The Science Behind Nutrition
Hi guys!
Before diving into discussions about “Nutrition”, “Workout” or “Supplements”, we would like you to first understand the fundamental concepts related to our body.
Basically, “bodybuilding” is a science. If you’re getting decent results without a proper plan and/or a workout, well then, good for you! Please continue doing what you do.
However, if you’ve tried everything and nothing worked out for you, we’re here to help.
To lose weight you must first understand that you need to consume less calories (kilocalories) than your BMR (Basal Metabolic rate), and vice-versa if you want to gain weight. That’s all there is to it.
Now, to understand this further, let’s discuss a little about Metabolism.
See, your body is like an engine that needs fuel. That fuel is the food we consume. And that food contains ingredients which our body uses to work. But the fuel is still not energy.
Consuming an energy-containing fuel does not mean it’s ready to use.
It all starts with food, and its metabolically active ingredients:
Fat
Fiber
Long Carbs
Short carbs (Sugar)
Protein
Fat contains 9 calories, carbs and proteins contain 4 calories each and fiber has none. Yet fiber is extremely important in making digested food leave your body and aids in digestion.
Now let’s look at each of these “fuels” in detail:
Your body can extract at least 3 kinds of fuels from the food you ingest:
Fatty acids = Fat
Glucose = Long and short carbs
Amino acids = Protein
Now we know what the fuels are. We now need to know how the body stores different kinds of fuel in different amounts as well as forms inside of it.
Fatty acids
Almost any cell can store fatty acids and can be directly transported into the bloodstream - no conversion is needed. If it turns out that you do not have enough cells to store fatty acids, your body can easily generate special adipocytes which, put together, form the adipose tissue.
Our body can store tens of kilos of fat. Each kilo of fat can power an adult for many days; an average person will carry enough energy to survive for a month and an overweight person carries enough energy to survive for months on end!
But guys, having said that about fat, it is not at all bad for the body. Our body can survive without carbs, but without essential fats your brain would stop working. So never cut down on fats completely. The body requires at least 40 grams of essential fats daily.
Glucose
Glucose is a very small molecule and it easily travels from cell to cell. The motility is very well suited for storage of sugar. Sugars are converted into glycogen. Glycogen is a molecule that consists of lots of smaller glucoses. This size makes it easier to store.
As glycogen sugar is stored in the liver and muscles, both of them can covert glucose into glycogen. The livers can convert glucose back to glycogen, but the muscles cannot. Muscles, though, can use the glycogen directly, if needed, or release it into the blood stream.
What is very notable here is the limited amount of sugars which can be stored. Ingested glucose and small carbohydrates, like “table sugar”, travel nearly directly into the blood stream. While this allows the body to rapidly utilize ingested sugar, the amount of glucose allowable in blood is easily exceeded.
People with average weight would be having 5 gm of glucose at any time in their blood. Levels above 10 grams are considered too high. That means a regular candy-bar has 30 grams of sugar in it, which is too high and poses a great challenge to the body.
When glucose arrives in excess of 10 grams in our body, it releases insulin which instructs the liver and the muscles to absorb glucose from the blood. Furthermore, all parts of your body, which can run on glucose, start doing so and thus the burning of fatty acid is reduced.
Beyond the bloodstream, our body can store few hundreds of grams of glucose. The amount differs with body mass and bodily conditions. The glucose storage can generally be depleted in a single day, making it a very short-term fuel.
Longer carbohydrates cannot be transferred to the bloodstream directly - they must be converted first. This takes some time and, actually it’s a good thing, because it makes sure that your blood is not flooded with glucose, thus preventing insulin spikes (Insulin spikes are bad as they indicate there is no need to burn fat by the body)
Proteins and Amino acids
These are bound throughout our body - either bunched up as protein or freely available. They can be converted into muscles or cells or a lot of other things, which can again be broken down into proteins or even amino acids.
Proteins are broken down into amino acids in the intestine and then are brought to the liver, where they are partly reassembled and partly released into the bloodstream.
Compared to glucose, a lot of protein is available in the body at a time. The blood alone will contain 100 grams of proteins, approx.
Amino acids have many uses as compared to glucose or fatty acids. It would be safe to state that you ARE amino acids. They make up your DNA and mostly everything else that is interesting. It is somewhat revolting that the body actually burns amino acids!
