Bigger Leaner Stronger

Training with lighter weights and higher reps is best for muscle gain.
Training with heavier weights and lower reps is best for muscle gain.
Muscle building is mostly genetic, and how you train doesn’t much matter.

Heavy, lower-rep weightlifting primarily increases muscle strength and results in higher amounts of mechanical tension and muscle damage, but less cellular fatigue.
Lighter, higher-rep weightlifting primarily increases muscle endurance and results in lower amounts of mechanical tension and muscle damage, but more cellular fatigue.

When your body is digesting and absorbing food you’ve eaten, it’s in the postprandial state. This is also called the “fed” state.
Once your body has finished digesting, absorbing, and storing the food eaten, it enters the postabsorptive state. This is also called the “fasted” state.
Your body flips between fed and fasted states every day, storing small amounts of fat after meals, and then burning small amounts when there’s no food energy left.
Without an energy surplus, no amount of insulin or insulin-producing foods can significantly increase body fat levels.
When you restrict your calories to lose fat, especially when you restrict them aggressively, you tend to retain more water.
If all we’re talking about is body weight, then a calorie is very much a calorie, and “clean” calories count just as much as “dirty” ones.
“Clean” or “healthy” foods are more conducive to weight loss than “dirty” or “unhealthy” ones because they’re generally lower in calories and harder to overeat.
Getting the majority of your daily calories from “diet-friendly” foods when dieting for fat loss makes for a much easier, more enjoyable dieting experience.

If you’re trying to lose weight but aren’t, you probably need to eat less or move more.
(And if you’re trying to gain weight but aren’t, you probably just need to eat more.)
We’ll talk more about this, including what you should do when you stop losing weight, later in this book.

If you’re trying to lose weight but aren’t, you probably need to eat less or move more.
If you’re trying to gain weight but aren’t, you probably just need to eat more.

This is why a number of overfeeding studies have confirmed that the only way to cause meaningful weight gain is to eat a large surplus of calories, whether from protein, carbohydrate, or dietary fat.2

Some people say that the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to the human metabolism. They say our bodies are far more complicated than the simple engines that power our refrigerators and cars.
Their arguments can be convincing, too, chock-full of weasel words like entropy, chaos theory, and metabolic advantage, and tangents on the more esoteric aspects of our endocrine system.

What’s actually happening is almost always nothing more than a matter of human error, just like we discussed in chapter seven: accidentally eating too much and “cheating” their progress away.
Water retention is another issue that can throw many dieters for a loop.
When you restrict your calories to lose fat, especially when you do it aggressively, your body tends to retain more water. The reason for this is that calorie restriction increases production of t

Oligosaccharides are molecules that contain several monosaccharides linked together in chain-like structures. Oligos is Greek for “a few,” so a “few sugars.”

The candy bar turns into glucose rather quickly because it contains a large number of quickly digested monosaccharides, whereas the broccoli takes longer because it contains slower-burning oligosaccharides.