Diet

Diet is one of the trickiest and most important components to good powerlifting. If you don't eat enough, you are not going to get very strong - and there are plenty of skinny and weak people who love their 2 visible abs so much, that they will never eat enough to ACTUALLY put on some muscle. But on the flip side, if you don't limit your huge, huge numbers of calories to better food, then you are going to end up a very strong, very fat, piece of shit. Nobody wants to be skinny and weak, but being strong while not being able to move around during normal day-to-day activities isn't great either.

Heres a classic example: this is a powerlifter

And this is that same powerlifter, dieted down. 

Now, given similar strength levels, who wouldn't choose to look like the latter, rather than the former? And the truth is, in that first picture, he's not even carrying THAT much fat, compared to a whole lot of other powerlifters. 

Furthermore, if you look at a lot of the greats in powerlifting AND strongman, they aren't ridiculously fat. Heres a few examples: 

Mariusz Pudzianowski, looking better than most people who (attempt to) bodybuild

Konstaninovs may be HUGE, but he's not fat by any stretch of the imagination

Captain Kirk: when was the last time YOU squatted 1000 for 2 reps? 

Then there's Matt Kroc, Stan Efferding, even Jaime Lewis from Chaos and Pain... the list goes on. And the truth is, theres just no excuse to be a fat piece of shit anymore, just because you train specifically for strength. All these people have become great, while still looking fucking ripped and manly, so if you can't it's just due to a lack of discipline. 

But ANYWAYS, on to the meat of this post, which is my diet history, and my current diet. I have been fucking around with my diet since well before i started lifting. Back when I was a skinnyfat highschooler, who thought running was all i needed to do to get into shape, I started dieting with the most common and most fucking stupid method out there: simple calorie restriction. Now don't get me wrong, if you're morbidly obese, by all means cut calories. it will make a world of difference. But for any relatively normal human being, who is looking to (as all of us are), try and gain a little muscle and trim a little fat, cutting calories with little to no attention paid to macronutrients is just dumb. Back in highschool, I would try and keep my calories to 2000 or (when I was being extra fucking stupid), 1600 a day. But without eating the right foods at these low levels of calories, I was basically hungry all the time, and I would end up eventually breaking and just eating a shitload. And obviously, I didn't lose any weight. 

Flash forward to first year of college, when I was crossfitting. Here, I started a paleo diet, which I loved, and I discovered a secret: if you eat the right stuff, you can eat a LOT of it, and not gain any weight. Fucking awesome. No more starving myself. I ended up putting on some good weight, and with all the crossfitting I was doing, I was relatively cut up. BUT.... then I started powerlifting spring semester... and the diet slowly but surely went out the window. I basically was eating whatever I wanted to. Eventually, I embraced this, and decided it wasn't a bad idea to intentionally gain some weight. My diet basically consisted of as much food as i could eat, with a minimum of a gallon of chocolate milk a day. And I did go up, as I've written about before, about 50 lbs over the course of a year - and MOST of it good weight. But definitely a good amount of fat too. 

So now this is where I'm at: I have a solid base of muscle, with a little higher body fat than I want. So, the plan is to eat well and workout hard, focusing on strength but paying attention to volume/work capacity as well, until the body fat reaches around 10%.  Then, it will be a slow-but-steady climb in weight, while keeping the body fat % the same. And here is how I hope to do it: 

First of all, eat a MOSTLY paleo diet. That means these foods: 

eggs

meat

fish

milk/cheese

veggies

fruits

nuts/seeds

beans

breaded meats

And on workout days, eat as much of those foods as I can, especially Whole Milk in the post-workout feeding frenzy. Then, on days when I don't workout, I will eat slightly less calories (not starving myself, but definitely being at a bit of a caloric deficit), and cut almost all of the carbs - no dairy, no breaded meats, and even a little less fruit than I might normally eat. Basically, on rest days I'm hoping to  get my body working on digesting those fat stores, without stressing it out too much, and on workout days I'm going to try and eat as MUCH healthy food as I can, so that as many of those extra calories as possible can be stored as muscle, with relatively few stored as fat. oh, and one last thing: once a month, on the rest weekend between my 5/3/1 week, and my deload week, I get to cheat to my heart's delight. 3 nights and two days of pure carbohydrate bliss. It'll give me a chance to refuel and rebuild after a hard three weeks, but is still only 2 days out of 28, so it shouldn't make a very big difference. And I'll need the mental break too, I'm sure

Once a month... you will be mine, bitch

So that's the current diet. I'm not sure how it'll work, but I have high hopes as long as I stick to it. If I don't feel like I'm progressing in a month or two, I might have to try something a little stricter, but until then, I will enjoy my milk and breaded meats as long as I can.