I rarely talk about the difference between the 60 Day and he Macro Nutrition methods that are so popular in the performance athlete world. The reason I don’t, is because so few of the people I reach are actually in that truly high performance world. I will say, they are often trying to get there, but being there and trying are two different things. And I want to explain why I currently believe that just about every individual needs a corrective change before getting to macro counting. So here we go…
First off – Macros. What the heck are we talking about here. No, this isn’t the first of a long line of boring classes on how governmental policies end up destroying your interest rates. This kind of maco has nothing to do with economics. In nutrition, we look at macro nutrients as simply being a classification for Carbohydrates (carbs – readily turn to sugar), Proteins (building blocks that can also be converted to blood sugar), and Fats (primarily used for hormone synthesis and cellular re-building, but can be burned for energy in the process that many are familiar with as ketosis. Most people are not currently wired to burn fat very well, simply because of the high availability of protein and carbs.
When a diet focuses on macros, it focuses on having a very specific percentage of protein, carbohydrate and fat in the diet. With this highly sensitized, balanced percentage of each macro, athletes have found they can build muscle, train very hard, recover, and still not gain weight. For the sake of my discussion today, the key word in that sentence… is athletes.
What makes an athlete an athlete? The amount of work put in is high. The physical demand on the body is high. The Engine that drives the body is significant ALREADY, and the rest is appropriate as well. This state allows someone to be in a place where fat can be used for energy at a significant rate still, and the overall total burn that one is experiencing is significant based on that engine.
When the individual who is pursuing the “athlete” status has yet to build the engine, this diet can be good for achieving great results in strength and endurance increases, but might leave one stressed out over the difficulty of achieving the correct weight. This is why we teach the 60 Day Diet (Straight 60) as a starting place for anybody who has spent time in the cultural diet. The cultural diet simply means carbohydrate dominated, minimal protein and fat. That is what the world around us is eating.
Leptin is a hormone that drives sensitivity to blood sugar and the body’s ability to respond appropriately to a rise in blood sugar. It moves right along with insulin, but has a greater impact on your ability (now and future) to burn fat for energy, and to feel satiated. If you have a leptin number outside of the range of 2-5 (men closer to that 2 as a target number, and women 3-4 as their target), then your body will have a hard time feeling satiated. You will have a hard time burning fat. As that number drops, then this improves.
I recommend that “athletes” who have a leptin outside of this level should follow the 60 day diet, to perfect this number, and thus move to a macro mentality diet for performance following this period. The “Generality” principle, simply means that there is no weighing and measuring… no counting of calories, no focus on a percentage of the macro nutrients. It is simply a rule based diet of ALLOWED and NOT ALLOWED. This rule based diet drives knowledge and understanding of glycemic loads and through that understanding, will assist somebody pursuing a macro diet in understanding which foods might still have negative impact on their results.
The 60 Day Turnaround Diet is the diet, it is the delivery method, that we have seen incredible results with. Both with athletes as well as with the average American when it comes to activity levels (nobody is average)!
Love to assist your efforts, Be Well and Be Blessed! – Dr. E