Eat to grow?

B

berserkerzx

New Member
Hi all, I was pondering, is it true that to grow bigger, one must consume more calories? If thats true, can i see some scientific backing about it? or an article about it would be great too, cause i have a really hard time believing that and i don't know why. My subconscious says thats not true, so i know i might sound like a dick. but bear with me and help me out?

Thanks in advance guys and girls :)
 
I've never actually seen any conclusive scientific study backing the notion that if you don't eat at a surplus, you can't gain any muscle.

That doesn't mean it isn't true though. Logically, high load weight lifting takes an eminence toll on the body, and if one consumes insufficient calories, it effects recovery. The thing is, I don't know of any conclusive evidence that points to how many calories one must consume to gain muscle mass while lifting. And all the experts point to a bulk as necessary. Maybe Tot or Grunt or LOL can spit us some science.
 
How about basic physics? Energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed.

Not sure how you expect to create mass out of nothing. If you want to add mass to your body, you pretty obviously need a calorie surplus, otherwise what is your body going to build it out of?
 
berserkerzx said:
Hi all, I was pondering, is it true that to grow bigger, one must consume more calories? If thats true, can i see some scientific backing about it? or an article about it would be great too, cause i have a really hard time believing that and i don't know why. My subconscious says thats not true, so i know i might sound like a dick. but bear with me and help me out?

Thanks in advance guys and girls :)
Click to expand...

See Totentanz' post, and consult the laws of thermodynamics.
 
I see, so what about the fat in our body? Can it be used to create mass? How does Thermodynamics play a part in mass gaining? i look it up on wikipedia, but i am confused >.<

Totentanz said:
How about basic physics? Energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed.

Not sure how you expect to create mass out of nothing. If you want to add mass to your body, you pretty obviously need a calorie surplus, otherwise what is your body going to build it out of?
Click to expand...
 
berserkerzx said:
I see, so what about the fat in our body? Can it be used to create mass? How does Thermodynamics play a part in mass gaining? i look it up on wikipedia, but i am confused >.<
Click to expand...

At the most basic level everything you eat is either oxidized and used for energy, or converted to a storage medium. Your body has stores of all three macros: fat, carbs, and protein. Thermodynamics as it applies here is simple: neither energy nor matter can be created from nothing or destroyed (turned into nothing), only converted from one form to another. Again, on the most basic level, the processes of oxidation and storage comes down to the breaking of atomic bonds and the formation of new ones. Therefore to 'build' muscle you have to have an excess of material to work with, which is most commonly represented by a calorie surplus over your maintenance calories and whatever you burn due to activity level. That excess represents raw material which your body can use to build tissue to adapt to training, and you can't build tissue without it. It would be like trying to build a house without enough bricks, wood, or nails.
 
Fat cannot be turned into muscle.

To build muscle requires energy. The body makes energy from food + oxygen + water. No food, no energy. No food, no mass.
 
Hello,
The actual number of calories required to ensure growth is an unknown number. Most people say around 300-500 calories on top of your maintinence where as mike mentzer said it can be 16 calories over maintinence ( see hs book, heavy duty training). Your maintinence calories is the amount of calories your body needs on a daily basis to mantain balance (homeostasis). To grow your body needs more calories than your maintinence to form new tissue. Less and you will eventually loose weight, equal to and you will maintain your weight. Imagine a bonfire, if you dont add fuel it will go out, if you add fuel at the same rate the fire is burning then it will stay the same, if you keep addind fuel the fire will get bigger and bigger. Many nutritional text books outline the principles of energy utilisation. Thats as simple as it needs to be, all of the science can be read to understand how the body utilises energy through oxidative process such as those outlined in guyton and hall etc but simply if your maintinence calories equals homeostasis then exces calories equals growth
 
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Your question comes down to how is muscle actually synthesized at the cellular/molecular level? To keep things simple, there are metabolic pathways and cellular signaling mechanisms/cascades that regulate energy transformations and homeostasis in the body as well as tissue turnover (i.e., breakdown/catabolism and synthesis/anabolism). When nutrients (food) are consumed, their very presence in the body cause a number of things to happen, perhaps most importantly is the release of insulin from the pancreas. Insulin can be thought of as kind of a master hormone or "master switch/lever" that, when turned on (more accurately, when the insulin:glucagon concentration in the bloodstream increases) causes food to be stored in the liver, muscles, fat tissue, and other peripheral tissues & organs and causes anabolic/energy-expensive processes to be turned on or "up-regulated" (e.g., mTOR, IGF).

Over the course of a 24-hour period, the human body cycles through periods of anabolism and catabolism based on cellular energy status (ATP:ADP ratio; creatine:phosphocreatine ratio; insulin:glucagon ratio; AMPK phosphorylation; mTOR phosphorylation; etc.). As such, in order to "build muscle," there need to be sufficient growth periods during any discrete period of time. Furthermore, those growth periods need to outweigh the catabolic periods that occur such that over some period of time (be it 24 hours, 48 hours, a week, a month), the net trend in the body is growth/anabolism. In order to keep the body's net growth positive, one needs to over-consume food/calories in order to turn on those anabolic signals/mechanisms/cellular cascades mentioned earlier (insulin, mTOR, IGF, HGH, etc.). Once again, those things can only be turned on when the body "senses" an energy surplus by virtue of increased cellular ATP:ADP ratios, insulin:glucagon ratios in the bloodstream, and other things like that. While it would be nice for our bodies to use stored fat as energy substrates for muscle anabolism, the cellular/metabolic pathways simply do not exist in the human/mammalian (and probably even the whole goddamn eukaryotic) genome that would allow such a thing to occur. So far the next best thing we have is to cycle between anabolic and catabolic periods (e.g., bulking and cutting), or something like Leangains (micro bulk-cut cycles that occur every 24-48 hours coupled with improved insulin sensitivity/nutrient partitioning & optimized/synchronized circadian+feeding rhythms). Some day we'll have more advanced drugs and other genetic interventions to make things easier, but until then, we need extra food to make things work.


Finally, it is technically possible to "force" the body to grow without a calorie surplus / during a minor deficit, but it costs the body greatly (see overtraining syndrome). In essence, the growth stimulus from physical exercise becomes so consistent, so persistent, and so great that the body begins to disassemble proteins from other tissues in order to yield additional amino acids & substrates to assemble/repair damaged muscle tissues. Can you take a guess what the first 3 body systems are that are sacrificed during overtraining? I'll give you a hint, it's what happens during the Female Athlete Triad. Basically the reproductive system, the immune system, and the skeletal system all take a back seat as they aren't, according to the body, directly relevant/absolutely necessary to meet the immediate demands it is facing. If you are overtraining, you don't need to reproduce, you don't need to fight infection, and you don't need your bones (Blood calcium is way more important – without it, your nerves can't fire and you die, so your body leeches it from your bones. This happens all the time anyways, but it becomes accelerated and exaggerated during energy deficits). So yes, you might possibly be able to grow a teensy weensy bit without overeating, but it would be damn hard, and damn stupid.


Anyways, hope this helps! I tried to hit on the main points without going into too much crazy detail. If you're really still interested, just start reading about mTOR, AMPk, cAMP, and other cellular signaling thingies like those. You'll get into a lot of crazy cellular & molecular physiology, but it will give you some interesting insights into how the whole damn system works and how incredibly similar it is across species (and even right down to simple eukaryotic cells!).


TL;DR: Lift, eat, sleep, repeat.
 
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