Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

meal per day consisting of roughly 85 grams of protein as opposed to the same amount of protein spread across meals and more hours.
    We share the science for a few reasons. First, we want you to be able to eat more protein. Guys love eating, and guys really love eating more protein. But you need to know that there is no drawback to eating more than 30 grams and no reason to create some imaginary cutoff. In fact, there might be a great benefit in pushing the limited findings of what our favorite scientists might recommend.
    As for the exact number? Don’t worry—we’ve done enough experiments to know what will work for your body, on this plan, with our diet and exercise design. And we will share that with you starting in chapter 8.

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    REJECT THIS THOUGHT:
    Eating before bed makes you fat.
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    We love Ryan Reynolds. We’ve never met him, but he seems like an awesome guy, a dude who’s got it all figured out. He has a movie career where he gets paid millions of dollars to play himself in every role, and he’s had sex with Scarlett Johansson and Blake Lively. In other words, his life is pretty damn awesome.
    If all of that weren’t enough, Reynolds walks around shredded year-round—a difficult feat for anyone to accomplish.
    Despite all that, he’s not your best guy for nutritional advice, and that’s why we’re calling him out. You see, Mr. Reynolds—whether he realizes it or not—is one of the reasons why guys think it’s bad to eat after seven p.m. When Reynolds dropped to about 5 percent body fat for his supporting role in Blade: Trinity, his body instantly became the new prototype and even earned him a nod for People ’s Most Eligible Bachelor. Good for him. Bad for you.
    Eating late at night is actually one of the best things you can do for your body. For starters, let’s not forget the most basic of laws—and that is the first law of thermogenesis. That is, your weight is dependent on how many calories you eat (energy in) compared to how many calories you burn (energy out). While the foods you eat are very important, calories are still calories. To quote renowned nutritionist Alan Aragon, “Your body doesn’t store fat more readily during the evening than any other point during the day.”
    What’s funny is we’ve known this for a while. All the way back in 1987, Italian researchers compared eating earlier in the day (ten a.m.) to eating later in the day (six p.m.). In that study, there was no difference in weight loss, but fat burning was higher in the people who ate their meals after six P.M .
    Several follow-up studies concluded the same thing—timing doesn’t matter. And then in 2006, researchers from the University of Oregon made this bold statement: eating too many calories causes weight gain regardless of when you eat them. In other words, the timing of your meals doesn’t matter. All that matters is the foods you eat.
    So why not eat more calories at night? It’s easier, and it makes more sense. Do you have more breakfast meetings or more dinner parties? Do you prefer drinks at night or in the morning? Eating at night is an essential component of the social fabric of our society. And living in a world where you can’t eat at night and can’t enjoy food with your friends and family is dumb and restrictive. And it’s a reason why so many people hate dieting.
    So just stop. In our diet, we’re going to encourage that you eat more at night and enjoy. Your body will look better for it, you won’t wake up hungry every morning, and you’ll have less stress planning your day.

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    REJECT THIS THOUGHT:
    Eat your carbs earlier in the day.
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    So if we’re telling you it’s okay to eat at night, we just mean protein, right? Cottage cheese and peanut butter—the old bodybuilder standbys. There’s no possible way it’s okay to eat carbs before bed.
    Right?
    Wrong.
    In fact, eating carbs during a late-night feast might be one of the best ways to blast away your gut. Having carbs at night can cause you to release more growth hormone (GH) when you sleep. You might not know much about GH—yet—but we can tell you that it allows you to build muscle while keeping you lean. Oftentimes antiaging clinics prescribe expensive doses of GH to men looking to keep their edge. But how much better would it be to have the same impact by eating carbs at night? If you believe science and physics, that’s a reality. So much so that when Israeli researchers compared people who ate their