It was coming up on noon, and I had just finished up 40 minutes of cardio on this new gadget Nautilus made called the Treadmaster. This machine was a mutant hybrid of a treadmill and a stair-stepper, with independently moving dual treadmills that could also rise up and down in alternate fashion. Unlike many cardio machines that allowed one to slip into a mindless, ‘zoned-out’ state as you simply repeated steps or kept pumping bicycle pedals, you had to pay attention to what your feet were doing or else you could very easily trip up and fall in a most clumsy and embarrassing manner.

I knew because I had done it a couple times while trying to check out some hot chick halfway across the gym. Any time something like this would happen, I heard my wife’s voice ringing in my ears: “That’s what you get!”As I was wiping down the machine’s handles so that the next user wouldn’t catch my cooties, Jeff ambled over. He had just wrapped up a chest workout that had featured far too many exercises and sets, as was his custom. I estimated that he did about three times more sets for chest than he did back. As for legs, that was a tough call, as I had only glimpsed him working his lower body on a couple odd occasions. Maybe he only trained legs on the fourth Tuesday of every month starting with S.

After the perfunctory greeting, he got right to the point, an admirable and time-saving quality I wish more people possessed.”Hey Ron, I was thinking some more about starting a diet. Can I buy you lunch and maybe you could give me a few tips?”I pondered this in my head for about three seconds. My nutrition plans entailed throwing back a whey protein shake as soon as I got to the locker room, taking a shower at home, then sitting down to a couple rubbery sirloin burger patties I had grilled on the old Foreman two days ago, with some raw snap peas for dessert. “Sure. Where we eatin’?” I inquired.”The Chinese buffet just opened up, I’ve been wanting to check that out.”"Fine,” I replied. For about a year since the Applebee’s around the corner had shut down, there had been a sign in the window informing all that a Chinese buffet was coming soon. “Soon” had apparently been a bit ambitious, but the place was now open for business at last.

I had a lot of fond memories regarding Chinese buffets. In my days of bulking up, I would wait until I was good and hungry, then barge in and get my money’s worth with an average of three heaping plates of food. It reminded me of the stand-up act of an obese comedian named John Pinette, who had admittedly torn up some of these places himself.”You go now!” he cried, mocking the irate Chinese owner, “you here four hour! You so big, why you no eat vegetable?” After a few times at the same spot, I had inspired a similar reaction. On a mission to stuff myself with as much protein as possible for $9.99, there were times when I had easily put away a couple pounds of various types of chicken; teriyaki, orange, General Gao, cashew, spicy, and wings. I was now dieting for a contest that was still five months away, so right now I wasn’t about to commit such an act of gluttony. A bit of lean protein and fibrous carbs (raw vegetables) was all I needed.

If I had any twinges of guilt about Jeff springing for lunch, they evaporated as I followed his pimped-out Escalade the half a block to the buffet. This dude had some serious bucks. When the housing market was down, he would buy a couple dozen properties in foreclosure for a fraction of the original asking price. When the market came back, he sold those at a huge profit, and his contracting company also built entire developments of new homes and condos. I was thinking I might even live really large and have a Diet Coke to drink instead of water.We filled up our plates separately, and then sat down to eat. I hated to spoil his lunch, but he had asked for it. It was time to critique his eating habits.”Jeff, look at what you have there. Do you consider that a quality meal?” Puzzled, he glanced at it and shrugged.”Chicken and rice, isn’t that what bodybuilders all eat?” “Saying that all chicken and rice meals are the same is like saying that all trucks are the same; your 80,000-dollar luxury SUV out in the parking lot is the same as a ‘74 Chevy pick-up with body damage, no hubcaps, primer paint, and 500,000 miles on it.” That seemed to pique his interest a bit.

“How did you know what it costs?”"Wild guess,” I deadpanned. “Let me point out what’s not perfect here. For one thing, you shouldn’t even have had a solid meal after your training. You should have had a shake, something that would have digested much faster like Parrillo’s 50/50 Plus Powder^TM or a mix of Optimized Whey^TM and Pro-Carb^TM.”"Right, but I asked you to lunch…” I waved him off.”Yes, and I appreciate it, thanks. But what you need after training is a clean meal with plenty of lean protein and complex carbohydrates. You don’t want a lot of fat in it, because it will slow digestion. On your plate right now you have a couple different types of chicken that have clearly been deep-fried and have as much batter as meat, and also a ton of fried rice. There is a moat of grease around the food.”Jeff scowled at his plate as if to admonish it. How dare this tasty food trick him like this!”Another big problem I see here is that you are combining large amounts of carbs and fats in the same meal.

This is a very bad idea, because both are energy sources and your body only requires so much. The leftover portion will simply be stored as fat.”"Sonofab***h!” he spat, shoving his plate to the corner of the table. “So what am I supposed to eat?” Jeff glared at me, daring me not to retort with anything along the lines of celery sticks and tofu. I gestured to my plate.”I got the only type of chicken here that isn’t either slathered in sugary sauce, fried in batter, or both,” I explained. “These teriyaki sticks have grilled chicken, which is a much leaner way to prepare poultry than frying it. I have some sliced cucumbers from the salad bar. You could get exactly what I have here plus about a cup of plain white rice.” Grumbling, he got up to fill a plate with cleaner food while I started working on mine. When he returned, Jeff seemed a little calmer.”You are what you eat is such a cliché by now that people forget how true it is,” I continued. “Put clean, nutrient-rich food into your body and it will look and perform at peak capacity. Shovel the wrong foods down your gullet all the time and you will look and feel like crap,” I said.”Back in the day, we just ate whatever we wanted. As long as we were big and strong, we didn’t really give it a lot of thought,” Jeff told me.

“I know, but luckily now we know so much more about nutrition and especially the impact it has on your body composition,” I went on. “You can train as hard as you want to, but without the right fuel supporting your training and recovery, you will never see the results that you should. And when it comes to actually stripping off the bodyfat so you can see the muscles you train so hard to have in the first place, there are no two ways about it. You have to eat the right foods at the right times or the fat will never go away.”Over the course of the next half-hour, I went over the importance of eating protein-rich meals every two to three hours, supplementing with shakes or bars when necessary, and limiting complex carbs to the times when they were needed most and utilized best, mainly before and after training. By the end of the meal, Jeff was starting to get a solid grip on how critical nutrition really was in achieving any physique goals, be they muscle gain, fat loss, or both. He was also developing a sense of respect for nutrition that he had been lacking for half a century. We talked about how his eating should support his goals of fat loss, while his son’s would be geared toward gaining lean muscular bodyweight.I ordered a second Diet Coke.

Refills weren’t free at this place, but what the heck? It wasn’t on my dime! I didn’t even feel badly about hardly eating more than one plate of food. Once I was in contest dieting mood, I did my best to stop worrying about wasting food. If I was at a kid’s birthday party and there were a couple slices of cold pizza at the end destined for the trash barrel if they weren’t eaten, I no longer felt obliged to consume them out of respect for those starving kids in China my mom used to tell me about all the time. I could even eat at an all-you-can eat buffet and leave before my stomach was so full that breathing was a struggle. I was on my way to getting shredded, and Jeff was on his way to losing the big belly that he had been carrying for what would have been at least ten full terms had it been a baby. As I left, I remembered that I had meant to talk to Jeff about some profanity I had seen on his son’s MySpace profile, which I had read when my daughter accidentally left it up on her computer screen. That could wait for another day. Jeff had enough shocking information to digest for now.

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