Kendrik

Alright... I hate to be the new guy that starts more than one thread early in his posting career, buuuuuut... I'm going to anyway.

This post is half a question, half an experience, and half a report of the remorse associated with said experience. I recommend not thinking about the math on that... it doesn't add up.

Anyway, as a relative newcomer to actually taking diet seriously, I have a few simple questions about how consistent a diet needs to be to be effective.

Does a generalized diet/eating plan of, say, 5-6 meals (alternating between decent meals and more snack-like meals for keeping the metabolism running) and a crapton of water work equally well on heavy work out days as well as days that don't allow for gym time or "recovery days"?

For me, personally, I'm not at the point of counting calories or carbs or anything, but I try to avoid "useless" foods that are full of added sugars and stuff. I aim for a rather broad diet (eating from various food groups) and eating food as close to its natural source as possible (less refined flours, more raw vegetables).

Does this sort of base diet work for all days? (I tend to add more protein on workout days... otherwise the lack of protein results in me demanding blood... or... in less graphic terms... being unduly edgy.)

It's been a while since I took my nutrition class in community college (and I didn't retain as much as I would have liked), but I think that the body tries to adjust to work off of whatever s given diet has available. Logically, wouldn't a diet change (initially) cause the body a little bit of trouble? If this is true, how much tolerance for variation in diet does the body really have?

In my experiences, switching diet pretty severely (say, going from a typical middle-class white kid mix of foods to a vegan or all-protein diet) results in a bit of intestinal cramping (and/or explosive diarrhea). Once the change starts to take effect, the system seems to settle down and function more normally.

Now, to continue this wall of text, my observations from my latest (and seemingly ideal for my general purposes) diet plan. I was previously eating two large meals a day (lunch and dinner), and that was it for food intake. Food quality and nature would vary, but I naturally go for as much meat as I can get when possible. As of a week or so ago (upon reading up on nutrition here and other places), I decided to rework my diet to the one mentioned formerly (5-6 lesser meals a day and a ton of water). I didn't suffer any serious intestinal cramping, but, nearly immediately, I found that I wasn't pooping much. I would still poop a couple times a day, but the volume was very small in contrast what was common before.

I found this a bit puzzling, and I was beginning to wonder if I needed to take a laxative to get back up to speed in poop output. Removing this from consideration, I found myself feeling great between the increased water, smaller (but more frequent) meals, and heavy exercise. The only other note is that it seemed like the more water I drank, the more water I needed (and spending minutes upon minutes a day actually urinating was a bit annoying at first).

Today (well... technically... yesterday... and part of the day before)... I ate hardly anything worthwhile. Most everything I ate was simply crap (like donuts, and crappy pizza)... I didn't get nearly enough water... at least in contrast to what I had been drinking.

Still, on the whole, I felt functional. That is until I went to work (naturally, the time for the body to decide to stop working nicely is when I'm on the clock and need to get things done). I work retail right now, and didn't start until the evening (post-dinner).

That's when it hit.

My stomach, apparently, was pissed at the crap I had been feeding it over the last 24 hours or so. Not long into my shift, extreme stomach cramping started to take place. The second I hit the toilet, explosive diarrhea. Half an hour later, the cramping hit again (possibly even worse than before). I suddenly missed the limited volume poop of the previous week.

I suppose it's possible, in theory, that I managed to get hit with food poisoning, but it seems highly unlikely in this case. Really, my best guess is that my body was not taking kindly to the crap I had eaten. My direct inference is that my body had already adjusted to the superior foods (and eating plan)... so that this recent bit of eating caused a system panic (I used to be a server admin... does it show?) and the purging of everything in my system. Add to that that I felt like crap after eating the crappy food anyway, and the superior dieting has become very appealing today.

So, somewhere in this wall of text were some legitimate questions and some legitimate observations. For the "too long; didn't read" crowd, the important things were these: "Eat smart, and don't go back," and "How much fluctuation within a diet can most bodies reasonably tolerate?"

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-Kenny
Currently studying BJJ.