Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body

by Michael Matthews

How you look and feel is just as much a reflection of how you eat as it is of how you exercise, so no matter how many hours you put in at the gym, you won’t see major improvements if you’re not also managing your diet properly.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

as far as your body weight is concerned, how much you eat is far more important than what you eat. Don’t believe me? Just ask Kansas State University Professor Mark Haub, who lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks eating Hostess cupcakes, Doritos, Oreos, and whey protein shakes.1 Or a science teacher, John Cisna, who lost 56 pounds in six months eating nothing but McDonald’s.2 Or Kai Sedgwick, a fitness enthusiast who got into the best shape of his life following a rigorous workout routine and eating McDonald’s every day for a month.3 I don’t recommend you follow in their footsteps (the nutritional value of your diet does matter), but they prove an indisputable point: you can lose fat and gain muscle while eating copious amounts of junk food. The key to understanding how this works—and to understanding what really drives weight loss and gain—is energy balance, which is the relationship between energy intake (calories eaten) and output (calories burned).

If you consistently consume more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight, even if those calories come from the “healthiest” food on earth.

For starters, studies show that most people are really bad at estimating the actual number of calories they eat.12 They underestimate portion sizes, assume foods contain fewer calories than they do, measure intake inaccurately, and, in some cases, simply lie to themselves about how much they’re actually eating.

Here’s an all-too-common scenario: It’s mealtime and you break out the oatmeal, peanut butter, blueberries, and yogurt, and the measuring cups and spoons. You measure out one cup of oatmeal, one tablespoon of peanut butter, and half a cup each of blueberries and yogurt. You cook it all up, scarf it all down, and move on with your day. Unfortunately, you’ve just eaten a couple hundred more calories than you thought. How did this happen? Well, that (slightly heaping) cup of oatmeal that you scooped out contained 100 grams of dry oats and 379 calories. The “cup” on the label, however, contains only 307 calories because it assumes 81 grams of dry oats. That’s 72 more calories than you thought. And your tablespoon of peanut butter? You packed in 21 grams for a count of 123 calories, but your app’s tablespoon assumes just 16 grams and 94 calories. There’s another 29 “hidden” calories. Make these types of errors meal after meal, food after food, day after day, and this alone can be the reason you “mysteriously” can’t lose weight.

A good example of the effectiveness of resistance training while dieting is found in a study conducted by scientists at West Virginia University, which split 20 men and women into two groups:34 Group one did one hour of cardio four times per week. Group two lifted weights three times per week. Both groups followed the same diet, and after 12 weeks, everyone lost about the same amount of fat, but the cardio group also lost nine pounds of lean body mass, whereas the weightlifting group didn’t lose any.

Weightlifting isn’t a popular way to lose weight because it’s a bad way to lose weight, but it is a fantastic way to speed up fat loss and preserve muscle.

Our brain doesn’t give a damn about the bigger picture, either. It cares nothing about how we’re going to feel 30 pounds heavier or a few thousand dollars poorer. Its job is to identify promises of pleasure and then raise hell until we give in, even if pursuing those promises will entail risky, chaotic behavior likely to cause more problems than it’s worth.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. —UNKNOWN