I've drastically cut my carbohydrate intake. Breakfast is usually oatmeal with two ham egg cheese McMuffins or two steak egg cheese McMuffins at McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts. The oatmeal is made with with water no milk. Milk has carbs. The muffins are low glycemic and don't induce massive amounts of insulin to pour into my blood stream, so I don't suffer from the resulting hypoglycemic sugar comas.
Snacks between lunch and dinner are low glycemic as well. I like to eat apples or oatmeal bars high in fiber like Clif bars. Again the only purpose is to thwart the huge sugar rushes that you would get from eating candy bars or pastries. The Clif bars are only 40 or 50 cents more expensive than a Snickers bar.
Lunch involves salads or vegetables with significant amounts of animal proteins like beef or chicken. After the salad, I'll eat one chocolate chip cookie to fool my body into thinking I just ate a huge bowl of carbohydrates when all I did was stuff my gut with fibers. The cookie induces a serotonin drip into my brain in a slow and steady manner.
Again more snacks before dinner.
Dinner involves more animal proteins. Again I stuff my gut with significant fiber intake in the form of vegetables. I only do this because my job requires that I stay awake long hours and I don't want to take in the huge amounts of carbohydrates and have to suffer the resultant sugar crash/coma. But if you want to sleep at night anyways, you might as well stuff your gut with high glycemic foods like pastas or breads and try to induce that sugar coma in your body to make you go to sleep. The resulting influx of insulin into your bloodstream is also supposed to help with the formation of insulin growth hormone when production levels of it are highest when you sleep at night. Again I'll finish the meal off with a cookie or a quarter slice of pie to trick my body into thinking I got my sugar fix.
As an aside, your protein intake would be cut drastically if you didn't do any heavy lifting at the gym, but if you don't work out heavy at the gym then what are you reading this blog for?
So how does this relate to strength training?
No sugar comas/crashes means more muscle growth. When you go into a sugar coma, your body is literally eating itself away to fuel your brain. When you eat that cookie or candy bar, your brain triggers a serotonin drip and a state of euphoria. After ten minutes when your body has created a huge influx of insulin into your bloodstream to shuttle all that excess sugar into your muscles in the form of glycogen, and when those fill up the insulin begins to shuttle the excess sugar into your body's fat deposits in the form of fat.
The problem with that is all the sugar is taken out of your bloodstream and now your brain is requiring a fuel source but there's no sugar in your bloodstream so it triggers hunger pains and starts eating away at your muscles to use the glycogen stored in them. Your body is literally eating itself to fuel your brain that means you're losing muscle and consequently you will lose strength.
With the adoption of a low glycemic high fiber diet, I stay alert more throughout the day and into the night. Also it seems, and this is purely anecdotal, my strength gains have been more consistent.
Of course, it took about two months of eating like this to get used to it. At first I felt kind of weak because I had programmed my body into thinking it needed those sugar crashes to survive pretty much all my life, and it was like weening an addict off his drug when I starting eating low glycemic foods. Now I've gotten used to the more stabilized lower blood sugar levels and I feel more alert and stronger.
Finally, pre-workout I'm doing Clif bars. They sell them at the gym, and they digest slowly so I have stable blood sugar levels while I'm working out but still give me enough energy to complete the training session.
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