Nutrition, Do you still remember your first time? I surely do. It was in a locker room at the gym. Two guys, one slightly muscular and the other pleasantly round. The slightly muscular guy was telling our round friend to “lift weights for size and do cardio for cuts.” What? You perverts were getting aroused until the last line? Broscience,  regardless of how much time has passed or how much contrary information has come out, is still widely accepted, practiced, and acknowledged as truth. So, let’s deflate some of these stupid hot air balloons, shall we? Never, Ever Combine Carbohydrates and Fat within the Same Meal The food combining theory states that you shouldn’t mix carbohydrates and fat intentionally in the same meal. The reasoning behind this is that the insulin spike from the carbohydrates will increase the chances of dietary fat being stored as body fat. In reality, this is a very myopic view of insulin that doesn’t consider the entire meal. I’d never advise a client to purposedly consume a very high-carbohydrate and high-fat meal together, but there’s nothing wrong with having a moderate amount of both at the same time. There’s little, if any, scientific evidence to support the theory, and humans have been combining carbohydrates, fat, and protein together for ages and we turned out all right. (Well, some of us at least. Okay okay. Only a few of us). The vast majority of us who mean business are eating every two to three hours, which means that our nutrients from meal one are still being absorbed when we start to eat meal two. So, the nutrients from our first two meals are acting together anyway, even if we don’t intend on it. A study has been actually conducted looking at a mixed diet versus the food combining theory. Here’s what they stated in their results: 1. Different Foods for Different Goals Bodybuilding is a fanatical sport because everything is done in extremes. So, it only makes sense that we’d eat different foods when we have different objectives, right? Wrong as the day is long. The line of “clean” and “dirty” foods is so blurred that pretty much makes no sense whatsoever. From a physiological standpoint, there’s no difference between “clean” or “dirty” eating, provided that your macronutrients are kept in line with your goals. It’s why the cookie-cutter bodybuilding coach that advocates one diet to rule them all always fails. You can take five different dieting bodybuilders and give them five radically different diets and they can all get shredded. It’s all about hitting your macronutrient numbers. Mind you I’m not advocating that one should eat a pizza everyday to get ready for the beach – far from it. Let’s say that the protein, carbohydrate, and fat amounts in the pizza fit in with your daily allotment. You eat the pizza, and then you’re done. What about the rest of the day? You won’t have much room left for more fat or carbs; thus, you’ll end up wrecking your physique. Now, I brought up pizza to serve as an example. You can freely eat white rice, white bread, bagels, and pasta daily, as long as they fit into your daily macronutrient numbers. The whole “bulking/cutting foods” idea is plain retarted. I won’t sugarcoat it… 2. Water Depletion Will Make Your Midsection Leaner The most common type of broscience can be found in the days leading up to a bodybuilding event, or even a big day at the beach. Individuals looking to tighten up their midsection will often progressively drop water, while raising carbohydrates throughout the week, until they get to the day of their event when they’d have zero water and ultra-high amounts of carbohydrates. The fact of the matter is that water is stored in two different areas in the body – intracellularly and extracellularly (inside the muscle and underneath the skin, respectively). The problem with following the cool kids is that the body strictly regulates the intracellular to extracellular balance at a seventy to thirty ratio. Try to remember this forever. If you pull water out of one area (like people try to do with extracellular water), it’ll also be pulled out of the other area to keep that seventy to thirty balance. Said ratios don’t change; you just get flatter. That is until you have your post-event binge meal and take in copious amounts of carbohydrates and water. You end up looking better the day after the event that you’ve trained and dieted for during the previous sixteen weeks. Sounds painfully familiar? I believe so. 3. Sodium causes water retention  This goes hand-in-hand with our previous myth. For some reason, physique athletes are so afraid of what they think sodium might do to their bodies that they put themselves on a path of destruction, literally. Now, it’s true that sodium does make your body hold water. I’m not denying that fact. But that’s a rather simplistic view. Your sodium balance affects both fluid and blood volume. Why does that matter? Well, aren’t we after a harder and tighter look that depends on both fluid and blood volume? Like the water ratio we mentioned above, the body holds on to its normal range of sodium very strictly for survival. Your kidneys will either increase or decrease their sodium output depending on your intake. A Harvard study showed what happens when sodium is restricted over the course of six days. For those who always scream that research studies don’t apply to bodybuilders, six days is the typical amount of time that athletes manipulate their intake for a contest or event, on average. In the aforementioned study, sodium intake was eliminated, but the sodium in the subject’s blood stayed the same. By the sixth day, the body had nearly stopped getting rid of sodium. What does this mean? All the sodium manipulations that you did the previous week did nothing! All it did was raise the hormone aldosterone, which causes increased water retention and