Foods don't have powers (they have numbers)

“My body responds well to sushi.”

The guy who told me this trains at my gym. He's cutting, in that annoying stage where hunger bites and energy runs low. He had a free meal over the weekend, sushi, and the next day he showed up at the gym with a huge pump. He was convinced he had found a secret.

And I get the confusion, because I've said similar things myself.

“When I ate oats, I performed better”

A few days later, another man told me a different version of the same idea. Back when he was more disciplined, he ate oats and egg whites for breakfast and performed better in training. Now he has a piece of fruit and a yogurt, and training doesn't feel the same. To him, the explanation was the oats.

This man knew a lot of things. He debated training methods, the right number of meals, all those details. But ask him how much he eats per day and how much he needs to eat for his goal, and he doesn't know. And that's where the whole thing falls apart.

What happened, explained without magic

Weeks in a deficit leave your glycogen stores low (glycogen is energy stored inside the muscle). A big sushi dinner brings a lot of calories, a lot of carbs and a lot of salt all at once. The carbs refill those stores, the salt holds water, the muscle sits fuller and gets a bigger pump in the next day's session. That's it. There is no more mystery to it.

If he had eaten pasta with chicken carrying the same numbers, the pump would have been the same.

Same thing with the oats: back then he simply ate quite a bit more across the day. Now he shows up to train with a piece of fruit and a yogurt in the tank. Of course he performed better back then. He had fuel.

Where these beliefs come from

You feel the pump, you feel the performance, you feel the bloating. The calories, the carbs and the salt, those you never see. So the mind grabs whatever it can name, which is the food that happened to be on the plate that day. It was the sushi. It was the oats. And there it is, a belief is born.

The danger is when the belief starts calling the shots. Imagine the guy decided he should eat sushi every day to keep the pump. The retained water would start hiding his definition and he'd drift out of his deficit without noticing. There goes the goal of getting lean.

These beliefs play against you more than for you, and they always grow in the same soil: not knowing the logic behind what you're doing.

More beliefs from the same bag

• “Eating at night makes you fat.” The daily total is what counts, not the clock.
• “Bread bloats me.” Carbs plus salt hold water for a few hours. That's not fat.
• “Fasted training burns more.” You burn the same, with less strength to train.
• “White rice makes you fat, fruit at night is bad.” Same conversation all over again.

(Note: diagnosed intolerances and digestive problems are a different matter. That one belongs to your doctor, not to me.)

A simple test

Think a food does something to you, good or bad? Repeat the effect with different food and the same numbers. Same calories, same carbs, same salt. If you feel the same thing, now you know where the power was. In twenty years of doing this, I haven't seen this test fail.

What to do with all this

Know how much you eat. Weighing your food gives you that answer, and it costs far less effort than it sounds. Then know how much you need: there's a free calculator on this site that does that math in two minutes. Then fill those numbers with food you actually enjoy.

Sushi belongs where it has always belonged: in a free meal every now and then. Just don't ask it for miracles. It's fish and rice, not a wizard.