Bodybuilding Clean: The avoidance of Fruits and Dairy
Clean eating in the bodybuilding sense deserves its own discussion. Much of its ‘rules’ are adaptations of dogma from the 80’s and 90’s with a healthy dose of contradiction. Many bodybuilders who consider themselves hardcore will avoid (among other things) dairy and fruit, regardless of training season. Why? Nobody really knows, but I’d speculate that fruit & dairy phobia among bodybuilders originated from the pre-contest leaning-out process, which typically involves the reduction of carbohydrate. Milk and fruit are both carb-dominant foods, and are thus prime candidates for reduction or elimination. But still, my example above is speculative. This dogma could just as easily have come about by someone cutting milk and/or fruit out of the diet and experiencing further fat loss from the re-creation of an energy deficit, and declaring those foods barriers to fat loss. Nevertheless, in some pre-contest cases, carbohydrate restriction to extreme degrees is called for, and this nullifies the possibility of including milk & fruit (or any carb source, for that matter), at least cyclically. So, milk and fruit got blamed as bad for all occasions, when their omission only potentially applies to certain aggressively carb-restricted dieting phases.