Diet

No amount of training can overcome a poor diet. You are what you eat, it is as simple as that. In my youth, my downfall was alcohol, although it certainly wasn't the only thing. Simply put, alcohol is a poison. It dehydrates you, increases the risk of injury, impairs hormones i.e. testosterone and I missed many a workout as a result of feeling lousy the day after. All of that said, alcohol can make a good night into a great night but you get the idea. I still drink, but it is very occasional and no more than two units in one sitting.

I have experimented with different restrictive diets, and have found the high carb, low fat variety to be ineffective, counterproductive even. I have also read some research that indicates that humans don't actually need dietary fibre, if I find that article I will link below.

I few years ago, I spent a bit of time thinking about the food pyramid, and our history. Our species has not evolved eating carbohydrates. If you rewind to 1900, the dietary intake of refined sugar was less than 5g a year. A YEAR! Also bear in mind that your saliva contains 'salivary amylase' - this is an enzyme that you will find in your saliva (surprisingly) that begins to digest starch into simple sugars before you have even swallowed. Therefore, I think that is it fair to assume that consuming 20g of starch, as opposed to 20g of white sugar is going to have roughly the same result. Yes, you blood sugar will not spike quite as quickly as with the sugar, but it will still spike.

In addition, much of the food that we eat today is very different from even 40 years ago. Take apples as an example, the 'pink lady' variants that we  now have been modified and bred to be sweeter, with a higher natural sugar content to be more palatable to the modern consumer. If you really think about it, we survived on a diet of meat and fish, which was available all year round, couple with in-season fruit and nuts. We didn't even begin to eat flour until a few thousand years ago, and flour is related to grass - it has just been modified over centuries.

Now the bulk of my meals are beef, lamb and egg heavy, and I use butter and lard freely. I try to keep milk and cream to a minimum. I'll have the odd apple, but that is generally the only fruit that I'll have. The calories in, calories out model is absolute horse shit in my opinion.

My final comment is this: I used to work with a guy who, in a previous life, was a pig farmer in Rochester. Do you know what he used to fatten up pigs? Whey protein, which at that time was a cheap waste product from the dairy industry.