To carb, or not to carb...that is the question
- Thread starter darkside06
- Start date
crazyfmike
New member
I would weight all my food. Keep subtracting carbs until your BF drops to 10% but keep your protein at 1.5:1 minimum.
Once you get to 10% consider a cycle as 3J suggests and by then have your goals defined as Cash points out.
I am going to put my money on your goal is more like mine: to look your best all the time. I figure I am around 80% year round. We see Cash hits 100% and with all due respect Brother Cash you are awesome Bro......a guy just cannot hold that lean and hard 365 days.
Find your real base caloric intake (the one you think you have sucks man). Once your BF is down the gear works WAY better with WAY less sides. IMO packing meat on a leaner frame looks better through the course then fighting the shedding fat and worried about losing muscle.
Once you get to 10% consider a cycle as 3J suggests and by then have your goals defined as Cash points out.
I am going to put my money on your goal is more like mine: to look your best all the time. I figure I am around 80% year round. We see Cash hits 100% and with all due respect Brother Cash you are awesome Bro......a guy just cannot hold that lean and hard 365 days.
Find your real base caloric intake (the one you think you have sucks man). Once your BF is down the gear works WAY better with WAY less sides. IMO packing meat on a leaner frame looks better through the course then fighting the shedding fat and worried about losing muscle.
nicklifter
New member
Do you think one should low carb when trying to lose fat?
What do you mean by "low carb?"
Are you referring to a ketogenic diet or simply calorie restriction via the reduction of carbs intake?
There are many ways to reduce body fat but in the end each method simply boils down to the fact that one takes in fewer calories that is expended.
nicklifter
New member
Do you think ketos are needed? It's common to see alot of people mention insulin stopping the use of FFA's and hinting to keto or very low carb diets being best for fat loss.
What do you think about this? Do you think carbs are the best place to remove calories when dieting? I'm in my first dieting phase since I've been hovering around 205 and not particularly lean for 2 years or so, wanting to get down to 8-10% from 18% or so by summer. Starting with a 300 calorie deficit everyday, do you have any opinions on calorie waving or just keeping calories low.
When I competed, I used a ketogenic diet to get ready for my shows. It worked extremely well for me and that is the only way I would prep for a show if I were to do one.
That said, I find that most people don't respond to ketogenic diets the way that I do because they are using them for a different purpose than what I did.
I would not use a ketogenic diet for general fat loss. It is a very different animal when you are already lean, say 8% like I was, and you are prepping for a show and trying to get down to 4-5%. Keto works really well in that context.
For general fat loss, use a reduced calorie carb based diet and employ a rotational schema for the calories where you follow a 2 days lower calories one day higher calories pattern. Build your diet around 1.5 g to 1.75 g protein per pound of lean body weight. Then add carbs into the mix until you are roughly 500 cals less than your base metabolism. Use that as your starting point for your 2 low days and bump up to base metabolic requirement for your 1 higher calorie day.
nicklifter
New member
Great response, answered everything thanks very much. Is there an ideal carb and fat percentage you prefer? My carbs are quite high relative to fats. Could the lower fat effect hormone production?
Do you think cardio has many benefits for fat loss if one is lifting 3 or more times per week? If so how should it be done (intervals or steady state etc)?
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I keep my carbs during a diet phase in about a 5:1 ratio to fats so about 250 g carbs to 50 g fats.
For dieting, I don't like to do tons of cardio. I've learn over the years it is far easier and better time management to reduce calories as opposed to do cardio to try to burn more.
I never did more than 20 minutes a day even when I was prepping for a show.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly when you say "you feel like you need just a little something more" but I'll answer that from one of the perspectives I used when dieting.
When you are dieting, you are "restricting" so there will always be the feeling of needing more but that is a different issue..
I monitored my blood sugar very activity when I was dieting for a show to make sure at no point during the day my blood sugar was bottoming out.
I've found a lot of times with guys that I've prepped for shows, their feeling "like they need a little something more" was closely tied to steep drops in blood sugar.
So, I take an active and aggressive approach to making sure that we don't see the drops that produce those type of feeling.
I do that by watching early on how one's blood levels react to carbs. So that gives me a little bit of a road map as to what to expect when we start restricting calories and subsequently carbs.
Now, I know that might not be the perceptive from which you were asking the question so I'll try to get less "contest prep" focused and more general. The answer depends on what the current diet looks like. If the diet was very light on fats - like mine 50 g or less, I would bump the fats up first for two reasons. One, you avoid fluctuation in one's blood sugar by doing so and two, fats tend to be more satiating so there is a more filling feeling than with carbs.
