Early last year I woke up one morning fed up and frustrated with the traditional bodybuilding dogma of having to eat at least 6 meals a day. The day in and day out meal preparation, cooking, eating, and cleaning was wearing me down. The constant time spent in the kitchen and at the dinner table started to feel more like a job and less like a privilege… and the whole nutrition aspect of gaining muscle was becoming a massive struggle for me when I had to balance it with university exams, income generation and my social life, all while ensuring I got my workouts in.
Feeling that there must be a better way, I started researching eating strategies that would still get me significant results, but would solve my problem of being a slave to the kitchen. Within two weeks of research, I settled on a brand new eating strategy that completely went against most of what I believed was gospel as far as proper nutrition went for gaining and maintaining muscle.
My New Eating Strategy
The way of eating was called the Warrior Diet, which calls for a 20-hour period of near fasting or very light eating (under 800 calories) and a 4-hour window of mass overeating or feasting. The basic premise behind why the diet was effective came down to a few major benefits, in addition to freeing you from the kitchen all day.
Most importantly, the diet was a way of optimizing hormone function and ensured a solid anabolic window every day at the time just prior to when most muscle growth takes place. This meant that you could take advantage of naturally alternating periods of muscle gaining and fat loss throughout the day. Sounded good to me!
If you’ve never heard of this style of eating, you can read more on my very first post about it where I detail out my entire Warrior Diet meal plan. There are 3 or 4 subsequent updates as well. This post is what you could call a final delayed update. I actually discontinued this site for a year as I was working on a project that was taking up most of my time, but DIDN’T discontinue the Warrior Diet until about 8 months in.
First Post Back
Now that I’ve created some more free time and energy back in my life, I’m going to be working incredibly hard to make this site an awesome resource for you when it comes to physical and psychological development. I’m going to start by giving a debriefing on my final months of the Warrior Diet – the months that I haven’t blogged about yet or told anyone much about, but months that I still receive multiple e-mails every day asking about!
The last update saw me looking at putting this area of my life on autopilot. The diet was simple to follow, I was getting tremendous results, feeling great, and by all measures, the experiment was a total success.
The Decision To Stop
The first worrisome sign showed up about six months into the eating plan. Turns out my testosterone levels had steadily been dropping, and after a few weeks of having extremely low energy levels (I seriously thought I had mono or some other major sickness!) and having absolutely no sex drive, I went and got a full blood panel done, and was told that my testosterone levels were decimated. As my doctor explained it to me and I later researched up on to verify, my levels were somewhere a 65 year old’s average testosterone level should be (multiple tests brought me in around 200+ ng/dl, and never more than 300 ng/dl until I made some major changes).
This led to me having a bit of a theory based on my experiences that short-term, intermittent fasting such as Eat Stop Eat style has a beneficial effect on testosterone and anabolic hormone function. However, when you have an extended period of fasting, the body may respond by cutting down on hormonal production due to the significant stress response placed on the body.
What this means for you, is that over time with the Warrior Diet you MAY see a bit of a reduction in testosterone, leading to less muscle gain over time. I have thought of a few fixes of this problem however, which I’ll lay out in a follow up post.
Ectomorphs, Testosterone, and the Warrior Diet
This theory would apply more for ectomorphs or naturally skinny people like myself, probably because the central nervous system in an ectomorphic body type typically has a lower capacity or threshold for dealing with stressors compared to mesomorphic or endomorphic body types (this is a generalization however, individual differences are pretty significant).
There are a few studies (here’s one) that show short-term fasting can cause a reduction in serum testosterone, but most of the studies I found really aren’t that relevant for a fit, athletic population. Case in point, the study I linked to was looking at the effects of fasting on an obese population. An obese person has an insanely different hormone profile and stuff going on internally than a fit, healthy person, enough so that this study could be argued to be useless for our purposes depending how you look at it.
Personal survival would theoretically trump reproduction in terms of biological survival, and while eating under the Warrior Diet style, your body’s sympathetic nervous system is kicked on high gear ( also known as the fight or flight system). The only study I’ve found that’s looked somewhat into this was one in which a non-lifting population had their testosterone levels studied during the month of Ramadan (here), and there wasn’t a ton of change either way, but the study was done on middle-distance runners so isn’t really that generalized for our purposes either.
Based on the hormonal resources used in fight or flight, let’s just say that running away from a bad ass Sabretooth tiger would overshadow sexy time. This is more of a theory based on what I experienced, as far as I can find there have been no long term studies on this style of eating and hormonal levels in a strength training population. I’m just running off what I noticed personally, so take the above theory critically, and if you have anything to add or dispute about it, I’d love to hear more in the comments.
An alternative explanation is that my body fat dropped below a certain threshold where anabolism is at its peak. You do actually need a little bit of fat on your body for peak anabolic hormone production (in the range of 9-13%).
Because of the Warrior Diet’s super potent ability to burn body fat, especially with my ectomorphic body type, I was absolutely shredded and able to maintain it easily. Nice on the eyes, probably not the best situation for optimal hormone function.
Interestingly, a few months after discontinuing the Warrior Diet, I more than tripled my testosterone levels using a variety of different strategies which I’ll share in some future posts. Even if you don’t have low testosterone, you’ll want to read those posts because you can definitely apply them to begin packing on muscle much more quickly than you are right now, no matter how you’re eating.
Why You Need to Pay Attention to Digestive Stress
The second event that crippled the Warrior Diet for me was when I went through some very stressful things in my life in regards to family situations and relationships. I don’t know about you, but my digestive capacity gets totally destroyed when I’m stressed.
Without any hard weight training or overeating, it’s likely my body would stabilize around 155 or 160 pounds, which means that my digestive tract is designed for someone eating the quantity of food around that weight.
At the time I was sitting around 205 pounds and eating a TON of food. Throw a massive truckload of stress into my life, and my digestive capacity quickly crashed. This meant that I couldn’t absorb or use much of the food I was eating in my feast window, and within a week’s time my energy and mood was way below normal. My reasoning behind this was that I likely wasn’t getting enough nutrients from that window to support my body’s needs.
Feast Meal Time Too Late? Issues!
The final nail in the coffin for my Warrior Diet experiment was when my work schedule went from finishing up relatively early, around 5 or 6 p.m., to where I would sometimes be finishing up around 9 or 10 p.m. If you’ve never tried the Warrior Diet for a few weeks, you won’t really get what I’m talking about, but something magical happens after these meals. Your body almost feels like it’s on fire, your protein synthesis is up, your absorbing food like crazy, and basically your metabolism just races. Within the first hour or two of this meal, sleeping is brutal because you overheat extremely easily.
After getting home, cooking and eating my feast meal, I was getting to bed WAY too late and started to build up a good chunk of sleep debt, which has a pretty significant negative effect on hormones as well.
Benefits For The Natural Lifter
The reason I’ve highlighted hormones so much in this post is that hormone optimization is really the biggest physiologic benefit to the Warrior Diet. This is especially important if you’re a natural lifter like me who doesn’t resort to prohormones or steroids to help your muscle gains. You and I need to take every advantage our body will give us in terms of maximizing testosterone levels, enhancing protein synthesis, and capping out our muscle building capacity.
The problems seep in when you start to affect this hormonal output through other major routes, namely stress, sleep, and meal timing.
That being said, if I had to do it all over again (and I may do it again soon for all of the reasons I tried it in the first place – energy, fat burning, freedom from the kitchen, etc.) there’s a list of main changes I would make to make the Warrior Diet work in spite of the problems I highlighted above.
The next post you can look forward to me dishing up later next week is a 3,000+ word monster on a list of tweaks and fixes to iron out the problems I ran into following the diet long term. Everything from food selection, meal timing, digestion, stress, and sleep control will be covered to ensure you get the best out of the Warrior Diet meal plan should you choose to give it a try or you’re a seasoned WDer.
If you’re not following the Warrior Diet and doing something more traditional with more frequent eating, you’ll definitely want to check out the post as well because there will be some major tips in there that apply to ANY eating strategy.
I know a lot of people are finding my site from Google looking for the Warrior Diet, whereas you might have just stumbled on here and are curious about an alternative way of eating, so let’s get some discussion rolling. Have you tried it? How long for? Did you experience any other problems than the ones I mentioned in the post?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Scott,
Thanks for this write-up, I have been doing the diet for a few months now and have had a few issues like you’ve mentioned. especially with work stress, makes sense what you wrote. Looking forward to next post!
my job makes me stay up wayyy too late man. Trying to get the feast in at like 10 or 1030 pm is messing me up. kind of put the diet on hold until it slows down a bit, but it worked very well for me when I could eat earlier in the day. Sleeping is fine an hour or two after, but right away and I feel sick.
Hey I have been on warrior diet for about 6 months now and its done wonders. I have lost around 10kgs so far. It was a difficult schedule to stick to when I had to fast all day and eat only in the evening but my body responded to it quickly and got adjusted to it. I have been feeling more energetic during the day and have managed to keep a tab on my weight. However, off late I have not been losing more weight even though I have been following the same diet plan. I was on a holiday for about 2 weeks and I was completely off the diet and after I resumed the diet again, so significant weight loss has been observed. Does this mean that my body has become “immune” to the warrior diet? Should I try something else now?
Thank you.
Sounds like you may have been not taking in enough calories, which leads to your metabolism slowing down. The 2 weeks of regular eating again would upregulate your thyroid and metabolic functions and thus you’ll see the weight loss continue when you get back on and calories naturally drop again. Add in a night a week with some extra junk of 2-3,000 calories if weight loss stalls again and see what happens.
iv been on it for a while and like a month later i developed egsama i dont know if it has to do with the warrior diet but thats what happened and thats not something i was born with it came right after being on this diet for a month or so
Scott, I’m interested in learning about the strategies you used to triple your testosterone. I’m a 51 y/o with very low testosterone, and I am concerned about having to go on HRT. Before I do, I want to explore any/all natural alternatives.
Hi Bob, I’ve had several requests for the strategies, I’ve been writing them out and will be releasing a post and probably a short e-book on what I’ve learned complete with blood test results, etc. so keep an eye out for that. Make sure to subscribe to my newsletter (top right corner) or to the blog to get the update when it comes out. It got to the point where my T levels were so bad where my doctor wanted to put me on TRT… and I’m 23 years old… so I felt exactly the same way you did, except with the fear of having to be on the stuff for another 30 years of my life. So there’s a LOT I’ve learned and I can share with you, will keep you posted.