WEBVTT
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Hi, welcome to the Deficient Vegans Podcast.
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This is episode 24.
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I'm the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan.
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Do you wanna say hi?
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Hi.
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Hi everybody.
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We hope you had a great Halloween.
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We only had a mildly good Halloween because we only got like 20 trick or treaters.
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Yeah.
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All right, so this week our topic is, does meal and protein timing really matter?
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So as we go through this, we're gonna talk about meal timing in general.
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Uh, most commonly controlled by something called intermittent fasting, and whether or not that's maybe worth it or not.
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We'll also talk about protein timing and what makes a difference there.
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Then we're gonna touch on a couple of other macro and supplement timing specifics.
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Just a few that we wanna highlight there.
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And then we have our myth of the week.
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So let's dive right into some information about meal timing.
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So meal timing basically just means, how many times a day do you eat?
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How long do you take between meals?
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Some people take the opportunity to try to structure that and schedule it out a little bit to maybe get some more optimal results or just make it work with their schedule.
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Maybe you have a really tight schedule and you have to schedule in your meals.
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So, intermittent fasting is the main one we're gonna talk about here because it's kind of the most common.
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What intermittent fasting means is basically you take a big chunk of the day and you don't eat.
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So most people fast, uh, the obvious time is when they sleep right?
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You're obviously not eating while you're asleep, so that can be kind of a natural fast.
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Hopefully you're getting about eight hours a day of a fast there.
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So that would be considered an intermittent fast.
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Some people do eat in their sleep.
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Do they?
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How do you pull that off?
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I've seen this.
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I've seen people sleepwalk to the fridge and they eat.
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This is a thing.
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Oh, I guess, yeah, man, that'd be really hard to account for.
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If you were trying to keep track of it.
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You'd be so screwed.
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So I guess if you're just gaining weight and you can't explain it, and food's missing in your fridge, maybe that's how you figure it out.
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Yeah, and I guess if you know you have that problem, you put up a camera by the refrigerator at night and then you can just kind of watch what you eat and put it into your MyFitnessPal or something.
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Yeah.
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Or like lock the fridge with a padlock.
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I don't know.
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Very normal way to deal with that issue, I'm sure.
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Right.
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So normally you would fast, quote unquote, while you're asleep, you wouldn't be eating.
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So if you slept for eight hours and then you ate freely the time you're awake, which is pretty normal, that's what most people do.
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That would maybe be considered like an 8:16 protocol for intermittent fasting, you're fasting for eight hours, you're eating in the 16 hour window.
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And so that's not really to the point where you're considering it like a restricted feeding window because you're just doing the natural thing.
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But some people take it a step further and they'll flip that
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8 eating window.
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So you are fasting for 16 hours and then you're only eating for eight hours of the day.
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Now what that ends up looking like in reality is basically you just skip breakfast, which a lot of people probably do anyway.
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Or dinner.
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So if you don't eat until noon every day, then
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00 PM where you can eat whatever you want.
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And then you had a 16 hour fast each day.
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Yeah, some people do.
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12.
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I've seen two.
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Yeah, some people do.
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One.
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4.
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Yeah.
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4. Some people do one meal a day.
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1 kind of.
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So there's a lot of different ways you can do it.
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So maybe you're wondering like, why would I do that?
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Is it actually worth doing that?
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And really the main and possibly only benefit to an intermittent fasting setup is that it can make it just easier to control your calories.
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You have less time in the day where you are allowing yourself, I guess, to eat food so you might not snack as much for the extra hours, things like that.
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So there are some benefits in general for health, for calorie restriction, um, especially if you're trying to lose weight.
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Obviously it's necessary to lose weight, but intermittent fasting is just a way that you might be able to mentally make it a little easier to do the calorie restriction.
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If you're able to restrict your calories to whatever your goal is without doing intermittent fasting, you probably don't need to mess with it at all.
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Uh, there aren't any real special benefits to, to eating that way.
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What I've done in the past a couple times is like and again, not recommending this and I don't think there's anything special to it, but it just kinda helps to control calories is we've done like a 24 hour fast once a week, so we just don't eat for a day.
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Those are rough days.
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They are rough days.
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I feel like it was a little easier to control calories on the weekly average.
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Plus you get to eat a little more on the days you do eat, so you know you can kind of play with this and see what works for you or don't do fasting at all if it doesn't make sense and you're able to control your calories, just fine.
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That's no problem either.
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So that's meal timing.
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Next I wanna talk about protein timing.
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So there are probably a lot of things you've heard from kind of bro science and just general gym culture around protein timing.
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Some of the common ones are like you have to take in protein as soon as you finish your workout.
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You have to only eat 20 grams of protein in a meal, some things like that.
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So we're gonna cover a couple of those and try to give a little more information about what's real and what's maybe not.
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So first of all, for the amount of protein, which is basically how much protein you would eat in a single meal, um, you may have heard something like your body can't absorb more than like 20 to 30 grams in a meal.
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Um, that's not true.
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Yeah, I've definitely heard that before.
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Yeah.
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So basically you're as far as just absorbing it, your body will eventually use, you know, whatever you take in, in some kind of way.
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And then as far as using the protein for muscle building or preventing muscle loss, which is what, you know, I really care about personally.
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And I think a lot of people who are working out in the gym really care about using the protein for, there was actually a study in 2023 that showed there really isn't an upper limit for the amount of protein you can use in a single meal for the muscle building.
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So the reason for that is basically just the more protein you eat in a meal, the longer it hangs out in your bloodstream, to be available for those muscle growth phases.
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So that's not really something you need to worry about.
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It's gonna come into play definitely for logistical purposes, because if you're trying to eat all of your protein in one meal, for some reason, if you're trying to eat 100 grams, 150 grams in one sitting, uh, that could be pretty difficult.
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I think I can eat 100 grams in one sitting with those rice crispy treats made out of edamame puffs.
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That's true.
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That's a really good point.
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I do it easily too.
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Yeah.
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Now that I'm thinking about this, um, using a lot of your protein desserts, I don't think this would be much of a problem.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And then next is like the number of times you eat protein every day.
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So the number of meals you use to hit your daily protein target.
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You've probably heard a lot of things about this.
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It was a big thing in bodybuilding culture for a long time that you need to eat like six times a day religiously to really make sure your muscles are growing all day long.
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There was a study back in 2020 that compared eating your protein.
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Ah,, 2020, what a good year.
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Eating your total protein target across three meals, versus eating it across six meals.
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Same total protein target for the day, but doing it in three meals versus six meals, they showed there was virtually no difference in any body composition metric that they were able to see.
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So, you definitely don't need to stick to like strictly eating six meals a day to really optimize your muscle growth.
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Ideally it's probably somewhere around three to four, but that's mostly for logistical reasons.
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You can really do whatever works for you.
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If you can do it in two meals, that's probably a little better than doing it in one meal.
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If you can do it in three, that's probably a little better than doing it in two.
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Beyond three is not really anything meaningful as far as benefit, but again, if you have a high protein target, like I try to get about 190 grams a day, so for me, it's easier if I can split that up into four meals of like just roughly 50 grams of protein in each meal.
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But if I was trying to do it in two, I'd have to get like a hundred grams of protein in two different meals.
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What do you qualify as a meal?
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Yeah.
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So for the purposes of protein timing, a meal is when did I ingest some protein?
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So not The Hobbit definition of a meal.
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Right.
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Okay.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Elevensies and second breakfast.
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Yeah.
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And if you do it the Hobbit way, that's fine.
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And you'll probably only have to eat 15 to 20 grams of protein every meal to get it all in through your 11 meals of the day.
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Uh, but you know, some people just don't wanna do that.
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The overarching conclusion here is basically, it doesn't really matter how many meals you do it in, just do whatever works for you.
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And the most important thing is to make sure you're hitting your total protein intake goal for the day.
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So again, if you wanted to do it all in one meal, that would probably work well, it'd probably work a little better for the actual muscle growth if you could do it in two to three meals.
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But beyond three meals, there's not much additional benefit there.
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So do whatever works for you.
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Okay.
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So when you say three meals, is there like a requirement in spacing those where you're saying that's optimal?
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Yeah, so that's another thing that gets discussed a lot is basically the meal timing.
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And that's kind of where the initial idea of six meals a day came in because people wanted to make sure they were getting basically a meal in every four hours, no more than four hours.
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Wow.
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So they were eating all day.
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Yeah, literally.
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I mean like, and really strict bodybuilders, and a lot of 'em still do that.
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They'll like set a midnight alarm or something to get up and have some protein and go back to sleep.
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So they're like Guinea pigs, like you know how Guinea pigs just like eat constantly?
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Interesting.
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I was unaware of this.
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No, that's definitely a thing, and a lot of people do that.
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And if that somehow works for your schedule, uh, that's great.
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And a reason they do that is because they, you know, historically have had really high protein targets.
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Like there were some body builder guys eating 300 grams, 400 grams of protein a day.
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So the only way that's even feasible is to eat like six meals a day.
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But those limits are much higher than most people need, especially if you're not on steroids or something.
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Like that's a whole different ball game really.
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But in general, the time between your meals is not super important for the actual optimization of muscle growth.
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So that same, um, 2023 study that showed there wasn't an upper limit in a single meal is kind of the basis for this too, because again, if you decide that you want to spread your meals out a little more and you're still hitting the same total daily protein, then you're gonna be having more protein per meal.
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And then as far as like protein timing around your workout specifically, a lot of people think that you need to take protein like immediately, directly after your workout to make sure that the muscle growth that you're triggering from your workout is able to use the protein.
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And there's some truth to that, it just doesn't need to be immediately after.
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You just wanna make sure you get some protein in within a couple of hours of your workout.
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Just maybe within two hours of your workout is fine.
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This is especially true if you are working out fasted, because basically there aren't any amino acids above your normal baseline available for your muscle growth there.
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So if you're working out fasted, you might want to consider either a bigger protein dose or a little sooner after your workout, but in general, you don't have to worry about it too much.
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So that's the information for protein.
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I wanna talk a little bit more now about some macro and supplement timing for a couple of little nuances.
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So one is carbohydrate timing around your workouts.
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So you take carbohydrates and your muscles use those for muscle glycogen and depletes those as you do your workout.
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Us lay people just call it carbs.
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Carbs.
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Sugar.
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Yeah, fancy sugar.
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Um, so you want to try to have some carbs before a workout, even if it's just like a small snack, like an apple peanut butter and jelly sandwich, even maybe like a sports drink with some sugar in it.
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What about a bag of Skittles?
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A bag of Skittles would work.
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Sure.
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Fast digesting carbohydrate.
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And that's just to make sure your glycogen stores in your muscle aren't fully depleted before you go to do your workout.
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Now, there are a lot of people who prefer to just work out fasted.
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That's fine.
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Just know that you might not be able to go quite as hard or have quite as long of a workout as you would if you had some carbs beforehand.
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That's what she said.
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That is what she said.
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Also fat timing, since we're talking about macros, we might as well mention fat.
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There isn't really a fat timing per se, but a lot of vitamins are fat soluble.
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So if you have a time of day where maybe you're taking some multivitamins or some supplements or something like that, or even just a big meal, you wanna try to make sure you have some fat with most meals.
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Just because some of those vitamins do need fat to process.
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Which vitamins?
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It's vitamin A, D, E, and K.
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Okay.
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What about iron?
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Iron, I know absorbs better with vitamin C.
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Hmm.
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Next up for supplements is creatine.
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So creatine is included in a lot of pre-workouts, and some people seem to think that you have to take creatine right before a workout, but creatine doesn't have any short term effects.
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It's not like a stimulant or something when you take creatine, it doesn't do anything immediately after you took the creatine.
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It's more of a, we take creatine daily to keep refilling the creatine stores and the muscles.
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And it doesn't really matter when you take it, so I take mine pretty much whenever I remember throughout the day.
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What does Creatine do again?
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So creatine will give extra energy to your cells that you use during a workout.
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So if you take creatine regularly, you'll be able to get one or two extra reps when you do your workout.
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And over time that'll build more muscle because you did a little more volume.
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This can be especially useful for vegans and for women, because your body naturally makes a couple of grams of creatine a day, but you get the rest of it from food.
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Vegans don't get a lot from food because it does mostly come from meat.
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So, creatine supplementation for us can be a little more helpful.
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And then women have been shown to store less creatine in their body in general than men.
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So kind of for the same reason, extra supplementation can be helpful there.
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I don't know if this is true, but I saw a TikTok video the other day, which, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but they were saying that creatine's actually good for brain health.
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Yeah.
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And can, uh, reduce your chances of Alzheimer's disease or something.
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Yeah, I've seen that.
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And you know, for a long time, five grams a day has been kind of the standard for creatine and now it sounds like, they're maybe leaning towards a higher dose for the brain benefits.
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Hmm.
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So some people are trying 10 grams a day.
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I've seen some people doing up to 20 grams a day.
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I don't think there's been enough studies on it to really know how much more if you need to take more to help in general.
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But the links to brain health are pretty strong so far.
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Also, essential amino acids, those can come in a supplement.
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I would just treat this like a small dose of protein because that's effectively what it is.
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It's the amino acids that come in protein, but just broken down into a really simple form.
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And.
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It can be good for like, rounding out your amino acid profile, though, like if you're eating a lot of seitan or something, right?
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Yeah.
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If you're eating seitan, you know, if it's low on lysine, you take an essential amino acid supplement, and it'll have extra lysine in there, so it'll basically make your meal a more of a complete protein.
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So you can use it for that.
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I can't find a single one I like.
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They're always like too sour and uh, it just ruins my whole day.
00:14:04.068 --> 00:14:11.119
Yeah, they do have a lot of crazy flavors for those for some reason it's always like some kind of sour berry or lemonade or rainbow sour candy or.
00:14:11.178 --> 00:14:11.719
Yeah, I'm like.
00:14:12.558 --> 00:14:15.109
Are the amino acids like naturally sour?
00:14:15.168 --> 00:14:18.558
'cause it seems like they really lean into the sour flavors and I just can't do it.
00:14:18.889 --> 00:14:23.818
Yeah, I think I've had one unflavored one, but sometimes when those things say unflavored, it's not true.
00:14:23.879 --> 00:14:27.099
They're very flavored, not additionally flavored, but they taste like shit.
00:14:27.099 --> 00:14:27.278
So.
00:14:27.548 --> 00:14:28.028
That's true.
00:14:29.979 --> 00:14:32.048
The flavor is shit, but they can't write that on the can.
00:14:32.408 --> 00:14:36.938
So if you know of a really good flavored one that's not like overly acidic, let me know.
00:14:36.938 --> 00:14:36.999
Yeah.