Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How to Know Exactly How Many Carbs You Should Eat

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

When it comes to building muscle and losing fat, most people “in the know” agree on at least a few things:-A high-protein diet is best.-An energy surplus is necessary for maximizing muscle growth.-An energy deficit is necessary for losing fat. In fact, those fundamentals are so well established both scientifically and anecdotally that they form a litmus test of sorts for diet “gurus” and methodologiesIf someone claims otherwise–that a low-protein diet is optimal or that you don’t have to worry about calories if you “eat clean,” for example–you should ignore everything they say.That may sound harsh but, as you probably know by now, one of the biggest barriers to getting fit is just figuring out who to listen to.Just because someone sounds smart doesn’t mean they know what he’s talking about. A degree doesn’t mean she can get results. A great body doesn’t mean he also has a reliable, universally workable system for getting there.Determining who is and isn’t full of shit can be tricky, but know this:One of the easiest ways to quickly assess the reliability of a self-style fitness expert is their grasp of the the non-negotiable fundamentals of dieting.If someone…-rejects the laws of energy balance…-claims certain foods make you fat by “clogging your hormones”…-rants about how sugar is ruining your life…-pushes other foods as the “keys to weight loss”…-or otherwise claims how a century of metabolic research has it all wrong and he knows better… …he should be defrocked, pilloried, and exiled. He’s a fitness Flat Earther.I don’t care if these misguided people have good intentions, either. If they’re going to step up on the stump and gather a crowd, they now have a responsibility to be well informed. We all have a right to ignorance but not to infect others.As the saying goes, hell is full of good intentions but heaven is full of good works.

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my high quality sports multivitamin Triumph. Now, Triumph was designed for athletes and physically active people who want to optimize their health and fight off stress, fatigue and overtraining. It contains 21 vitamins and minerals, as well as 14 additional ingredients that improve overall health and well-being, enhance physical and mental performance, and help protect against disease. All that is why Triumph has over 500 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average and another 180 plus on my website with a five star average. So if you want to plug any nutritional

holes in your diet, improve your mood and mental and physical performance, and boost your resistance to stress, sickness, and disease, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Triumph today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast to check out and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you. Contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.

All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least. Let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Muscle Life and Legion Athletics. And in this video podcast, we're going to talk carbohydrate, how to determine how many carbs you should be eating. And I have good news in that you probably should be eating a lot more carbs than many people are telling you, which means that you probably should be eating a lot of the foods that you actually like to eat. And the reason for this is simple. Unless you are very overweight and completely sedentary, your body can do a lot of good things with carbs. Carbs serve your body well, whether you are wanting to gain muscle or lose fat or do them at the same time, if that's

possible for you. Of course, if you are new to weightlifting, you can re-comp, you can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. And again, regardless of what you're trying to do, if you're trying to improve your body composition, carbs are your friend, not your enemy. Now, I know that's kind of counterintuitive or even controversial to say these days because so many mainstream so-called gurus and experts have pretty much singled out carbohydrate as public enemy number one. You know, they're saying that no carbohydrate is the reason why so many people are so fat and sick. And if we were just to completely get rid of this macronutrient, the world would be a better place. And that is completely not true. They are

missing the forest for the trees. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They are oversimplifying something to make it more palatable to people, to make it more marketable, to be able to tell people that it's not their fault. It's just this evil boogeyman called the carbohydrate. Now, I don't want to get into all the specifics in this video because I don't want to go on for 30 minutes, but first you should know that no insulin does not make you fat. Yes, it triggers fat storage, but that does not make you fat. Overeating makes you fat. Now, if you want to learn more about that, click on the link up there to check out an article I wrote on it. So the second thing you should know is that so long as protein and caloric intakes are equated, low carb diets do not result in more

fat loss than high carb diets. This has been shown in a number of clinical trials. And at this point, the weight of the evidence is clear. There really shouldn't even be an argument about this anymore. What I mean by that is if you take two people and you have them eat the same amount of calories and the same amount of protein and burn more or less the same amount of calories, they will lose more or less the same amount of fat over time. Of course, they're not going to lose the exact same amount of fat. One of them might lose a little bit more, but it's not going to be statistically significant. Now, if you want to learn more about that, if that is news to you, or if you don't agree, or you want to see the science behind my statements, click the link that is up there and you can read all about it in an article on low carb dieting that I wrote. if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well,

please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay, so how many carbs should you be eating? Let's get to the point here. So if you're trying to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, then you really want to be eating as much carbohydrate as you can for a few reasons. One, a high carb diet results in higher glycogen levels in your body. Glycogen is a form of carbohydrate stored primarily in muscles and liver. And the more glycogen you have in your body. Glycogen is a form of carbohydrates stored primarily in muscles and liver. And the more glycogen you have in your body, the better you're going to be able to perform in

your workouts, the better you're going to be able to recover from your workouts. And those two things alone, of course, result in more progress over time. Another reason why high carb dieting is more conducive to muscle and strength gain is it results in generally higher insulin levels. Insulin is a hormone that shuttles nutrients from your blood into your cells. And research shows that while it isn't anabolic like testosterone, it does have strong anti-catabolic properties, which means that it helps reduce muscle breakdown rates. And at the end of the day, muscle gain, of course, is muscle protein synthesis rates exceeding muscle protein breakdown rates over time. So anything that you can do to raise synthesis rates or reduce breakdown rates

can contribute to muscle gain. Yet another reason is research shows that low carbohydrate dieting combined with a lot of intense exercise results in generally higher cortisol levels. Cortisol is your body's stress hormone. It's a catabolic hormone and it has an inverse relationship with testosterone. So as cortisol levels go up, testosterone levels generally go down. And of course, high cortisol and low testosterone is the exact opposite of what you want for gaining muscle and strength. And all this is why several studies have shown that high carb diets are just better for gaining muscle and strength. And all this is why several studies have shown that high carb diets are just better for gaining muscle and strength. For example, one study conducted by researchers at the University of Rhode Island had two groups of people, one group eating about 226 grams of

carbs per day and the other eating about 353 grams of carbs per day. At the end of the study, what the researchers found is that the higher carb group gained more strength, recovered faster from their workouts, and showed higher levels of muscle protein synthesis. Another study worth looking at was conducted by researchers at McMaster University, and they were comparing low carb to high carb dieting with daily leg workouts. What they found is that people on the low carb diet experience higher rates of protein breakdown and lower rates of protein synthesis, resulting in less overall muscle growth than the higher carb group. So how many carbs should you be eating to gain muscle

and strength as quickly as possible? Well, I recommend that you start with about two grams of carbs per pound of body weight per day. And if you need to increase your calories over time to continue gaining muscle and weight, which you probably will if you're relatively lean and you're looking to lean bulk for an extended period of time then i recommend you focus on increasing your carbs as high as possible now of course there is a point where it's just not feasible to eat any more carbs or it just is it becomes almost painful for me that's around five or six hundred grams a day i just trying to eat more makes me sick, at which point then I will usually start increasing my protein instead if I need to continue increasing calories.

But I recommend you increase your carbs first. Work your carbs up to the point where you no longer can anymore. And if you need to continue increasing your calories, then start increasing your protein intake. Okay, so now how many carbs should you be eating when you want to lose fat? Now, we already talked about why you shouldn't be restricting your carbs to lose fat because it's not going to do anything for you. So long as you are restricting your calories and eating enough protein, how many carbs you eat is not going to impact how much fat you lose. However, it is going to impact your workouts. It's going to impact your body composition. It's going to impact your mood. And a long story short is most people just do

better with more carbs, not less when they're cutting, which is why I recommend you set your carbs like this. So first you want to calculate how many calories that you are going to be eating. Then you want to set your protein intake to around one gram per pound of body weight per day. If you are lean looking to get really lean, I recommend you go a bit higher, 1.2 grams per pound of body weight per day. I recommend that you set your fats around 0.2 to 0.25 grams per day, and that you get the rest of your calories from carbs. And to calculate that, you just need to know that one gram of protein contains about four calories. I know it's a little bit less, but whatever. Functionally speaking, four is fine. One gram

of fat contains about nine calories and one gram of carbohydrate contains about four calories. So then all you have to do, of course, is take your total calories, set your protein, calculate the calories, subtract it out, set your fat, subtract that out, take the calories you have left, divide it by four, and voila, you have your carbs in grams per day. Now, if you don't want to do the math or if that doesn't quite make sense to you, just click the link up here to be taken to an article that has a handy dandy calculator that will just do it for you. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness

podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for

listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my high quality sports multivitamin Triumph. Now Triumph was designed for athletes and physically active people who want to optimize their health and fight off stress, fatigue, and overtraining. It contains 21 vitamins and minerals, as well as 14 additional ingredients that improve overall health and wellbeing, enhance physical and mental performance, and help protect against disease. All that is why Triumph has over 500 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average and another 180 plus

on my website with a five star average. So if you want to plug any nutritional holes in your diet, improve your mood and mental and physical performance and boost your resistance to stress, sickness, and disease, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Triumph today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast to check out and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any

other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now, lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.