So now I will discuss macronutrient ratios, this is a touchy subject.  Many diets out there don’t consider these ratios at all, as a matter of fact they don’t even want you to monitor you caloric intake.  By following point systems or portion sized systems, you can still lose weight.  This is generally only effective for the clinically obese.  People who are very overweight will benefit from almost any diet but will still lose lean body mass overtime slowing their metabolism even more.

The diets that do consider the macronutrient ratios are often pretty slack in the ratios.  Some of these diets will give you foods you can eat and foods you cant, but depending on how many of these certain foods you eat your macronutrient ratios will change.  You caloric level will vary quite a bit as well, since you aren’t monitoring the amount of food you are eating you have no way of knowing how many calories you are consuming.

Some popular approaches when it comes to diets right now are high carb/low fat (weight watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.), The Zone or South Beach and high protein/low carb (Atkin’s) diets.  All these diets are designed with the average person in mind, the average sedentary person that is.  You on the other hand, if you are resistance training (which is necessary to maintain muscle while dieting) are an athlete.  Hey you are working out hard and breaking down muscle so, comfortable with the tag or not, that’s what you are.  So you are going to have to eat like one.

I am going to mention some problems I have with common diets out there today. I am going to approach them from both a muscle gain and fat loss angle so you can understand how they may affect you no matter what your goals are.  At the end of the day, any reduced calorie diet approach will help you lose weight and any increased calorie diet approach will help you gain weight.  But like I mentioned earlier, we don’t want to lose or gain “weight”, we want to lose fat and gain muscle.

At the end of this section, I am going to touch on the ratios I developed for the Emerge Lifestyle.  I have found these ratios to be very effective, often building muscle while on reduced calories and in many cases fat loss while increasing calories for muscle gain.

High carbohydrate

 With your typical high carb low fat diet (approx. 20% protein, 70% carbohydrates and 10% fat), you can run into a few problems, especially as someone that works out.  When looking at this approach from a fat loss goal, you have a few glaring problems.

As I mentioned when I wrote about dietary fat, when consuming less than maintenance level calories.  If you don’t consume enough fat, your body will tend to retain existing body fat at all costs.  Usually this cost is lean muscle mass, as you know, this will lower your metabolic rate over time making it harder to get or stay lean. 

Since you aren’t consuming much protein, the building block of muscle, you will also have a hard time maintaining muscle when on lower calories. The higher carbohydrates should have a protein sparing effect but often the amount of protein is so low that it just isn’t enough to repair the damaged cause by high intensity workouts.

The biggest problem I see comes from the carbohydrates themselves.  Many people following this type of diet approach don’t consider the types of carbohydrates consumed and tend to eat a lot of refined carbohydrates.  There are so many low fat products available today but they often have a lot of refined carbohydrates, as you know this will generally lead to a high GI rating.  So now you have to try to lose fat with insulin always present in your system.  Not an easy feat.  You will tend to burn the dietary carbohydrates or muscle tissue over the stored body fat.

 This type of diet will also make it harder to build muscle when on a higher calorie diet.  You have plenty of carbohydrates for energy and a protein sparing effect but like I stated earlier, the amount of protein isn’t conducive to muscle gain or repair.  Also, diets low in fat have proven to lower testosterone levels, making it harder to build or maintain muscle and lose fat.

Zone style diets

The Zone in my opinion is actually a pretty good diet (30% protein, 40% carbohydrates and 30% fat) for the average person.  Overall it is a good maintenance style diet and pretty easy to follow.  There are a couple things I don’t like about it, such as people just following the general rules to eating and not getting too specific with their exact caloric and macronutrient amount.  As well, I don’t like the precise ratios from meal to meal, more on that in a minute.

With this style diet you do have an adequate amount of dietary fat to give your body what it needs, so you can tap into fat stores more readily.  Obviously, since the amount of fat is considerable, you want to make sure that your fat sources are high quality healthy fats. I do feel that this amount of fat may be a little high when you are on a higher calorie diet and may result in a gain in body fat.

The amount of protein is also adequate so that you should be able to maintain or lose very little muscle mass while on reduced calories.  Also, you should be able to build muscle quite well on a higher calorie diet.

The carbohydrate choices are mainly low GI which is good.  Except that there are times when you will require higher GI foods.  This isn’t addressed in The Zone approach, again its designed for the average person, not an athlete.  I feel the carbohydrate level is a little low when on a high calorie version as you will want to spare as much protein as possible to aid in muscle growth.  Although The Zone states that athletes can thrive on the diet I haven’t personally found that to be the case.

The one main thing I don’t like about The Zone is that you are required to eat the same ratio 30/40/30 each meal of the day.  This is regardless of your activity level for that time of the day.  The overall daily ratios are okay in my mind but I don’t think they should be the same for each meal.  I have found that certain times of the day require different ratios of macronutrients. Certain times of the day your body requires more or less of each macronutrient but this is not addressed with the Zone style approach.

Low Carbohydrate/High fat diets (also known as Ketogenic, Atkin’s or Protein diets

These types of diets generally want you to consume very few carbohydrates over the course of the day.  Usually the magic number is around 30 grams for the day, the rest of you calories will come from protein and fat.

You can lose a lot of weight within the first few weeks of this type of diet, the thing is it is mostly water weight.  This is due to the fact that your body depletes its glucose and glycogen stores.  When this happens your body slips into ketosis, this is when your body starts to convert body fat and dietary fat to ketones.  The water weight returns quickly when you start to consume carbohydrates again, but it is just water, not fat.

I have been on many types of ketogenic diets over the years, some where you introduce carbohydrates for a day or two a week to help maintain and or build muscle.  Cycling your carbohydrates when on a ketogenic diet is a body building type diet where your muscles will super compensate and retain more carbohydrates and water making your muscles appear larger and fuller.   I have also been on ketogenic diets where I have consumed no more than 10 grams of carbohydrates a day for months at a time.

Many people find lower energy levels when on a keotgenic diet, and a flat feeling in the gym.  Since you have no carbohydrates in your system you will not get a pump when you work out and this can mess with your mind somewhat.  One of the biggest issues I have with many keotgenic diets on the market today, is that they seem to promote a haphazard approach.

Often, they let you eat anything that doesn’t contain carbohydrates and as much as you want.  If you consume too many calories, you will not lose fat.  Calories are calories.  If you consume too much saturated fat, you will store fat more readily.  Yet everyone is eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and fatty steaks or burgers and butter the rest of the day. 

When I experimented with ketogenic diets, I chose lean protein sources and mainly essential fatty acids. For example, I wanted to see how fast I could get lean by consuming only protein powder with water and flax seed oil, or skinless chicken breasts and shot glasses of a blended EFA oil.  Fat came off fast except for the fact that I was bored with the lack of variety and feeling flat in the gym.

The other major issue I have about ketogenic diets is that most people will make a minor cheat and eat a carbohydrate source that they shouldn’t and screw up days of sticking to the diet.  Once you eat too many carbohydrates (like a slice of bread), you are kicked out of ketosis and may take up to 4 days to get back in.

I have applied many of the rules behind the ketogenic diet theory when I came up with the Emerge approach.  I have found the Emerge approach to be the most versatile type of diet that keeps you in a fat burning zone when you need to be and an anabolic zone when you need to be. With the Emerge approach you never feel like you are missing anything, since you are still eating breads and pastas as well as having an adequate amount of fat.

“The Emerge Lifestyle” approach, high protein moderate carbohydrates and fat

Okay, so what do I recommend for my clients?  Obviously I am not going to give all the details in the article but I will give you the theory behind the Emerge approach.  I like to use all the information that I have on macronutrients and how your body is affected by them.  I also want to use the information regarding meal timing and frequency.  So knowing how our bodies react to certain foods as well as resistance training, I have constructed a simple scientific approach that focuses on fat loss, not just weight loss and it focuses on muscle repair and gain, not just weight gain.

By the way, you should eat this way all the time.  You will just eat less when you want to get leaner and eat more when you want to gain muscle.  This is not a temporary diet approach it is just a well balanced way to eat to ensure that your body is always in a positive healthy balance. After all, I don’t call this approach the Emerge Lifestyle approach for nothing; it is exactly that, a lifestyle to be maintained for life.

Like I stated early in the Diet and Performance Nutrition section, I want to have people weigh and measure their food to start.  Once you get used to the portion sizes of items, you will be able to eyeball them and be fairly accurate with your macronutrient estimations.  I have people count their calories to better understand what their meal sizes will look like so they can just wing it down the road and remain fairly accurate.

Basically I want you to be as precise as you can.  You will still see an improvement if you wing it from the start and just follow my diet principles but I wouldn’t recommend it from the start.  If you are putting the time and effort into your diet and training you may as well go all out. Often people think that if they give it an 85% effort they will get 85% of the results, not the case at all.  85% effort may only give you 50% of the results or less, so why not go that extra 15% for 100% of the results.

Alright, now to the main points of the Emerge Lifestyle diet approach.  I found that most people benefit when they reduce their carbohydrate intake, so I like to keep carbohydrates rather low.  I focus mainly on complex whole grains and vegetables. Vegetables add so much bulk and help fill you without the extra calories.  I always take into account my clients activity level during the day and tailor the type of carbohydrate (high or lower GI, simple and complex) they will consume at different times.  This applies mainly to the workout days more so than the non workout days.

Since they are resistance training and constantly breaking down muscle, they have a higher protein requirement than the average sedentary person.  Also, our bodies work harder to process protein and doesn’t store it as body fat as readily as carbohydrates or fat.   For these reasons, I have a moderately high protein ratio in my diets.  I have found that most people don’t consume enough protein in their diet, or they choose poor quality protein sources.  It always amazes me how many clients gain muscle mass even when consuming as much as 1000 calories below their maintenance levels. This is due to the timing of the macronutrients in the Emerge approach as well as the diet being very nutrient dense.

By now you should know that diets too low in dietary fat will lead to fat storage as well as making it harder to stay in an anabolic environment.  You also know that saturated fat is instantly stored as fat but your body requires essential fatty acids that you can’t produce yourself.  Since you tend not to store these EFA’s as readily, you can fool your body into thinking you are getting plenty of fat.  Therefore, forcing the release of fat stores by consuming a diet rich in EFA’s.

Knowing all of the above, I like to have maintenance level or caloric deficit macronutrient ratios higher in protein with moderate carbohydrates and fats.  These ratios change when following a bulking or higher calorie approach, then I increase the ratio of carbohydrates and lower the protein and fat somewhat.   I lower the fat due to the overall increase in calories I don’t want you to consume too much fat, too much will lead to storage on some level.  I also don’t want you to consume more protein than your body can use, so I lower the ratio so that the protein stays at a high level to build new muscle with little to no waste.  The carbohydrates are higher to take advantage of the extra energy supplied and to use the anabolic effects of insulin to our advantage.

I have had great success with clients using the Emerge ratios.  Most people find they maintain energy levels so there are no peaks and valleys.  They also have muscles that feel full even when on lower calories.  As a matter of fact, I have constructed maintenance level diets for some recreational bodybuilders that know their bodies very well.  Within a week, their muscles feel fuller and tighter and body fat levels dropped.

When I am planning the day’s meals for a client, I look at their requirement for each part of the day.  I have them eat six meals on average, breakfast, mid morning, lunch, mid afternoon, dinner and evening.  The ratio of protein, carbohydrates and fats will change from meal to meal.  Again, these ratios depend on their specific needs at certain times of the day.  First thing in the morning, your metabolic rate is highest, so you need more.  As the day goes on, the carbohydrate need lessens and so on.  These requirements are even more complex on workout days.

The fact that the Emerge approach is so specific to the individual and their specific needs is the reason that it works so well.  This does make the diet rather complex to put together for the average person, however the clients at Emerge don’t have to worry about this since we lay everything out for them in a very simple to follow approach.  As well they are educated about this new lifestyle since that is the only way to maintain it.  Knowledge is the key to success in anything in life especially when it is something as complex and nutrition and the science behind our bodies and how they respond to internal and external changes in diet and training.

If you want the knowledge and power to change your body for life, contact Emerge today and start to Emerge tomorrow.