About Me:
————
I’m a 32 year old male. I’ve lost 20 lbs in 6 months on the Atkins
diet (190 down to 170 lbs). I’m 5′ 10″ and now have a 36 inch waist
(down from 38″). I started the Body for Life workout program, but
found I didn’t have enough energy for that much exercise.

After reading “The Ketogenic Diet” Book by Lyle McDonald, I decided
the benefits of ketogenic dieting did not out way the potential
negative health effects. Instead of TKD (adding carbs around
workouts) or CKD (carb-ups & downs), I’m thinking of having a more
balanced diet like the Zone. I do like the Insulin minimizing theme in
both programs. I was considering eating slightly more than the 100g
of carbs (just above that ketosis threshold.)

My Goal:
———-
I want to lose 2 inches around my waist, and put on lots of muscle.

My Confusion:
—————-
After reading “The Ketogenic Diet” Book, I got the impression that
I’ll first need to set the goal: fat burning *OR* mass gaining. For
fat burning, eat 10% less than needed, for mass gaining, eat 10% more
than needed. For mass gaining, avoid cardio more than 20-40 minutes, 3
times a week.

“The Ketogenic Diet” Book says that beginners can lose 5-10 lbs of
body fat WHILE gaining 3-4 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks.

My Question:
——————–
How is that possible?

These books are bullshit.

I thought it was either fat burning or mass gaining?

Nope, both happenat the same time. If you are really “burningoff” fat,
then you must be doing something physical to do so. Since you wouldn’
be fat unless you were over eating, you will be adding muscle anytime
you “burn” fat thru exercise., and the more muscle you add, the extra
growth needs more protein and calories to grow…so they take it out
of the fat areas and fromt he food you eat, and you lose weight.

>Any thoughts would be very much appreciated!

Don’t buy stupid books like that ever again. If you go into
Ketogenesis, you can die. I have type I diabetes and have had it for
17.5 years, and have weightlifted for 9 of that, and I have not had
any problem keeping the wieght off. I’ve been told by Dr. Neal
Friedman, who is now the editor of DiabetesForecast and Dr. Boyle, on
of the ten authors of the Dccm trial a few years back, nto to do this.
They kept stressing about how my kidneys would fail, or how my body
coudln’t handle it, etc. But I reasoned all of that was bullshit, and
I was right!

17.5 years, and 20/15 eyesight, without complications, proves that. My
HGa1c’s, which measure diabetes control, used to be miserable, in the
9 range…last one I had was a 6.7.

Perfect health.

What I did was learn soem things about life…look at when you go thru
puberty. Yiou have tons of growth hormones running thru your body, you
can run forever, you get horny incessantly, and eat forever without
gaining weight.
why? well, cuz you’re growing, my man, and as long as you are, your
body is going to be putting the food you most likely want to eat, even
over what you need, somewhere in your muscle or etc…to make bigger
muscle and recover. So why not fool your body, and rebuild some
muscle, and still keep running around as you did back then? Riding
your bike instead of watching TV, running thru the woods at night with
friends, doing something enw and daring. Instead fo getting ready to
die, like a lot of Americans are.
I live enar the “good ” area of town, and I always see people there in
the stores, eating lowfat and well cut meat, lots of fish, yogurt, and
some wine and beer. They are enjoying life,w ith good food. They also
seem to walk a lot, after work, play racquetball, etc.
It’s their behavior, not their damn genetics, that keep them healthy.
I look at my family’s records, and al lthe farm people must have eaten
gravy, lots of fat and eggs, yet they lived into their 80’s and 90’s.
My Dad knew some epople in his hometown who intheir 80’s stil
ate bacon and eggs for breakfast, and got up at 4 am. They worked ona
farm every day, and prolly had their stress lowered by some sort of
confidence in life and God. Same for African tribes and our ancestors
who were cave men. From what I learned in Anthropology, ancient man
and woman worked 4 hours a day, then rested and goofed off the rest fo
the time. Men went on two week hunting expeditions where they moved
all of the time, then came back and feasted for up to a week.

So what does this tell you and me? If you weightlift and exercise, you
will lose weight. Let your body and its desires for food help you to
decide what to eat…I naturally like to eat fresh fruit and
vegetables, and eat meat, and fresh bread, etc. I don’t get sick but 1
or 2 times per year.

My room amte, who believes in Herbalife, and eats shitty food 1 or two
times a day, without exercising, gets sick ever few weeks, and looks
ten years older than he actually is. So who do you believe?

Remember the movie “Conan”? He started out a small boy, and kept
pushing that trubine/windmill thing around, and ended up being the
only one pushing it in the end. It’s a movie, but make s apoint…your
cholesterol is also the basis for making all the hormones, growth and
other, in your body. If you grow muscle, it will stop building up in
your body.

Forget the stupid books…eat after a workout, jsut work out HARD.
Lose the books. Just workout, and if it helps your workout, eat carbs
before or afterward. You won’t be able to exercise if you lower your
carbs, because your muscles won’t have the sugar to move…eat it, but
cut down on fat unless you get really hungry and angry for it. Listen
to yourself, and forget atkins…look at the kidney failures and crap
that come from those diets.

Good luck, and get off your ass…anything els eis a girly man excuse.

Just a second, you’ve been on the Atkins diet for 6 months, but think
the ketogenic diet is dangerous? I’d be shocked if you didn’t slip
into ketosis quite often on 6 months of Atkins. I think you should do
some more reading before dismissing it so readily. And as a side note,
if the Body for Life workout program is too strenuous for you, you
should probably re-examine your priorities before you step into the gym
next time.

Lyle’s referring to the commonly accepted paradox that beginners
(within the first 6 months or so) seem to be able to both put on muscle
and burn fat at the same time, while after this oh-so-sweet
beginner “phase” is over, doing both at the same time is very, very
difficult, and that’s why most experienced lifters concentrate on mass
or diet, one at a time.

Best answer I can give right now. Probably has to do with the
fact that beginners are typically starting out with less muscle and more
fat and their body can do both to a limited degree. After while of
training, this doens’t really happen much anymore and you have to focus
on one or the other.

As far as I’m concerned, the type of training done while dieting (for a
natural) should be no different than while trying to mass. Why, you
ask. Well, I’ll tell you.

What do muscles sense (i.e. what stimuli can they receieve). Well, if
your name is Crystal and you live in the world of ASW, they can
apparently sense bulk, tone and definition training.

If you’ live in the real world where the muscles don’t have little
brains, they can sense tension and fatigue and that’s it.

Tension is the key aspect of building muscle. Period. Fatigue is a
minor and maybe irrelevant aspect (I can go around in my head on this
one and switch my beliefs day to day). Fatigue without adequate tension
won’t make you grow. Tension without fatigue will (i.e. a 1RM). There
may be some optimal mix of tension and fatigeu however. If there is an
optimal mix, it’s at 80-85% of 1RM where all fibers are recruited but
you can get the most reps (this is about 5-8 reps for upper body, a
little higher for lower).

Anyway, to ‘tell’ the muscle to grow (or to not shrink in the case of
dieting), you have to subject it to high tension loads and do so
progressively (well, to make it get any bigger). If you take away the
tension stimulus by dropping the weight or raising the reps, the muscle
has no signal to keep its current size.

Fatigue, just like with endurance training, builds endurance. Amusingly
enough, studies of bodybuilders show that their muscles look more like
endurance athltes (lots of mitochondria, capillaries, etc) than like
strength athletes (the proper term is strength-endurance). Because they
train with lower tension and more fatigue (these studies were done when
‘bodybuilding’ training was lots of sets, high rpes and short rest periods).

So look at what most people recommend while dieting: cut the intensity
(tension) and increase the volume (fatigue). Which is stupid and will
cause muscle loss unless you’re on drugs. Why? Because their muscles
no longer have the tension stimulus to ‘tell’ them to stay the same size.

Basically, weight training is included in a diet to maintain (or
hopefully increase muscle mass), the fat loss will occur primarily from
the diet induced caloric deficit.

My belief: don’t change a damn thing (if you’re on drugs, it won’t
matter, change to high reps to burn more calories, this is where that
idea came from) with your training. Keep the same basic frequency (you
may have to reduce frequency it because overtraining is more likely on
lowered calories), and try your damnedest to keep your weights the same
(and work in the same basic rep range as you were to build the muscle in
the first place).

Because if you go from doing sets of 5 with 85% of 1RM while massing to
sets of 12 with 75% of 1RM while dieting, your muscles will simply
‘think’: Oh, we don’t need to be big enough to handle 85% or more, so
let’s shrink to save the calories that were being wasted to keep all of
that horrible big muscle.

So, what about glyocgen depletion and fat burning and all that other
shit that I go on and on about all the time? Although I don’t like
seeing a huge increase in training volume while dieting (and I think
increasing frequency while dieting is just retarded, because if you
couldn’t recover from it on above maintenanc calories, you surely won’t
recover from it on below maintenance caloris), if you must, add a set or
two of high reps after your heavy work just to deplete glycogen.

So if you were doing say 3X5@85% 1RM in the squat, drop back to say 2
sets of 5 (to maintan the tension) and add a set or two of 12-15 just to
deplete glycogen and burn calories.

That’s my opinion and recommendation. let the battle begin.

Don’t even get me started on the whole thing about burning in cuts or
etching in separations.