Hi!

13 blocks a day actually works out to more calories than that because there is additional fat, carb, and protein in the blocks you eat. For example, nuts also contain some P and C, though we only consider the F in them for Zone purposes. The are about 100 calories, give or take a little in every Zone balanced block of P, C and F. An 11 block day is usually said to contain between 1100-1200 calories. A 13 block day will usually result in 1300 to 1400 calories.

Hi Sue,

Thank you. I stand corrected. I just read the Anti-Aging Zone and sure enough, it says about a 100 calories.

David

For those wanting to build strength and speed I would recommend reading a book by Barry Ross called Underground Secrets to Faster Running. Overtraining can lead to negative results. You don't have to kill yourself to put on muscle mass or gain strength. I've done the zone for over 10 years and have gained all strength and muscle mass I want. Remember, once you get to the bodyfat% you are happy with you need to add extra fat (monounsaturated) for extra calories. Sounds like Alex did several things wrong. He overtrained and didn't add enough calories through extra fat if needed due to the intensity of his workouts. Muscles need time to repair and grow. If you smoke them every day you'll just tear them down.

<div class='NTForums_Quote'>Posted By Brad on 08/17/2008 3:03 AM

There's a strength coach named Mark Rippetoe who advocates the Zone Diet and for those who want to gain weight he suggests adding a gallon of milk a day to the regular zone diet.</div>

I have spoken with Mark Rippetoe (and his partner and one of the contributors to his two best known books, Starting Strength and Practical Programming for Strength -- Glenn Pendlay) via e-mail and over the phone. Both Mark and Glenn are quite knowledgeable about strength training and their theories jibe well with my own -- and I am not exactly out of my element when it comes to strength training having owned a top level gym, being a former national champion powerlifter, being a certified Olympic weightlifting coach (through Coach Mike Burgener) and generally just knowing a hell of a lot about strength training both from coaching and from being in the trenches (in competition I squatted 500 lbs., benched 300 lbs. and deadlifted 480 lbs. at a body weight of only 164 lbs.)

Let me just say this... I like a lot of what is in the Zone, but for a serious athlete either trying to maintain his or her weight or for gaining muscle it just is not enough calories. Think about what Rip is telling people to do who want to gain muscle: he is telling them to do the Zone and then add between 1,400 (skim milk) and 2,400 (whole milk) to their calories per day. I calculated the number of calories that the Zone would tell me to eat based on on my body weight, activity level and body fat percentage... at 170 lbs., 14% bodyfat (and training weights 6 days per week for between 30-60 min and hiking 2 hours every day -- and before anyone tells me this is over-training... I will tell you right now you don't know what you are talking about), the Zone tells me that I should be consuming just less than 2,000 calories per day just to maintain my bodyweight. At my activity level, there is no way that 2,000 calories is enough to even maintain my body weight at that level of activity and certainly insufficient if I want to gain any muscle. Now, if I were to add a gallon of skim milk to that, my daily calorie consumption leaps up to 3,400 calories per day.

Now, according to various calculators (I'll take the one at exrx.net) my daily caloric requirements just to maintain my present body weight at my activity level would be around 3,100 calories per day. Consuming 3,400 calories per day would put me in a caloric surplus of 300 calories per day. Over the course of 7 days, that means an excess of 2,100 calories per week. That is certainly enough of a calorie surplus to add muscle. So the Zone is on the right track for most people, but it far too few calories for people who train several days per week and already have relatively low BF levels. Heck, my BMR is ~1,800 with NO exercise added. The extra 200 calories above BMR level the Zone would tell me to eat would cause me to be in a calorie deficit of 1,100 calories per day -- 7,700 calories per WEEK!!! That means loosing some fat, sure, but it also means losing plenty of muscle.

Rip is definitely on track with Zone + 1 gallon milk if you are training hard and trying to gain muscle mass. Or for that matter, eating within the Zone prescription for food choices and ratios, but just eating a LOT more blocks of food.

Hi Matthew!

Eating numerous additional Zone balanced blocks beyond your protein requirement or adding a gallon of milk daily (this amounts to the same thing as eating a lot of additional balanced blocks) is not the way to go if you want to stay in the Zone. (You won't stay in the Zone doing that.) The way to support you needs as an athlete in the Zone are eat your P requirement for the Zone (that's 19 or 20 blocks with your 147 LBM and you activity level), balance it with an appropriate amount of C and F and for the Zone, and supplement this with additional monounsaturated fat to provide for any additional energy needs. This is what the professional athletes and Olympians in the Zone do. Some athletes in the Zone eat well over 50% of their calories from fat. You can read more about their info in Elite Athletes link found in the top tool bar of the Fitness tab above. In THE ZONE (aka ENTER THE ZONE), the first Zone book Barry Sears wrote, you can read about how he developed his Zone dietary recommendations through his work with athletes 20 years ago.

The BRM calculations you refer to are based on burning carb to produce energy. In the Zone you're burning fat to produce all of your body's energy. This translates to fulfilling you energy needs with fewer calories. The following quote from Barry Sears (pg. 104, The Anti-Inflammation Zone”) addresses this issue:

“One of the more difficult concepts to get across to athletes, coaches, dieticians, and physicians is the differences between burning calories and producing ATP from calories. ATP is the chemical that is required not only for muscle contraction, but also for virtually all of our metabolism. ATP is made on an as-needed basis from either glucose of fat. Your production of ATP is far greater from a calorie of fat than from a calorie of glucose. In the Anti-Inflammation Zone you are primarily burning fat for ATP production as opposed to glucose. This means you are also making all the ATP you need, even though fewer calories are being expended. This is why diabetics, world-class athletes, or just plain normal people require fat fewer calories on the Zone Diet than calculated from the usual metabolic equations. It is because they are producing more ATP from less calories.”

Hi Sue:

In a certain sense you are agreeing with me... the basic caloric recommendations of the Zone are insufficient for athletes who are either trying to maintain their body weight or who are trying to gain body weight. I will certainly look at the section you are telling me to look at on the site regarding athletes in the Zone, since it sounds like what those athletes are doing is consuming additional calories, but doing so with additional fat consumption (as you say, some in excess of 50% of their diets instead of the recommended 30%).

But, respectfully, I do have to take issue with one thing: Caloric requirements are caloric requirements... they don't change based on the type of calories consumed. To say otherwise would defy the laws of thermodynamics. The bottom line is that if you eat more calories than you are burning, you will gain weight over time. If you eat fewer calories than you are burning, you will lose weight over time. If your energy intake and your energy output are in balance over time, you will neither gain nor lose weight. Obviously, the quality of what you consume as well as your activity levels have a lot to do with whether weight gain or loss is fat or muscle, as well as your health and well-being. Indeed, the quality of what you eat can speed up or slow down your metabolism as well as other hormonal effects. But running a marathon burns the same number of calories whether the person running it is fueled by fat or carbohydrates. Squatting 425 lbs. for 3 repetitions burns the same number of calories whether the person doing it is using fat or carbohydrates to fuel the energy for that activity... and my basal metabolic requirements are the same regardless of whether I am using fat or carbohydrates.

It sounds to me (and I will have to read more based on the suggested link on this site you told me to look at) that athletes "in the Zone" have figured this out and chosen to use increased healthy fat intake to make up for the massive quantities of extra calories they need. Obviously fat is more calorie dense than carbohydrates or protein. Also, one must take into account the thermogenic effect of feeding as well -- 25% or so of protein is burned off as heat just from the body digesting it, approximately 10% of so for carbs, and as low as 2% for fat (although some studies find it is similar to carbohydrates). What this means is that if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body is only able to use 75 of those calories and the rest is burned off just processing it, 90 calories for carbs and 98 calories for fat. So, I guess in this sense I agree with you that the amount of calories you consume to meet your BMR will change based on the ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrates consumed. For example, let's say that my BMR is 2,000 calories per day. THIS figure does not change. But the amount of food I would need to consume to meet that BMR would change based on how efficient my body is in processing that food. For the sake of simplicity (and ignoring all the bad health effects of eating calories coming from only one micro-nutrient)... to meet my 2,000 calories BMR, I would need to eat around 2,650 calories of Protein (since 25% of calories in protein are burned off in the digestion), ~2,200 calories of carbohydrates (since 10% are lost due to the TEF) and 2,040 calories of fats.

Even if we assume that you are correct that BMR is based on the amount of carbs it would take to fulfill energy requirements, that means that my requirement of ~3,100 calories per day is really a requirement of ~2,800 calories per day when adjusted for the TEF. So let's break that down: I would require approximately ~150g/day of protein (600 calories). But my body only gets to use 450 of those calories. Using the Zone .75 rule, I would then consume 800 calories of Carbs (720 are used to meet my energy requirements after accounting for the TEF). So, after accounting for the TEF, I have received 1,170 calories to meet my 2,800 calorie requirement. That means I need to eat another 1,630 calories of fat (after accounting for the TEF, it bumps up slightly to around 1,660). So, to meet my daily caloric requirements adjusted for the TEF, I would actually need to eat 3,060 calories (600+800+1,660). That turns out to be pretty darned close to what the calculator would suggest (3,100). That means my diet would be ~20% Protein, ~26% Carbohydrate, and ~54% Fat.

Now, this does jibe with what you were telling me about athlete eating 50% or so of their daily caloric intake from fat... but it ALSO jibe with what I was saying about the caloric requirements being suggested in the Zone diet being massively too small for an athlete trying to maintain his or her body weight (or to increase it). If I decided that I wanted to gain some muscle (let's say instead of competing in the 165 lb. weight class (I dehydrate myself in a sauna to make weight and just prior to weigh-ins then gain the weight back by replacing the fluids after weigh-ins), I decided I wanted to move up to the 181 lb. weight class in the sport of powerlifting), I would need to increase my calories above maintenance. A reasonable amount to move my calories up would be 300 calories per day 3 days per week (on the days I train with heavy weights as opposed to the 3 days per week I train with lighter weights). Accounting for the TEF (assuming I add all the calories from increased fat) this means I am getting an excess of ~880 calories per week. Since a lb. of muscle is 2,500 calories, this means I am consuming enough extra calories theoretically to put on about a lb. of muscle every 3 weeks. In reality it will be slowed than this because it also takes calories to create new muscle -- so realistically, we are probably talking about doubling the length of time it takes to build a lb. of new muscle to 6 weeks. Still, we are talking about adding 9 lbs. of muscle over the course of a year (which, once you are past the couple years of weight training is pretty aggressive to expect). And what would my caloric break-down be on this weight gain diet?

4 days per week I would eat a maintenance diet (which we already calculated above). 3 days per week I would eat 3,360 calories (obviously this number and the ratios change as my lean body mass increases over time) with the following breakdown:

Protein = 600 calories (~18%)
Carbs = 800 calories (~24%)
Fat = 1,960 calories (~58%)

Now, obviously assuming that we are talking about using Zone foods and healthy fats, I would have no problem with a suggestion along these lines for athletes. But the the thing you will notice is that total calories will have to be massively above those recommended in order for an athlete to maintain his or her body weight or to gain body weight.

Like I said, I will definitely check out the "athlete" section and see if what I have arrived at through reasoning jibes with the experience of athletes using the Zone. From what you are telling me... it sounds like it is very similar.

I don't do any weight-lifting. I assume running 50 or more miles per week is a lot of lifting my own body weight. The Zone says to increase fat blocks once maintenance weight is reached. I guess I never reach maintenance weight and instead eat a lot of carbs before every run. Making ATP from fat is interesting but my problem is when my carb levels are so low that there's nothing to keep the Krebs cycle spinning. Once I run out of carb, gluconeogeness kicks in and muscle tissue is being sacrificed to make glucose for the Krebs cycle.

Is that correct or is ATP production from fat occuring without the need for that "carb primer"?

Hi Matthew,

You've achieved great results. When you say "training weights 6 days per week for between 30-60 min and hiking 2 hours every day -- and before anyone tells me this is over-training... I will tell you right now you don't know what you are talking about." Potentially you were referring to my comment on Alex original statement that of "killing" himself in the gym for 30 days and not getting any results.

The way I see it is, if the training at that frequency and intensity doesn't bring ANY positive results I would conclude the work outs resulted in overtraining (could be too little rest, poor diet).

If you are making strength and muscle mass gains, it doesn't constitute overtraining (well, technically it still could, because you may be getting less gains than optimally).

According to Sears you can train harder and more frequently in the Zone, because your recuperation is faster due to the eicosanoid balance in the body (at least that's what I've understood).

In addition, I believe body types will influence, where certain body types with a high % of fast twitch fiber respond more easily to heavy weight training.

I'd love to hear more about your weight training regimen. I'm also wondering if you have ever over trained? What did your work out regimen at the time look like, and how you did you discover that you were indeed over training?

BTW - the most I ever squatted for reps was 2.7 times my body weight.

All the best,

David (with lots to learn still)

you also killed yourself in the gym every day for 30 days straight. thats why people have rest days. you wont build anything and will eventually end up just wasting time if you do not give your body the rest it needs. muscle is not build during an activity but during the rest after an intense muscle stimulating activity. no rest = no repair, no repair = no muscle.

After leaning down quite a bit on Zone diet, I started Starting Strength (on my second week now) both to get bigger and stronger. I've drank as much milk as I can but still haven't drank the whole gallon in one day. Problem is that I feel that I'm gaining more fat, than I am muscle... I'd love to do the zone + extra fat and I'll probably give it a try if I don't like how the milk is affecting my body.

My question is, how is adding fat to the diet not screwing up the zone ratio? the top crossfitters add x5 fat to their diet, meaning that the whole 40-30-30 is no longer in effect... so how does this work?

A little additional fat. say one extra block per meal/snack is acceptable.
But 5x? Fat slows down some the Carb conversion and helps provide satiety.

Javier, you are right in that too much fat causes the ratio to get screwed up. But, some additonal fat (as John stated) is fine. Fat does not have much of an effect on insulin levels.

Hi Javier,

Adding extra mononsaturated fat with the Zone diet isn't going to mess you up if you're training at the level of an elite athlete. When a person keeps an appropriate Zone P/C ratio insulin lowers to a level at which the body burns fat to produce its energy. The increased energy needs of the elite athlete are supplied by the additional mononunsaturated fat. It's not unusual for an elite athlete in the Zone to eat more than 50% of their daily calories from fat.

that makes sense, thanks! so what would you recommend for a guy like me? I'm one of those "skinny-fat" guys that looks weak and not very intimidating, but my mid section is and has always been covered by fat that I just cant get rid of. I'm not even two weeks into SS and I've already decided to stop the crazy diet because I'm definitely getting fatter and not at a 60% muscle - 40% fat ratio described in SS. I love the zone cause I like knowing how much I SHOULD eat. I like limits that way. If i do add a block of fat to my meals, can I expect BF loss and increase in LBM simultaneously?

Javier, adding 1 block of extra fat to a meal really isn't going to make any difference. My recommendation is to eat the protein/ block requirement recommended for you by the Zone body Dat calculator ( find it in the Tools tab here) with the usual amount of fat for Zone balance. This will allow fbank creasing LBM and decreasing stored fat simultaneously. If you are exercising multiple hours daily and you feel a lack of energy, then try increasing dietary monounsaturated fat , a little at a time, keeping it at the amount that fulfills your energy needs and still allows you to lose your excess stored body fat.

alright, much appreciated Sue