Maximum Muscle, Minimum Fat: the first annoyance already in the bag

March 11, 2005

In my continuing efforts to make some sort of progress with my health and

fitness, I decided to give Hofmekler a shot, and already, just a few pages

in, there's an internal contradiction.

At the end of the first full paragraph on page 8, he says this:

>To take advantage of this powerful dietary cycle and to avoid metabolic

>decline and muscle breakdown, you should always fully control undereating

>and should never exceed more than 18 hours of undereating.

OK, quite clear. Except that on the last paragraph of the very same page

he contradicts himself:

>Undereating on a daily basis should last for 20 hours followed by four

>hours of nourishment from a main meal.

Never exceed 18 hours, but make it 20 hours on a daily basis? And it's not

like 18 hours is an isolated typo, either. It's repeated on page 10, and

maybe elsewhere too. In fact, on page 10 he muddies the waters even further!

>To be effective, the undereating phase should last between 10 and 16 hours.

He also says one should avoid insulin spikes during undereating periods,

but that

>undereating means minimizing your food consumption to mainly low-glycemic

>fruits and vegetables or their juices.

That sounds like a disaster, and elsewhere he says that after exercise, one

should eat some protein! Not much, though: just

>a small amount.

Since starting to work out again, my need for food has dramatically

increased, so I'd love to concentrate my eating in one part of the day and

reap a metabolic benefit besides, but this is sounding very poorly thought

out -- and poorly edited, too. Any Warrior Dieters care to decipher or

decode or otherwise explain this for me?

And while I'm on the subject, what on earth do you do when you're not at

home for your nightly overeating? I guess rich people can afford to eat a

90,000-calorie restaurant meal, but I sure can't. And besides, what if

you're out to see a movie or something? Do you have to bring a pound of

pemmican along and quietly munch away in the dark? What if it's a really

good movie and you don't want to be distracted by gorging

yourself? (Besides, if my experiments to date and my recent order of a

pemmican sampler from Grassland Beef are any guide, I can't imagine

willingly eating even a gram of pemmican, let alone an entire

overeating-phase meal. Yuck!)

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