High Volume and Overeating

Hi,
If I do a super high volume workout (like GVT) prior to stuffing my fat face with dirty foods like pizza and pastry, does that offset the fat gain that would have been caused by binge eating without training before ?
Thanks.

You can’t out-train a shitty diet and there’s nothing magical about when you eat, unfortunately.

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it…

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Not remotely. Unless your cheat is only one pastry and one slice of pizza.

First, because resistance training doesn’t “burn” as many calories as many think. A hard hypertrophy or strength workout will use up, at the most around 600 calories and for most typical sessions it will be closer to 350-500 depending on body weight and exercise volume and intensity.

So right off the bat, unless your cheat is only a small amount of crappy food (which won’t be the case since you mentioned “stuffing your face”) the workout will only account for a very small portion of the added caloric intake.

Depending on your level of “stuffing your face”, it is not hard to reach 3000 - 5000 calories on a cheat meal.

For example, ONE donut provides around 240 calories. ONE slide of cheesecake has around 480 calories, a cheeseburger will have anywhere from 500 to 800 calories, ONE SLICE of pizza provides around 285 calories and a whole pizza will give you over 2000 calories. A medium order of french fries will give you 400-500 calories.

So let’s imagine that you eat a whole pizza, 4 pastries/donuts and a medium order of fries. That would come up to around 3500 calories.

Compare that to the 600 you might burn during your workout and you are still way up.

Also, not to mention that the strength workout will use up mostly muscle glycogen whereas the cheat will containt carbs (which will go into refilling the glycogen you used up) but also lots of fat, which, under the high insulin state provided by the cheat, will be directly stored as body fat while the workout didn’t really use up much fat for fuel.

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I’ll add that when I was working as a personal trainer in commercial gyms, I’d see A LOT of people start to GAIN fat when they started training. Why? Because they thought the training they did compensate for the 2 fast-food meals (or junk) per day they wanted to eat. They started to eat worse than they were previously eating because they thought working out would prevent them from gaining fat It didn’t.

People in general grossly OVERESTIMATE how much calories they burn while training and severely UNDERESTIMATE the calories provided by the dirty food they eat.

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