![]() ![]() Two Meals a Day Are Ideal. By Dr. Mercola. How many meals a day is ideal? There are many answers to this question, but if you want to optimize your lifespan and decrease your risk for developing chronic degenerative diseases, the answer is becoming very clear. Other less obvious risks are biological changes that result in metabolic dysfunction, subsequent weight gain, and diminished health. In fact, a number of beneficial effects take place when you go for periods of time without eating. Valter Longo,1 director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, where he studies meal timing and calorie restriction, even three meals a day may be too much. As reported by Time Magazine: 2. They often look only at the short- term effects of increasing meal frequency. While your appetite, metabolism, and blood sugar might at first improve, your system will grow accustomed to your new eating schedule after a month or two. When that happens, your body will start expecting and craving food all day long instead of only around midday or dinnertime. More recently, I have refined my views on skipping breakfast. The key to remember is to only eat within a window of six to eight consecutive hours each day, and avoiding food for at least three hours before bedtime. As long as you restrict your eating to this window, you can choose between having breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner, but avoid having both breakfast and dinner. I have recently appreciated that this is another important factor that can help optimize your mitochondrial function and prevent cellular damage from occurring, which I'll review in the next segment. That said, none of this probably applies to normal weight teens or growing children. They likely need three square meals a day unless they're overweight. For kids and teens, the type of food they eat would be a primary consideration. Ideally, all of their meals would revolve around eating REAL FOOD — not processed foods, fast food, and sugary snacks. Drinking plenty of pure water and avoiding sugary beverages is another key consideration. This is due to the way your body produces energy. What is the best workout for an ectomorph? Struggle to add size to that frame? Although it's another obstacle, an ectomorph can achieve their dream physique with hard. Male body types - ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph. How to understand your body type and work your training and diet around it. What is your current training philosophy? I always liked heavy workouts, so I still continue to lift heavy. Regardless of whether I’m bulking or cutting, I still. Many don't realize that your mitochondria are responsible for . Your cells have between 1. When you don't have insulin resistance this energy transfer works quite nicely, but when you are insulin resistant or you eat excessively, dysfunctions tend to emerge. ![]() These excess electrons leak out and wind up prematurely killing the mitochondria, and then wreak further havoc by damaging your cell membranes and contributing to DNA mutations. Simple: resolve your insulin resistance as soon as you can, and do not eat for AT LEAST three hours before you go to sleep. Personally I stop eating around 4 PM or even earlier and typically go to sleep around five to six hours later. This is one of the reasons why I now believe skipping dinner may be an even better strategy than skipping breakfast. Clearly skipping dinner is more difficult to implement from a social perspective, but it might be a superior biological strategy. Obese participants who . ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() All participants, including the control group, received a weight management consultation on how to improve their diet and exercise. Those who ate three meals a day and drank water prior to each meal lost an average of nearly 9. Those who only pre- loaded once a day, or not at all, lost just over 1. In all, 2. 7 percent of the treatment group who pre- loaded with water lost more than five percent of their body weight, compared to just five percent of the control group. This makes logical sense, as thirst is often misinterpreted as hunger. Drinking water before settling down to eat will also make you feel fuller, so overall this strategy could result in eating less. Interestingly, research. So one reason why calorie restriction may lengthen lifespan appears to be due to the positive effect it has on gut microbiota. Earlier research has demonstrated that calorie restriction helps extend the lifespan of animals by improving insulin sensitivity and inhibiting the m. TOR pathway. This was demonstrated in a 2. Research included in that review, and other published studies, indicate that intermittent fasting can help: Limit inflammation, reduce oxidative stress, and cellular damage Improve circulating glucose Reduce blood pressure Improve metabolic efficiency and body composition, including significant reductions in body weight in obese individuals Reduce LDL and total cholesterol levels Prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes, as well as slow its progression Improve immune function,1. Improve pancreatic function Improve insulin and leptin levels and insulin/leptin sensitivity Reproduce some of the cardiovascular benefits associated with physical exercise Protect against cardiovascular disease Modulate levels of dangerous visceral fat Boost mitochondrial energy efficiency Normalize ghrelin levels, known as . Fasting can raise HGH by as much as 1,3. HGH plays an important part in health, fitness, and slowing the aging process. ![]() It's also a fat- burning hormone Lower triglyceride levels and improve other biomarkers of disease Boost production of brain- derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), stimulating the release of new brain cells and triggering brain chemicals that protect against changes associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. For starters, it's a lot easier to comply with, and compliance is everything. The calorie restriction route is also extremely dependent on high quality nutrition — you want to sacrifice calories without sacrificing any important micronutrients — and this can be another hurdle for many who are unfamiliar with nutrition and what actually constitutes a healthy diet. Most people fail to appreciate that there are many intricate biochemical dynamics that occur that are unaccounted for when you just count . As pointed out by Fight Aging: 1. Thus only the mouse evolves a relatively large plasticity of life span in response to food scarcity. Ancel Keys demonstrated this in the mid- 1. Thirty- six young healthy male volunteers were placed on a 2. They also had to walk for about 4. But instead of resulting in continuous weight loss, at 2. The men became obsessed with food to the exclusion of everything else in their life, and when the calorie restriction ended, they all over- reacted. Within a few weeks, they regained all of the lost weight plus about 1. Other studies have come to similar conclusions.
So starvation- type diets may not be ideal for the average person. Your body will tend to shut down various processes in order to survive. For example, by reducing thyroid function, your body will not burn as many calories. On the one hand, calorie restriction promotes beneficial biological changes that tend to extend life; on the other, there are built in mechanisms that when triggered by chronic calorie restriction can trigger other health problems. These are complex issues, and any extreme measure is likely to cause more problems than it solves. The best we can do is come up with some general guidelines that replicate ancestral patterns. In my view, daily intermittent fasting and avoiding eating for a number of hours before bedtime has many advantages over general calorie restriction and other radical diets, while providing many of the same benefits with a minimum of risk. It's important to recognize that, with few exceptions, you cannot burn body fat if you have other fuel available, and if you're supplying your body with carbohydrates every few hours, your body has no need to dive into your fat stores. When you apply intermittent fasting you not only avoid this but also will typically decrease your food costs and increase your health. If you're not insulin resistant, intermittent fasting is not as crucial, but may still be beneficial. If you're among the minority of Americans who do not struggle with insulin resistance, then my general recommendation is to simply avoid eating at least three hours before bedtime. That automatically allows you to . To that, I would add avoiding sitting, engaging in non- exercise movement throughout the day, and getting regular exercise. Exercise will not produce significant weight loss without addressing your diet, but when done in combination it can be significantly beneficial. Bony to Beastly—Ectomorph Weightlifting – Why Skinny Guys Need to Lift a Little Differently(Updated November 2. There are two things we ectomorphs often forget when getting into weightlifting. The first is that when we first start taking it seriously, well, we’re still novices. We can’t exactly be expected to perform lifts that require high degrees of athleticism – athleticism that we don’t necessarily have yet. This is off- putting, because we often desperately want to get bigger without being held up for months with all sorts of posture and mobility work. Luckily, we can develop mobility, strength, stability and power simultaneously with size. But we do need to learn how to move and lift right from the get- go though, otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for building an imbalanced body that looks funky, performs poorly and is vulnerable to injury. The second thing we often forget is that we don’t have the same bone or muscle structures that most bodybuilders and powerlifters have. Most of those guys have highly specialized bodies, accomplished both through decades of training. They’re often born with bodies that suit the lifts they do. Just like the tallest guys are drawn to basketball, weightlifters typically gravitate towards the lifts that they naturally excel at. This means that the guys you’re watching do the bench press are often the worst ones to get your cues from. The lift is very different for them—they’ve got big muscle bellies, short thick bones, stubby limbs and barrel chests. We’ve often got long tendons, long slim bones, long lanky limbs and shallower rib cages. Taking their cues is like asking a 7’2 guy how to dunk a basketball. He may very well say “uh just reach up and put it in.”Overall we’re just longer people. We make better decathletes than shot- putters; better quarterbacks than linebackers. Hardly anything to be upset about—it’s not like thin guys can’t kick ass at athletics and build amazingly powerful bodies. We just need to take a different approach, and it’s not the approach you’d likely see the biggest guys in the gym taking. But if we want to be strong muscular dudes we really do need to lift. Unlike many other body types, we can’t rely on our genetics or everyday physical activities to build us any muscle. We aren’t talking about how bony or burly you are this time, but rather about your bone structure. Some guys are built stockily, some guys are built lankily. Some guys have long arms, some guys have really stubby ones. We can explain why this matters by dipping into the three big lifts a little bit. Obviously these aren’t the only lifts you’d use, but they make for a pretty gnarly foundation when putting together a muscle- building program. Ectomorph Deadlifting. If you’re familiar with physics, you’ll intuitively know that our bone structure defines our lever lengths and affects the range of motion we lift weights through. This stuff plays a huge role in how much we can lift. A guy with gorilla- like arms can easily deadlift weight off the ground. He hardly needs to bend to grab the barbell and doesn’t need to lift the weight back up very high. In physics terms that means he needs to exert a large force, sure, but since the distance travelledisn’t very far, there isn’t much “work” (force x distance) being done. Deadlifts are made even easier by having a short torso, which means there isn’t much spinal stabilization required. Plus, short lever lengths lead to rad leverage. If an alligator- type guy were to attempt a deadlift he’d need to bend down ridiculously low because of his short little arms (also resulting in bad lifting mechanics) and then lift the weight through a huge range of motion—all while stabilizing an incredibly long torso. A huge amount of work is being done, a lot muscle surrounding the spine needs to be present to keep the spine stable, it requires impressive hip mobility, and that man needs to be wickedly strong to overcome really poor leverage. As such the world’s best deadlifters tend to look like Lamar Gant. Gant could deadlift over 6. Let me introduce you to the king of ectomorphs: Most of us ectomorph have much longer torsos though, often leading us to believe that since we have long fragile spines we probably shouldn’t be deadlifting. That’s just asking for disaster, right? It makes sense that we should leave the deadlifting to the short muscular guys with short stable spines – the guys that don’t need to worry about popping a disk. That means building a stable core and packing huge slabs of muscle onto our lower and upper back. This will protect our long and precious spine. And the best lift for developing a bullet- proof back, of course, is the deadlift. It’s kind of tricky. It hardly ever happens. Hell, you can’t even stand up and do a bicep curl without relying on your back for stability. And forget sweeping! That’s why no amount of lower or upper body strength matters in the real world if you can’t transfer that load through your torso. You can’t squat big, deadlift big, overhead press, carry things, play sports, carry your lover around, etc. The short stocky barrel- chested guys have stability in their torso naturally. We need to build it. Many of us start out looking like crooked lollipops when viewed from the side—what with our long narrow bodies bent out of shape by years of postural/weightlifting neglect. Deads’ll fix that right up. Check out how much lower and upper back musculature one of our members, Brett, was able to build after 1. Even Lamar Gant, seemingly a rare breed of ectomorph with a short torso, actually isn’t as atypical as it first seems. He had a severe case of scoliosis growing up, hindering his back development and causing him a lot of problems. He decided to pursue weightlifting in an effort to correct his spinal curvature and strengthen the muscles surrounding his spine. So, far from being a genetic superhero, he entered the weightlifting arena skinny and with a crooked back. His back is still crooked, but it’s now far from fragile: The deadlift isn’t a lift reserved for the naturally strong of back, it’s really quite the opposite. If you assumed that ectomorph deadlifting was a recipe for disaster though don’t worry—I’m not going to make fun of you. Especially since you’re correct. We’ve got some work to do before we can dead like Gant. For powerlifters, who need to follow a strict set of lifting regulations, the deadlift solution is to rock a really really wide stance, bringing their legs outside their arms. The “sumo” deadlift. This allows their torso to remain upright and means they don’t need to work as hard to stabilize it. It also shortens the range of motion and allows them to lift way heavier. Perfect for their sport. The downside is that instead of building up fearsome back strength, they build up fearsome quad strength. Quads are cool, but if you’re already emphasizing squatting movement patterns elsewhere in your program you don’t need a second quad- dominant lift to focus on. It also doesn’t help us accomplish our main goal: a rock solid bulletproof back. Luckily, since we aren’t powerlifters, we have the option of modding the lift by reducing the range of motion. So we take the barbell inside a squat rack, set it up the barbell raised up on the safety bars, and start with rack pulls. This keeps the dead an amazing exercise for building up back strength and stability, while also letting us safely lift heavy enough to stimulate some muscle growth. As you improve your mobility you can lower the bar lower and lower, requiring more and more hip mobility and back stability, until eventually you’re doing a full conventional deadlift—correctly and safely. At that point your long arms become an advantage, and you should be able to hoist some pretty nice numbers. There’s no sense rushing right there though, as building up hip mobility and back strength is far more important than winning the powerlifting competition you aren’t in. Ectomorph Bench Press. When it comes to pressing movements (overhead press, bench press, squat, etc) you want the opposite: a big barrel chest and stubby alligator- arms. Due to great lifting mechanics and a short range of motion, you’d hardly need to lower the weight at all and pressing it back up would be a breeze. Us ectomorphs typically aren’t the most stubtastically built men, and we’re often spotted sporting a long lanky everything. This can make our first time on the bench a really frustrating experience, as the odds are totally stacked against us. We often awkwardly struggle to press tiny amounts of weight while we watch other guys rock it out smoothly and effortlessly. The problem isn’t that we suck at building muscle though—we don’t—the problem is that we’re trying to bang out routines designed by stocky people for stocky people. Lamar Gant, the ectomorph deadlifting king, was also able to break a world record with his bench press despite having the worst possible physique for it. If he can do it we sure as hell can. When it comes to the bench press most powerlifters curve their spine to all hell to shorten the range of motion (like Gant, up above). Since the rules state that the bar needs to touch their torso in order to count, they get a little creative. Instead of bringing the bar down low, they can bring their torso up high. Their belly then meets the bar halfway, keeping their shoulders in a healthy position, improving their leverage and shortening the range of motion. You’ll do better by keeping your back straight and simply stopping when your upper arms reach sufficient depth for optimal muscular development (parallel with the floor). You don’t want to drop it any further than that, as too much rotation in that joint will risk doing damage to it. We’re of the belief that weightlifting should make you stronger, not weaker. Damage done to joints in the process of building bigger muscles doesn’t really fit with that objective. One trick we use is rolling up a towel and putting it on our chests, simulating a larger ribcage.
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