The All-You-Can-Eat Diet
5 December 2008
If you work out enough, you can eat as much as you want, and whatever you want.
Lately I’ve been toying around with a concept I call “The All-You-Can-Eat Diet.” It could also be described as exercise-only weight loss. To practice it, you simply eat as much as you want and whatever you want and exercise as much as necessary to lose weight. For some people that would be quite a lot of exercise, but so what? There are many men and women who would find it much easier to exercise 10 hours per week than to drastically change their eating habits to promote weight loss.
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that any person, no matter how overweight, can achieve his or her optimal body weight without changing his or her eating habits with adequate exercise. It’s a simple game of math. If you start the all-you-can-eat diet and find that it’s not working for you, just exercise more. And if you exercise more and it’s still not working for you, then exercise even more.
The All-You-Can-Eat Diet is based largely on my own experience. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six years, I was, to call a spade a spade, fat—not fat by contemporary American standards, perhaps, but by objective health standards, certainly. I was able to make three golf balls disappear completely between rolls of flab on my belly. While this is not a medical definition of fatness, it makes the point.
Previously, between infancy and the age of seventeen and a half years, I had been the skinniest boy in America—or at least the skinniest boy I ever saw. The only children I observed while growing up who could have defeated me in a scrawny contest were the forlorn stars of those heartrending television fundraising pleas for UNICEF with flies crawling all over their faces. When I entered my senior year in high school, I stood six feet, one inch (my current height) and weighed all of one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. Clearly I was genetically ectomorphic, but I also ran forty miles a week throughout high school, which brought out my full genetic potential to shimmy between the rails of picket fences when occasion called for it.
Since the onset of puberty, my emaciated appearance had driven me nuts, not so much because of such teasing, although that was bad enough, but because it was obvious that girls preferred guys with muscle tone, even a little, and I had none whatsoever. And so, when the cross-country running season ended in early November of my twelfth-grade year, I launched upon a rabid quest to bulk up: I stopped running cold turkey, lifted weights like a man possessed, and ate as much food as my stomach and hollow leg could hold. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams….
Read the complete story of the All-You-Can-Eat Diet, as well as a follow-up article with detailed examples of how the plan really works! You can also learn more about how Pacific Health Labs is using TrainingPeaks to power their training log and nutrition tracking services for their clients.
Nutrition article courtesy of PacificHealth Laboratories, makers of nutrition tools such as Accelerade, Accel Gel, Endurox R4, Endurox Excel and much more. For product information or to purchase products, please visit www.pacifichealthlabs.com.
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