Diet

The bodybuilding community spent twenty years repeating that you need two to four grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. It is nonsense. The ideal intake sits somewhere between 0.7 and 1 gram per pound. Past that you get diminishing returns and you burn calorie headroom you need for carbs.

One gram per pound is the working rule for almost everyone. Enhanced lifters have slightly more room, but that margin is not license to chug a tub of whey. It is a tolerance, not a target. Your number does not swing week to week. It is daily, consistent, and non-negotiable — especially during the cutting phase, where every gram you skip is muscle you bled for falling off.

Protein is the first macro because it is the one you cannot fake. Carbs you can time. Fat you can trim. Protein you have to physically eat, every day, for the entire run.

Carbs are not optional if you care about your physique. They are also not a free-for-all. They exist on your plate for one reason: to drive CNS motor-unit recruitment during training. Outside of that window they serve almost nothing on your aesthetic budget.

Eat 200 to 250 grams of carbs pre-workout. Your body converts carbs into glycogen at roughly one hour per 100 grams, so the pre-workout meal lands 2 to 2.5 hours before you lift. Rice. Potatoes. Oats. Food selection barely matters — hit the number, hit the timing.

Front-load carbs on training days. Train in the morning, front-load early, then ride protein for the rest of the day. The reason is simple: insulin uptake from carbohydrates bloats you. You want that bloat to happen while you're under the bar, not six hours later when you're walking into a date. No carbs in the evening before a night out. Shizzled, dry, and sharp for the moments that matter.

Dietary fat collects more myth per gram than any other macronutrient. The story you've been told — that you need a fat surge to drive steroidogenesis — is wildly overstated. Fat aids hormone synthesis, yes, but not to the degree the carnivore crowd screams about. You almost never need to exceed 50 grams in a day. That's the ceiling, not the baseline.

If you're supplementing exogenous testosterone, that number drops further. Your body is no longer synthesizing its own T from cholesterol at any meaningful clip, so the argument for fat collapses entirely.

Here's the math that matters: if you want to make gains in a caloric maintenance state or a deficit, you cannot do it with fat hogging your calorie budget. Every gram of fat is a gram not spent on protein or carbs — the macros that actually build and fuel the physique people see. Cap fat, spend the rest where it moves the needle.

Macros are what show up in the mirror this week. Micronutrients are what keep the scaffolding intact while macros do their work. Both matter. They do not matter equally for what a stranger sees on your face.

Micros are most important during your developmental stages. This is when you are building bone, building tendon, building the tissue you're going to carry for the next seventy years. Vitamin D and vitamin C are the two with the best return on investment at that window — bone health, skin repair, collagen synthesis, immune function.

This is not permission to skip greens and slam a multivitamin in the parking lot. It is a priority order. Hit your macros first, because that is what moves the look. Then layer in vitamin D and C as the two micros worth building a habit around during development.

Acne is not caused by grease on your chin. It is not caused by gluten. Those are the clean-eating myths that drain your twenties. Acne is driven by hormonal instability — specifically acute spikes in IGF-1, the insulin-like growth factor that dairy and sugar bombs flood your system with. Your body hates volatility. The skin reacts.

This is the same principle behind why enhanced lifters inject testosterone daily instead of once a week. Stability is what clears the skin. Peaks and crashes are what break it out. It's also why women break out during puberty and menopause — not because they got dirty, but because the hormonal floor dropped out from under them.

Elimination diets can work. They work when they happen to remove a specific spike for a specific person. Food sensitivity varies. But for most guys with severe acne, the answer is not another round of cutting dairy and praying. The answer is accutane — isotretinoin — which shrinks your sebaceous glands directly. Quit the copes. Stop burning your peak years on elimination diets that were never going to resolve a structural problem. See a dermatologist, run the course, move on with your life.