fat. In one study, premenopausal women placed on low fat diets experienced decreased levels of
both non-protein bound estradiol and testosterone (although postmenopausal women didn’t
experience the same deficiency).^1 In another promising study, animals fed diets high in cholesterol
or fish oil experienced increased testosterone production than those fed a low cholesterol diet
or linseed oil.^2
CONTROLLING CATABOLISM (MUSCLE BREAKDOWN)
Obviously, along with promoting muscle growth, you also want to do what you can to keep
it from being broken down by minimizing the production and effects of catabolic hormones,
the most critical of which is cortisone. Much of this is done naturally through the Anabolic
Diet. By increasing fat, you decrease cortisone. A recent animal study found a high fat, high
protein diet in concert with insulin and testosterone treatment doing just that, by reducing the
effects of corticosterone on muscle protein and growth.^3
Along with the biochemical control of cortisone, you’ll also find the Anabolic Diet providing
for psychological control. The wide mood swings and irritability you can get on a carbohydrate-
based diet can also increase cortisone. In fact, psychological stress can be a prime component in its
production. As discussed in the last chapter, the Anabolic Diet can greatly reduce the stress normally
associated with dieting and, thus, much of the psychological source of cortisone production.
Another misconception many people have is that catabolism, or muscle breakdown, is
inevitable during exercise, and that this catabolic activity is necessary for muscle growth. It’s an
old gym legend: “Muscles break down while training and are built up while recovering.” Indeed,
some believe that the more you break down muscle as you exercise, the more you’ll compensate
for it by increasing fiber size when you rest.
Though widely held by bodybuilders, these beliefs are total hogwash. We’ve found that the
muscle is actually trying to synthesize protein for growth as you exercise. The only problem is
that, though the protein synthesis machinery consisting of ribosomes, ribonucleic acid, and the
amino acid pool in the muscle are in place, they don’t have the energy available necessary for
synthesis. Basically, the muscle is synthesizing some protein during exercise, but the catabolic
effect of exercise is overwhelming it.
What we do with the Anabolic Diet is to decrease muscle breakdown while increasing protein
synthesis for muscle growth DURING EXERCISE. This way, by the time you’re finished
exercising, you’ve actually experienced very little breakdown of muscle tissue and actually
PRODUCED MUSCLE TISSUE.
I know this runs against most of what you have heard or believed about exercise, but
hypertrophy, or the enlargement of the cellular components of muscle, has little to do with
catabolism. It is stress or load on the muscle during exercise (the volume and intensity of training)
that is critical to growth.^4 It’s the kind of training, not how much protein you break down, that
causes hypertrophy. Protein breakdown is merely a simple response to training load. And if we
can limit that response, we should get more hypertrophy in the end.
Much of what we need to do involves increasing phosphocreatine in the cell. Phosphocreatine28 CHAPTER 3