THE OG: Notes on a Balanced Diet
As you'd expect, Vince Gironda had his own ideas about what a balanced diet is
Welcome back to the OG, my long-running series on maverick bodybuilding guru Vince Gironda (that’s the man in my avatar). We’re now considering Vince’s ideas about diet. Last time I talked about the general principles that informed Vince’s approach to eating, including his famous dictum that “bodybuilding is 85% nutrition.” You can read about those general principles here.
In this instalment, I’m going to talk about Vince’s approach to a “balanced diet,” before we get into specific diets for specific purposes, such as his “hormone precursor diet,” otherwise known as the 36-eggs-a-day diet, and his “maximum definition” or steak-and-eggs diet. Because this is a shorter post, this won’t be behind a paywall.
All quotations are from Vince’s 1984 book The Wild Physique.
Vince Gironda agreed with the general nutritional principle, beloved of doctors and armchair specialists alike, that one should keep a “balanced diet.” But Vince felt there was more than one kind of balanced diet. This was so, Vince believed, because the body has different needs at different times. As a result, what’s a balanced diet for a man attempting to build muscle for a bodybuilding show won’t necessarily be a balanced diet for a man who just wants to maintain a healthy weight and avoid putting on fat.
Traditionally, most nutritionists define a balanced diet as eating from the five major food groups each day.
1. Meats, poultry, fish
2. Eggs, milk, and other dairy products such as cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt
3. Grains (breads and cereals)
4. Vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts
5. Fats (oils, butter, margarine)
I agree with this system of eating for good health and in off-season maintenance diets. But this is not the only way to achieve a balanced diet. I feel the body needs certain nutritional elements but not necessarily at each meal. (The Wild Physique, p. 82)
In basic terms, for a balanced diet, man needs protein “for growth, maintenance and repair”; vitamins, minerals and enzymes to power the body’s metabolic processes; and an energy source either in the form of carbohydrates or fats.
In terms of protein, Vince emphasised that animal foods, beginning with eggs, then milk, then meat, are the best sources.
They are more easily converted into muscle in the body because they closely resemble the amino acid structure of human muscle tissue. Other kinds of protein are fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes, but these are incomplete sources, lacking one or more of the essential amino acids, which must be combined with complete sources to make a usable protein. (The Wild Physique, p. 83)
As a general rule for muscle-building, protein supply must be constant to ensure the body has enough to repair and build muscle tissue. For Vince, that meant consuming large quantities of protein at regular intervals, as well as supplements like amino-acid tablets and desiccated-liver tablets, “to flood the tissues with a constant supply of protein.”
Vince took issue with nutritionists who claim as little as one gram of protein is needed per kilo of bodyweight.
According to that theory, a 200-lb. man would need less than 100 grams of protein to gain weight. But I believe that for short periods of time the body can use five or six or even ten times this amount and that training increases the body's need for protein. Most top champs use at least 2-3 grams or more of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. (The Wild Physique, p. 83)
Vince’s preferred energy source for the body—if you didn’t know already—was fats rather than carbohydrates. Vince preferred fats for two reasons: 1) because they sustained blood-sugar levels for longer and burn more slowly as fuel sources; and 2) because burning fat for energy is actually inefficient, and therefore requires more energy input. You must burn fat to burn fat, essentially.
Since we’re talking about fat, that also means cholesterol. Vince was somebody who never believed the anti-cholesterol orthodoxy of his time. In fact, he thought it was totally wrong.
Now to the cholesterol controversy again. Many people get upset when I tell them to eat three dozen raw eggs mixed with cream. "What about cholesterol?" they scream. In fact, hospital experiments with burn victims who were fed three dozen eggs per day showed those people to have a lower cholesterol count than when they were put on a low-fat diet. I personally have yet to find a single bodybuilder in normal good health who eats large quantities of eggs and has an elevated cholesterol count because of it. (The Wild Physique, p. 83)
Vince described the so-called “lipid-heart hypothesis”—the theory that cholesterol consumption raises blood cholesterol levels, which in turn causes heart disease—a “gross oversimplification.”
A little-known fact is that the body itself manufactures more cholesterol than your could possibly eat. The body reduces cholesterol output or produces more depending on how much of it you ingest. (The Wild Physique, p. 83)
This is absolutely true.
Although Vince preferred to make fats the primary energy source for his diets, he nevertheless believed you shouldn’t go without carbohydrates. According to Vince, there were a number of reasons for this. First of all, he said, carbohydrates are important for maintaining the body’s correct acid-alkaline balance, which is all the more necessary if you’re eating large quantities of protein (i.e. acid). Carbohydrates are also important to maintain muscular fullness—muscular stores of carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen, draw in five times their weight in water—and help with recovery after exercise. When dieting to lose weight, for instance using the steak-and-eggs diet, Vince recommended consuming a meal of carbs every 72-96 hours, without protein, to restore muscle glycogen. This also has the effect of flushing water from the tissues. “People often report a lower bodyweight of several pounds when using this method,” Vince said.