The best weight loss and muscle gain programs
Bulletin No. 53, The Parrillo Performance Program
Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404
I think the basic strength of the Parrillo program, and why it has proven so successful with competitive bodybuilders over the years, is that it is based on solid fundamental principles. The core of the program is our approach to nutrition and training. Think about it. Nutrition and training is really what bodybuilding is all about. The Parrillo nutrition program works so well because it’s based on solid nutrition from healthy bodybuilding foods, not the latest supplement fad. Not only is a proper diet and intense training the best way to attain bodybuilding success, it’s the only way. It just doesn’t matter how many high-tech supplements you take, if you’re not eating right you won’t get very good results.
Getting your diet in order in the first item of business. This is the foundation on which everything else is based. I’ve seen many bodybuilders attain excellent size and conditioning using only a minimal supplement program, but they were eating a lot of muscle building foods. Every week I get calls from young bodybuilders disappointed because the latest miracle supplement they tried just didn’t seem to live up to their hopes. Usually it turns out they weren’t eating a bodybuilding diet. They wonder why adding some supplement to the typical American diet didn’t turn them into competitors.
If you learn one thing from me, remember that food is the foundation of nutrition. Over the last few years a number of very expensive supplements have entered the market and sometimes people get discouraged because they can’t afford to use them. Don’t worry about this. You can achieve great results with just a strict diet and hard training. Many of the top bodybuilders use only a few supplements. Generally, if you spend more effort at eating right and trying to perfect your diet instead of worrying about supplements you’ll be better off. Many supplement programs these days cost $200-$300 per month to follow. A one-time investment in a Parrillo Nutrition Manual will do more for you than a year’s worth of supplements and costs practically nothing in comparison. In terms of results per dollar, the Parrillo Nutrition Manual is the most powerful bodybuilding tool on the planet.
I’ve talked with countless people, in the hundreds if not the thousands, who have jumped around from supplement to supplement trying to find the magic formula that would work for them. Many of these bodybuilders have struggled in the gym for years with only minimal results. When one of these guys calls for advice, and it happens every day, I suggest the following experiment. For one month don’t buy any supplements. Take the money you would normally spend on supplements and buy a Parrillo Nutrition Manual instead. Read it. Follow it without exception, every meal, every day, for a month. See what happens. What have you lost? Nothing really, since the supplements weren’t producing good results anyway. Plus, at the end of the month you still have the Nutrition Manual. Many of these people are absolutely amazed at what they can accomplish in one month. Most people drop a couple of pounds of fat and gain a couple pounds of muscle just by switching onto the diet - and that’s without supplements! Many people see more progress in this one month than they have in the last year. And the key is, you can keep doing it month after month. If you buy $100 worth of supplements and take them, then that’s all you get. After you get on the right diet, you will find that you need fewer supplements and that you get much more benefit from the supplements you do use.
Be sure, when you go on the Parrillo diet you will be making some changes. It’s a major lifestyle modification for most people. It’s a strict program. It’s definitely not for everybody. It’s for people who are willing to work, to make sacrifices, and to do what it takes to look like a bodybuilder. It’s tough, but it works.
Here’s what you do. Start by consuming one gram of complete protein per pound of body weight each day. Next, limit fat to 5-10% of calories consumed. Finally, the remainder of your calories are derived from complex carbohydrates. How many calories should you eat? Start recording your daily weight and write down everything you eat in a nutrition journal. Measure your food portions so you can calculate how many calories you eat in a 
day. Initially don’t make any special effort to gain or lose weight, just concentrate on following the diet strictly. After a week or two of keeping records you’ll see how many calories you eat each day on average. If your body weight doesn’t change during this period this is your “maintenance energy requirement,” the number of calories required to maintain your present body weight. To gain weight, add 300-500 calories a day. To lose weight, eat 300-500 calories a day less or do an extra 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise.
You’ll notice that most of the adjustment in diet composition has to do with carbohydrate intake. Your protein requirement is determined primarily by your body weight. If you add extra calories to gain weight, these are supplied by more complex carbs. Extra carbs seem to work best for gaining lean mass. If you reduce calories to lose fat, you’re still consuming the same amount of protein. The calories are reduced by reducing carbs. The way the diet is structured automatically changes the ratio of protein to carbohydrate in the diet. This has been shown to change the ratio of insulin to glucagon in the blood (1) which in turn has an impact on nutrient partitioning and body weight set point (2). The Parrillo diet was designed with a lot of thought as to using food to manipulate hormones in the body to channel nutrients into certain metabolic pathways. The diet is engineered to channel nutrients toward the lean body compartment while partitioning energy away from fat stores. You don’t have to be a biochemist to get the results, you just have the follow the diet strictly. To the letter.
Let’s talk about a few specifics. What is a “complete” protein? This is a protein source which supplies all of the amino acids, including the ones which cannot be manufactured by the body. These are the so-called “essential” amino acids. Complete proteins supply all of the amino acids you need to build new muscle tissue, making them the best protein choices for bodybuilders. Examples of good low-fat protein sources are egg whites, chicken and turkey breast, and many fishes. These should form the basis of your protein choices.
Complex carbohydrates fall into two general categories: starchy and fibrous. Starchy carbs are things like potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, beans, oatmeal, corn, and peas. Vibrous vegetables are salad greens, broccoli, green beans, carrots, and so on. You should include both starchy and fibrous carbs at each meal. Each meal should be constructed according to the formula described above. Don’t eat just protein at one meal and just carbs at another. Combining protein and carbs and fiber together in the same meal slows the release of glucose into the bloodstream, helping keep insulin levels from getting too high. This helps channel nutrients to muscle instead of fat. When insulin levels are too high, this stimulates fat storage. Be sure to divide your daily allotment of calories roughly evenly into six small meals. This also provides for better insulin control and also continually bathes the muscle in a nutrient rich environment so growth can proceed continuously.
Again, concentrate your effort on following the diet. Spend as much time thinking about groceries as you used to spend trying to decide which supplements to try. Remember, groceries work better than supplements. Your body was made to eat food. That’s what it needs and that’s what works best.
You will find the Parrillo Nutrition Program shifts your metabolism into fat burning mode. Your body uses a certain amount of fat as fuel every day. Fat is used as a prime fuel source while at rest and is also used during cardiovascular exercise. If you consume less fat in your diet than you burn every day, that extra fat must be obtained from body fat stores. This simple sounding concept has caused quite a stir in the metabolism literature recently. Over the last few years it has become clear that what we really care about is not energy balance (calories in versus calories out) but rather fat balance (3,4,5). We want to burn more fat than we eat every day to achieve loss of body fat. Energy balance is not as important as fat balance. Last month I explained the concept of respiratory quotient (RQ). This is a way to determine to composition of the fuel mix the body is burning at a given time. Generally speaking, the body’s energy needs are met by oxidizing a mixture of fat and carbohydrate. In the same way we can define the fuel quotient (FQ). It has been determined that in order for loss of body fat to occur the RQ must be less than FQ. What does this mean? Simply that if you eat less fat than you burn then you’ll lose body fat (3,4,5). It’s that simple. This works because it turns out that under normal conditions your body converts very little (in fact, practically none) protein or carbohydrate into body fat (6). That’s right - almost all body fat is derived directly from dietary fat. Excess dietary carbohydrate has very little tendency to be converted into fat and stored as body fat (6). Over-feeding as much as 500 grams of carbohydrate results in only a couple of grams of fat storage (6). On the other hand, if excess calories in the diet are supplied as fat, they have a very strong tendency to be stored as body fat. In summary, quite a bit of recent research in metabolism has indicated that the fat content of the diet is at least as important, if not more important, than how many calories you eat. As an example, you could eat only a modest number of calories, but if those calories are supplied in a form prone to be stored as fat, then you’ll get fat. Alternatively, if you eat foods which are very difficult for the body to convert into fat, then you can eat a lot of calories without getting fat. Sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. I’ve been saying this for years, and the science has now finally been done to prove it.
The Parrillo diet is specifically designed to channel nutrients to muscle and to draw on stored body fat as a fuel source. This amounts to using nutrition to direct the flow of dietary energy along certain biochemical pathways to achieve the effect of partitioning dietary energy into the lean compartment while simultaneously drawing on fat stores for energy. I think you can see that setting up this sort of hormonal and metabolic environment in the body is inherently more powerful than supplements could be when thrown in on top of a regular diet. Most people don’t know how to use supplements and that’s why they don’t get good results. You have to have the diet in place to form the foundation. This converts the metabolism into muscle-building, fat-burning mode. Changing the metabolism is the first, most important, step. Then the supplements can do their job.
A question I get constantly is what are the most important supplements and which ones should I be using. Some people think they need to use them all to get results. Not true. For building muscle and gaining strength, the most important ones are Creatine and Hi-Protein Powder. This is a powerful combination. Just these two products alone can boost your growth into the stratosphere. Parrillo Hi-Protein Powder is a special formulation including a mixture of casein and whey protein with free form amino acids added to adjust the final amino acid profile to be optimal for muscular growth.
If you’re an ectomorph (naturally skinny person) and want to gain pounds of body weight, use the combination of Pro-Carb and Hi-Protein. These supplements can add quality calories to your diet to help you pack on muscle. I’ve seen guys gain 20 to 30 pounds in six months on this combination. It doesn’t take a complicated program to get results. It takes the right diet and the right supplement. For gaining weight what you need is calories. Keep the fat grams very low to avoid gaining body fat.
For fat loss the best product is CapTri. Be sure to watch your calories. CapTri is a very high calorie product, and 
if you just start pouring it on your regular food it will not make you lose weight. What you have to do is subtract a given number of calories of starchy carbs from your diet and replace those calories with CapTri. This lowers the energetic efficiency of your fuel mix, meaning that more dietary energy is converted to body heat. This loss of dietary energy as body heat means that those calories are not available to fuel activity, so your body is forced to draw more heavily on stored fat as a fuel source. This low-carb approach also reduces insulin levels which further promotes fat loss.
Endurance athletes should try Liver-Amino and Hi-Protein Powder. You might have thought Pro-Carb would be a better choice, but endurance athletes usually get plenty of carbs from their diet. The surprising truth is that many endurance athletes are protein deficient.
These should give you some ideas to get you started. Whether you want to use supplements or not, be sure to stick to the diet. Often times when one of my long-time clients calls in with a problem, it turns out they’ve strayed away from the diet or else are having a hard time eating enough calories to support further growth. This is a perfect time to add in a supplement. We’re always here to provide advise on your nutrition or supplementation program. Just give us a call.
Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404
References
1. Westphal SA, Gannon MC, and Nuttall FQ. Metabolic response to glucose ingested with various amounts of protein. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 52: 267-272, 1990.
2. de Castro JM, Paullin SK, and DeLugas GM. Insulin and glucagon as determinants of body weight set point and microregulation in rats. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 92: 571-579, 1978.
3. Flatt JP. Dietary fat, carbohydrate balance, and weight maintenance: effects of exercise. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 45: 296-306, 1987.
4. Flatt JP. Use and storage of carbohydrate and fat. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 61: 952s-959s, 1995.
5. Swinburn B and Ravussin E. Energy balance or fat balance? Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 57: 766S-771S, 1993.
6. Acheson KJ, Flatt JP, and Jequier E. Glycogen synthesis versus lipogenesis after a 500 gram carbohydrate meal in man. Metabolism 31: 1234-1240, 1982.
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