First Four: Recap

It goes without saying that the beginning of a diet is always going to be the easiest: you're not super hungry yet, results come faster since your metabolism is high, and your deficit is probably pretty mild.  The first four weeks of this prep were no exception.  I skated through them with a carb decrease of a mere few grams, no cardio, and yet still managed to make significant improvements.  Here's the recap!

Saboteur!

Getting ready for a contest involves a lot of dedication, it's true: There's training, posing practice, choreographing a routine, hours of cooking and meal prep, days of cardio, and of course, dieting.  But sticking to a diet, that’s really just willpower right?  Wrong.  Here are a couple hidden factors that can sabotage even the most determined among us.

Open Season

Well, it's 20 weeks until the Nevada State Championships and that means it's time to start my diet.  My most recent prep went really well overall, so I'm not going to change my approach in any drastic ways this time.  The primary alteration will be the duration of the diet--for my last show I only had 12 weeks by the time I decided to compete and it just wasn't long enough at the pace I was going.  An additional 8 weeks should be enough to really bring a dialed in package this time around. Here's my jumping off point for the first few weeks.

Tricks of the Trade

Eating chicken breast every day gets old real fast—especially if you’re eating it more than once too.  Keeping your go-to staples delicious and appetizing goes a long way towards helping you stick to a stricter intake.  Here are my favorite ways to dress up plain ol’ chicken and rice.

That Cheating Heart

When it comes to diets--specifically contest prep, but the theme applies generally--there are two basic techniques that are used.  Most diets fall somewhere along this spectrum.  One on hand, you have the "cycling" technique, where two to three moderately low carbohydrate days are cycled with moderately higher carbohydrate days, maintaining a deficit on all days.  This means that even on "high" carb days, the dieter will still be consuming less than what would be required for maintenance.  On the other end of the spectrum, we have the "cheater" style of dieting.  This is a depletion, or "keto," diet.  Ketosis is the term for the physical state in which an individual has high concentrations of ketones in the blood, caused by the body's inability to provide further energy from stored glycogen.  Ketones are produced in the liver during prolonged fasting or starvation.  Ketones combine with the byproducts of beta-oxidation and can then be incorporated into the Krebs cycle, which I discussed briefly here.  Ketones are not restricted by the blood-brain barrier in the same way albumin-bound fatty acids are and so can bring energy to the brain when sugar is not available.  "Ketosis" is used colloquially to describe a "depleted fat-burning" state.  A diet focusing on sustaining a depleted state in order to burn fat would generally also focus on lowering the intake of carbohydrates and maintaining a high calorie deficit for prolonged periods, usually one week.

Eat to Shrink III

Part I can be read here, Part II is over here..  Now on to the exercise portion.

No one can diet for long and keep losing weight without exercising as well.  What you do to burn calories is up to you; however, I highly advocate at least a three day per week weight lifting regimen in addition to your regular cardio.  I recommend this for two reasons: muscle burns energy more efficiently than fatty tissue, and weight training strengthens bones and connective tissue--vital for longevity and long-term health.  Adding some muscle to your frame will definitely help you look more toned as well.  BUT the body is a SYSTEMIC organism—spot reduction, i.e. burning fat off a particular area by training the muscles in that area DOES NOT WORK!  You can build muscle in a certain area and the muscles will push through the fat layer more, creating the look of more definition, but the fat will remain the same unless you lose it systemically.   

Eat to Shrink II

Part I of this series can be viewed here.

Now we have a general idea of how much to eat, but what do we eat?  I advocate simple foods such as chicken breast, brown rice, whole grain bread, sweet potatoes and fruit as staples that can be prepared ahead of time and act as a framework for clean eating.  Using food exchanges and “common meals,” as well as having food that is already prepared, will not only make the transition easier but also head off “desperation cheat meals”—why cheat when there’s diet-approved food in the fridge and all you have to do is assemble the meal?

Eat to Shrink

The next few posts are made up of selected portions of a dieting guide I originally wrote two years ago for a fatty friend of mine who never ended up reading it.  Do yourself a favor and don't repeat her mistake.  The guide itself has been edited and altered as necessary over the years to reflect more accurate information as it comes to my attention.  I've broken it into a few posts so you don't succumb to information overload.

GoPro or Go Low?

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started bodybuilding was eating way too much protein.  High protein is one of those things in bodybuilding that no matter how much you argue against it, people will never listen until they do it themselves--myself included.  Protein is definitely a necessity, don't get me wrong, but overdoing it is not as beneficial, or even as harmless, as most would believe it to be.  While bloodwork can show the negative biological effects of excess protein, I believe the straight-up better results from a lower protein diet speak for themselves.  And we can all smell the meatheads who are overdoing it, amirite?  High protein definitely contributes to some really nasty gym farts sooo, take it easy brah!

Thank You, Chris Aceto

One of the biggest mistakes I made with my diet early on, and even somewhat recently, is eating too much protein.  Sounds weird coming from a bodybuilder, right?  In fact, many high level bodybuilders advocate(d) low protein too: Dorian Yates ate "low protein" during his reign as Mr. Olympia (6 yrs in a row, plus he's arguably the best of all time), and Chris Aceto, nutritionist and prep guru to athletes such as Ronnie Coleman, Kim Chivesky (I can't wait to look like her! :D), Jay Cutler, Mike Francois and others, also advocates low protein.  Chris is fairly well known in the bodybuilding community, and he's considered one of the major "diet gurus," along with Charles Glass, Hany Rambod, George Farah, etc.  His approach is particularly interesting because of the intense focus on low protein diet compositions.