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Rippetoe's argument is often misunderstood, in fact he has written an article on it:Originally Posted by Neckhammer
Yeah, I basically put little faith in him for either so I have no cognitive dissonance to speak of.
But, I think your coming back to the point of what is your goal? If its strength "at all cost" i.e you are willing to sacrifice other attributes of health well then by all means just eat a fuck ton of food get fat and get strong all at once. There really is no argument that this will produce the most strength.
A Clarification - Mark Rippetoe
The point though is that IF you are a male between the ages of 18-35, who is not already fat, you need to eat a ton of food to do Starting Strength if you want to get the most out of it. As a result of doing so, you will gain some body fat.
Rippetoe's argument is not that everyone should just shovel garbage into their mouth and get unhealthy, fat, and strong. In fact, Rippetoe considers a paleo-type diet the healthiest long-term, and even recommends it to the "huskier" beginners.
Edit: I know many will not read the article, so here are some excerpts:
"Eating correctly may mean 6000 calories/day with a gallon of whole milk, or it may mean 3500 calories/day on a paleo-type
lower carb no-dairy diet, depending on your initial body composition."
"The goal of the program is not to make you fat. The program is for increasing strength and muscle mass. The idea is that you must gain some bodyfat in the process if your bodyfat is low, and that you should lose some bodyfat if it is high. I don’t want you fat, but I don’t care about seeing your abs. If you want to see your abs, fine – worry about that later."
"After the first three or four months, a change will be necessary for most guys that started off skinny. If you have done the program correctly, you will have gained quite a bit of weight, about 60% of it being lean body mass – muscle, tendon, and bone. This means that your bodyfat may have also gone from ~10% to 18-19%. This is fine; it was necessary to produce the LBM increase. But now it’s time to modify the diet to reflect your body’s approach to its limit of fast LBM growth. It obviously can’t go on forever, but it must occur at first to get our goal accomplished. Now, we need to drop the milk down to a half gallon a day for a while, and then perhaps less than that. At the same time, daily caloric intake should drop to about 4000/day, accomplished by cleaning up the carb intake and focusing on dietary quality instead of quantity like you did at first. This will allow your bodyfat levels to drop back to where they need to be, in the range of 15-17%, normal for athletic males in our demographic."
