The Most Important Nutrition Principle if You Want to Stay In Shape

Your body is in one of two states: growth or atrophy.

When training, trying to lose weight, run faster, whatever your fitness goal - we want the body to be growing.

Most people’s instinctive approach to weight loss because of the bullshit we have been hearing for 50+ years is that we should eat less and do more exercise.

But this almost always makes us feel like complete crap, and whilst we may lose weight we will almost certainly also lose muscle, which is not good at all, and the approach is completely and utterly unsustainable.

It’s unsustainable by nature - we cannot remain in a state of reduced food and increased exercise. Hell, we can’t even remain in a state of reduced food and no exercise. This is why our culture of fad diets exist. They don't work, ever, because it's not possible for them to. Yet people go through the cycles of them, their ‘health kicks' or whatever bollocks way we want to put it. 12 week transformations, 4 week cleanse, blah blah. And it's a waste of time.

As an antidote, I think understanding the relationship between growth and atrophy is the single most useful nutritional principle if you want to get and stay in shape.

If you are looking to lose weight, really what we want you to achieve is losing fat.

When we eat protein it digests into amino acids, which are used for creating almost everything our bodies are made of, including creating muscle. This is called an anabolic state - a state of growth.

When we don’t eat, our body starts to eat itself as it needs energy, and this includes eating muscle. We effectively start wasting away. That sounds dramatic but it is what happens. This is called a catabolic state - a state of atrophy.

There are two key things we can do. Keep protein intake high, and space protein intake out throughout the day by ensuring we don’t go for too long without eating.

Ensuring we keep our protein intake high and space it out throughout the day means we won't waste away, and will over time become more lean and defined.

Combine this with weightlifting and some high intensity cardio and you will keep your physique in check, and feel great too.

Will.