This entry is the second part of a review of Precision Nutrition v2 by John Berardi. I did the first review after having followed the approach for several months; its five months on from that initial review, so i can say with increasing confidence: Precision Nutrition works for the long haul - and it gets easier and simpler to practice as you go. And critically that means not just achieving the results you want; it means maintaining them. So this review is more about what makes PNv2 work for the long haul.
An overview of what Precision Nutrition is, and links to great associated resources, are in part 1 of the review, called "enter the super shake"
First off, Precision Nutrition is not a Diet, it's an approach to nutrition. What's the difference between a diet and nutrition? One works. for the long haul. That would be the latter one: focusing on nutrition rather than a diet.
Diets are traditionally reputed to be fast fixes for weight gain, but they also have pretty lousy longevity effects: as soon as people go "off" the diet, the weight comes back. It's understandable: for a limited period of time, we may be willing to live in a state of denial (and it usually seems like denial of something on a diet), but that's it, and as soon as the denied substance, or sloth or both come back into the equation, so does the loss of any gains. Diets are about diets, not about sustained practice.
So if diets suck at sustained results, what works?
According to John Berardi, it's all down to habits. Habits work.
Steven R. Covey of the famous 7 Habits of Highly Effective People calls habits an internalized principle, bringing together knowledge, skill and attitide: what to do, how to do it and why to do it.
While not explicit (that i could find) in Berardi's writing, his version of habits seems to agree with Covey's. To achieve our goals related to health, fitness, body composition, Berardi argues, we have to adapt our habits, our way of thinking about food, our food practice. We have to learn first about what to do eating wise, then how to do it and why to do it. If we bring together this knowledge, skill set and attitudes around truly eating right, then we're not dieting - not doing a short term restrictive eating regimen for short term gains. Instead, we've developed a healthy and enduring food practice that works rain or shine, and, in particular, can be tuned to support a variety of goals - whether those goals are weight loss or muscle mass gain or maintenance.
In the last review i looked at the features of the Precision Nutrition program - all the stuff one gets from recipes to access to the best nutrition forum of experts in cyberspace. In this review, i'm going to focus mainly on how the individualuzation guide - that tuning of PN - helps to ensure that Precision Nutrition works over the long haul for one's own particular make up and goals.
Technorati Tags: diet, fitness, health, nutrition
First things first (to cadge another Covey title)
We all have things we want to achieve if we're thinking about diet: lose fat; gain muscle; have the muscle we do have show, etc. Some of us just want to improve our health. For all these things, as Berardi's PN site points out, nutrition, more so than working out or anything else has the most profound effect for shaping our selves.
If we're willing to give that postulate a go, Berardi lays out ten habits for nutrition to follow (download here), His heuristic for this approach is simple: make sure you can follow these habits for 90% compliance for at least 5 consecutive weeks. Then, see how it goes, and if and as needed adjust the variables within this following habits space. More of that in a moment, first a quick review of Berardi's PN Habits:
1. Eat every 2-3 hours.
2. Eat complete lean protein each time you eat
3. Eat vegetables every time you eat
4. Eat carbs only when you deserve to (eg this is bread, pasta starchy carbs after a work out)
5. Learn to love healthy fats (eg. fish oil capsules, and omega 3's like ground flax seed)
6. Ditch calorie containing drinks (including fruit juice)
7. Focus on whole foods
8. Have 10% foods
9. Develop food preparation strategies
10. Balance daily food choices with healthy variety
You'll notice there's no mention of calories here, but macronutrients (carbs, proteins and fats) are mentioned, at least on global terms, and that's important. The big deal here is about a concept called nutrient timing: ensuring that your body gets the nutrients it needs when it needs them, and can make best use of them. That's why rule 4 about eating (starchy) carbs only after say an intense workout is a biggie.
Calculating 90% adherence to the habits is easy & direct: did you eat every 2-3 hours? Yes. great. did each of those "feedings" include both protein and veg? No? How many didn't? 2 ok, not compliant on two? Were starchy carbs only had after working out? No? Ok, so that's clearly not a 90% compliant day.
Habits in Motion
To see the rationale for compliance being so important, let's plug that last habit test on starchy carbs into those three attributes of a habit in motion. There's method to what seem like food pyramid madness here: grains, potatoes, breads are fast carb burners and very high in amount of carb/volume of food. a whole lot of grams of carbs in one of these foods as opposed to same volume of spinach. So, the optimal time to take in that amount of fast burning mondo carb is after a work out when we've depleted what those carbs can turn into: muscle glycogen - sugar for energy in our muscles. If our muscles aren't depleted, there's no need for those glycogen inputs from the carbs, so that fuel that would have gone into our muscles goes, well, you know where: it goes to fat, the opposite of what most of us want (for more on what's going on with carbs and muscles, see this article "Frontline Fat Loss" by Dave Barr).
So that's one habit of bringing what to do (don't eat startchy carbs) with when to do it (except after workouts) with why to do it (which is when our muscles and bodies can make use of this kind of fuel). That's a good habit. If we choose not to follow it, the consequences are pretty direct: lessened fat loss; possible fat gain.
The rest of the habits have the same kind of logic behind them, but they are foreign to most of us initially. Eat every 2-3 hours? Have veggies AND protein at every "feeding"? c'mon! ah but there are ways.
So where does this get us? Well, over the period of getting to "90% compliance" we'll likely be losing weight or gaining mass (muscle) or whatever it is we want. Worst case scenario, if already pretty "fit" it may mean staying at a similar weight while improving other measures of body composition, like increasing lean mass (good) and reducing fat (also good).
Aside on Body Composition: Weight and Weigh Scales Suck
And this is one of the eye openers with PN: simple weight measures can be misleading. This means that the scales can be a lousy way to monitor progress: muscle weighs more than fat. So we can be losing body fat while gaining muscle - the scales may not seem to change and that can be as frustrating as it is a misrepresentation of what's going on in our bodies . So PN includes a measurement guide, recommends taking skin fold measures using calipers, girth measures (height, tape measurements) as well as weight measures. And for those thinking about shelling out for a digital scale that "measures" body fat, too, stick with the cheaper calipers. These scales are notoriously variable, and for the individualization program, consistent measurements over time are mission critical.
Individualization: Getting You to Where You Want to Go and Being Able to Stay There
The reason for requiring 90% compliance for 5 weeks is as simple as it is scientific: in following these habits for five weeks straight (a) there is a solid baseline of eating right, providing a clear starting point for any refinement(b) these good practices are now pretty much "habits" - wired into the system. This base line becomes important for individual tuning.
While some folks stand up and cheer right away with PN, seeing terrific and immediate results, some people on the Precision Nutrition Forum early on express frustration at having been true and compliant to the habits, yet not seeing the gains or losses they want (i've been in this space). Things seem to be at best static, or moving very slowly.
It's at this stage that individualization comes in.
The individualization guide in PNv2 looks at numerous ways for people to tune the habits/practices to support their goals. These include looking at body types (aka somatotypes) and the relation of these to macronutrients (breaking calories into protein, carbohydrates and fats). For instance the typical skinny guy who can eat anything and not gain weight, for reasons we won't go into here - for that see Berardi's Scrawny to Brawny - will likely need a higher ratio of carbohydrates than the person who just looks at a desert and feels they've gained weight. The individualization guide provides strategies for helping a person figure out where they likely are, and how to (a) balance their macronutrients appropriately and (b) get the right amount of calories (finally, there's that word: calories!).
Ironically, a typical reason for people not to lose weight, or indeed gain weight can be severe under-eating. Many women, for instance, may freak out at being told to eat 2000+ calories a day; we're used to a diet mentality of 1200 a day. For a 140 pound female, that's less than 10 calories per pound. Considering even a mainly sedentary woman at this weight burns around 2000 calories a day just from daily efforts and metabolism, to say nothing of any working out, that person is eating at starvation levels (usually considered to be at approx. 50% of caloric requirements a day). The body at starvation mode slows down the metabolism; slows down fuel burning, and will actually often take fuel from muscle tissue before taking it from fat in those conditions. The number of reports from people, especially those working out, saying as soon as they upped their calories they started to lose weight is a common response.
Now, the idea of precision nutrition is NOT to get hung up on calories, but sometimes looking at caloric amounts relative to portion sizes of macronutrients can help someone new to nutrition get used to what these ratios mean for them, so that eventually, the calorie counting can be chucked in favour of knowing what the right food ratios in feedings look like for them.
Other strategies in individualization include both carb and calorie cycling to keep the body well away from getting settled into one mode of metabolic stagnation - keeping it on its toes.
PN strategies also reflect an awareness of different practices. While it encourages 5+ hours a week of exercise as a goal minimum state of activity, where those hours include a mix of resistance, cardio and high intensity interval work (in keeping with research on exercise requirements research for health and healthy body weight), it provides strategies that suit people at different levels of practice and interest.
Testing Testing. Is this thing Working?
Almost more important than the strategies available for individualization is the methodology for assessing the effectiveness of any of these strategies. Again, the approach is simple as well as scientific: change ONE thing only; hold it constant for two weeks at least, and re-assess. Is it working? do it for another two weeks. If not, assess what's happening and tweak again - change one other thing, one variable at a time.
The rationale for this simple, scientific, proven approach is that if you change multiple things at once, how do you know if any of them are the things making a difference? This is also why the baseline of 90% compliance is important. If you know you're eating according to the habits, then you can with confidence change one thing at a time. For instance, you may increase portion size (increase calories) overall for two weeks, or you may increase amount of protein only and hold everything else steady. One variable change at a time, assuming no other noise like illness or sudden decrease or increase in workouts, etc, means that change in results can pretty much be guaranteed to be attributed to that effect. It may take a few tweaks to dial in what makes sense, and PN provides tools to help for instance figure out caloric and macronutrient requirements dependent on activities (lots of workouts, but otherwise not active for example) and goals (weight loss, muscle gain, maintenance).
This is exciting: this method means that figuring out what works for you is not either the deprivation of a diet or the frustration of thinking that you already "eat clean" so why aren't you lean, or muscular or whatever. Here's a concrete, yet elegant (read simple but beautiful, sorta like e=mc2) way to understand clearly what approach works for you, with the insight into both why and how it works.
Now, someone reading this potential need for tweaking may be put off, thinking "but i want something to work right away! All this tweaking at two weeks a pop after getting to 5 weeks of compliance - that's taking possibly months away from that weight goal."
Two possible replies to this argument. First, as Berardi in his videos that accompany PN puts it, if you want to lose weight fast, and that's your only concern, he can make it happen with lots of drugs and diet enforcement. But then what? The immediate fix is only effective for the duration of that diet. Second, once you're tweaked, you're tweaked. It may take a little bit of time for you to get what works for you, but once it's dialed in, it's dialed in: you know what works for you AND you have the knowledge on how to adapt this if your practice changes - like you start to work out more - or your goals change - you want to add muscle now, rather than lose weight. If you could spend a couple months cleaning up your diet and getting techniques that last AND improve your health AND not only achieve your goals but ensure your results last for months/years, then that ramp up phase is worth it, no? And hey, that ramp up phase is still progressing you towards your goal, too.
You're Not Alone
Despite how great the individualization guide it can be challenging to determine which strategy to pick first - which one is most likely to benefit your particular circumstances/goals/composition. That's where the PN forum comes in. A PN purchase gives you full access to the forum, its online resources and especially its experts like Carter Schoffer (Director of Sports Nutrition and Performance at precision nutrition) and Ryan D. Andrews (Dietitian/Exercise Physiologist/Director of Research as well as being a vegan), to name only two of the PN team members, are worth their weight in gold. There are also folks like Kris Aiken, Coach Mike and Krista Schaus who are pro trainers who are regulars on the forum and part of the team. This is to say nothing of all the people who keep Members Logs on the site and have likely either gone through what you're going through or are right there with you, empathisizing, replying and pointing folks to related resources to help get up on the Why of any of the habits.
Just to add a personal note, this has certainly been my experience: with following the habits with 90% compliance, my progress to my goals was steady but seemingly very sloooow. I lamented this on the forum and got some super pointers of techniques to try to tweak the approach; i went back to the tools on the site and the individualization guide; i came back with a suite of questions, and got a sustained set of answers from Carter Schoffer in particular that helped me dial in within a month the nutrition refinements i needed for my particular practice. I'm very pleased with the results; more than that, i'm very pleased with having been able to maintain and improve them.
Tweak Your Fitness Program, too: As another aside: the support available on the PN forum is not just about nutrition alone; there's a strong focus on tweaking one's workouts, too. Beyond the PN team, there are numerous coaches and fitness professionals who are regulars on the forum. Three in particular have offered me free and terrific feedback on my programs. This is a shout out of thanks for these community members: Roland Ficher (CDN), Alex Gold (UK) and Mike T. Nelson (USA), whom i've had the pleasure to interview for IAMGeekFit. From basic program to custom tuning, you're so covered with PN.
Taking It Home
One of the main tenants of PN is that this is a strategy for the long term. As such spending the time up front to figure out how to tune good nutrition practices for you for that long haul is a far healthier approach than short term "fast" but also short and potentially unhealthy fixes like diets can be.
Maybe you're looking at those PN habits and thinking "wow, no way i can get compliant on those habits; too daunting." That's ok, too. Cold Turkey isn't for everyone: one at a time is a better start than walking away. What do you have to lose by not trying? This is about a practice for a lifetime. So, to paraphrase a line from Babylon 5, how old will you be a year from now if you don't try to get real with good nutrition?
For those reading this who are excited about how this approach may work for you, that's excellent. It will. The basics are super sound; the habits work, and best of all, the individualization approaches ensures that those habits work for you no matter your health, nutrition and fitness goals.
All the best,
mc
Link to Precision Nutrition v2