Cornflakes and Ice Cream along with GOMAD, are they a NO NO?

[Hombre]

For a long time I haven't read that epic thread on bb.com until tomorrow where yesterday's skinny guys posted their photos of progress and I have seen a post from jfindon, a truly ectomorph that weighted 125 lbs in 2007, and the last time I saw his posts in November 2008 he was like 190 lbs but for now he've got already 220 lbs. He has always been eating like a beast (though taking half in form of shakes), as I recall in November 2008 he wrote he was getting at least 5000 kcals a day. Now he stated he consumed 6200 kcals a day. Though he is not of ripped look he is not fat at all. He wrote that half of his daily calorie intake came from shakes which contained half a gallon of ice-cream a day.

We are told that ice cream is bad and so are cornflakes. But what do you think about an ice cream and cornflakes regarding a skinny skinny guy GOingMAD already? Is such stuff really that bad in his case (GOMAD guy's case)?

[Mehdi]

It depends on what you want. Garbage in is garbage out. If you only want to get big and don't care about fat gains: sure eat mcdonalds all day, it will work. If you care about your health, then stick with milk/pasta. Best combo for weight gain.

[Hombre]

Mehdi, regarding pasta, do you know (will sound crazy) in average how many pasta can be consumed in 30 minutes (consider it is not a food eating competition)? Compared to rice? You quite often mentioned that pasta is easier to consume than rice. Rice was my primary carbo source for two years.

Usually I have been able to eat ~210 grams of white rice per day (brown was tougher) - that was in 3 portions (70g rice + 100g raw chicken breasts in each portion). I think it is far less than should be consumed. It took 30 minutes for a portion to consume, I would like to stay in that time interval. ) Also I have tried to eat like 50 grams of oats at once that day (rolled, microwaved) - sugar, salt didn't help much, sweeteners (available) sucked.

But seems that is not enough carbo. So I am trying to figure out how to get more carbo in a day in a solid form. Haven't heard for a long time about pasta actually until met your site, Mehdi. For me, cons with pasta are:
harder to cook then rice (meaning rice-cooker), requires sauces to be tasteful (maybe quality of locally produced pasta is not that good, Italian is much pricey). Though I am going give it another chance, last weekends pasta preparation failed - there was no butter, no oil, no sauce

I wish I was able to eat Oats in tons. I don't know why but they are so hard to eat when they are cooked and of rolled variety.
Raspberry sweetener made taste even worse.

For now, I will try to replace a part of rice with pasta (going to find a pasta of decent quality and taste),
and will try to eat oats cold with milk (maybe cold oats will be easier to consume, I would love to eat at least 100-200 of them per day) - in an extreme case I think it is to not that bad to mix high GI cornflakes with oats for after workout nutrition.

Mehdi, I always wondered why do you suggest pasta so much instead of usually advised oats as primary carbo source? Don't you like oats that much?

[Hombre]

There so many controversial information about that GI stuff: some on bb.com states that milk's carbohydrates are digested at the thin intestine and do not cause insulin spike and also fats in milk prevents fast digestion of lactose and at the same time I read the precisionnutrition board where their team's senior adviser states that the reason a milk is not in their top 21 superfoods because (milk) "it seems to illicit an extreme insulin spike".

Same controversies with simple carbohydrates before bed (with fatty [healthy] shakes).

I always believed that simple carbohydrates or complex ones can be always made slower digestible (lowering insulin spikes) if mixed with fibers and/or fats.

[ricepower]

Good ice cream is made from cream & milk. Thats where the fat is.

When making ice cream a whole load of sugar is just added because the colder something is the less sweet it tastes. If you find regular milk & cream tasty just chuck that down in your shakes instead of the ice cream which contains incredible amounts of sugar.