 2-3 big ones. Drink water (or some other no calorie beverage) over soda. Don’t eat anything late (3 hours before bedtime is a good guide)
Beyond that, the choice of diet and or form of exercise is more or less a matter of personal preference. There’s a lot of support for Atkins here, but I hated it. My fiancee gave a go for the books “Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type” and it’s ilk. I hated that too, because it was too great a change for me. I did SlimFast for a while, I did BodySolutions as well. Now, it’s just eating less (I don’t watch/avoid anything in particular, but rely on just eating less overall to regulate carb/fat intake to a satifactory level) and exercising.
I have gone the diet soda route (though there was a period where it was just water), though at times I wonder why (water is more or less free, and doesn’t have aspartame). Some people have been known to suffer from migranes from Aspartame and some studies have shown a link to depression as well. If I could get a decent diet soda with Splenda in it (Diet RC is the only one I currently know of, and it’s not readily available here), I’d be all over it. Thank the NutraSweet lobby for the slow adoption of a substantially better option in Splenda (end rant).
Since March of 2002, I’ve lose 25 pounds (going from 205 to 180), and shed even more fat replaced by muscle. I hit the gym ~5 times a week (trying to alternate cardio with weights), I play basketball twice a week, and all that.
It’s a small, DMHO-covered world! Oddly enough, the guy who did that site took a lot of it from the The Coalition to Ban DHMO, of which my husband was a founding member (he and Eric Lechner wrote the original text):
“Written in 1988 at UCSC as a spoof of all the knee-jerk environmental activism there, we printed up a slew of these flyers and spread them all over campus (specifically, the Styrofoam reference is in response to the successful campus-wide student campaign to ban Styrofoam from our dorm cafeterias). It was posted on Usenet around 1990, and appeared on the Web around 1993. Though probably not the only time this idea has been thought of, ours was an “independent invention” and our particular copy has since been widely circulated as email spam (not by us!). It has also been printed in the Chemical Engineering News, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (with our permission) and other scientific publications.”
The dhmo.org guy eventually admitted he took the text (and the idea for his site) from original CTBD email, and now credits them.
[quote=“voltaic”]
Fortunately, water is one of those things that no matter how much you drink, you aren’t going to hurt yourself too bad [li]. You can’t overdose on water, you will simply live in the bathroom getting rid of it. The point is, as has been said earlier, it may not be required to drink that much water every day for good health, but it can’t hurt you in any way [*].[/li][/quote]
I’m actually suprised you haven’t heard of this dude. Drink too much much water and you start to feel like your dehydrated and you start barfing. Used to happen to me when I would ride my bike constantly, then I found out that there’s a reason people put a bit of salt in their water, or bring Wheat Thins with them.
And no, it’s not some “bizarre bursting stomach/drowning scenario” thing :) It’s pretty common.
