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Sassy69
New member
Ghede said:
What Ghede said - I'm female, 5'7", off season I end up around 160 and compete at around 140 at 7-8% bf and I cut on 1800 cals. The thing is that if you restrict your total cal intake, sure you'll lose weight for a while. But take a look at what you are burning. If you have an intense lifting program, you are putting demands on your body to provide energy for that. If you don't eat enough to first provde the energy and second to support muscle growth, your body will eventually turn to eating your muscle as well ---> catabolic effort --> skinny fat. Why sacrifice muscle?
You can do more effective bodyfat loss by eating enough to let your body run efficiently LIKE IT WaNTS TO, and then it will burn accordingly. If you dont' feed it enough, it thinks its in starvation mode (i.e. a drought) and metabolism will slow down in order to preserve the energy sources it has (bodyfat) available now.
Further instead of freaking out over the higher cal intake, you can also employ a great tool called "carb cycling" or "carb rotation" where you change the amount of complex carb you eat each day over a 3-4 day period to take advantage of the fact that your body responds to the TREND in the amount of food / fuel you feed it -- that means if you establish a pattern of eating say 200 g of complex carb / day and train to burn it (i.e. dont' sit & do nothing ---- also "condition" yoru body to expect a regular amount of training so it has an idea of the typical amount of energy it is expected to need on a given day) -- then drop into the carb cycle -- say :
Day 1: 200 g complex carb
Day 2: 100 g complex carb
Day 3: 50 g complex carb
Day 4 = Day 1 --- repeat
It takes your body a few days to respond to any change in the average food intake -- so it will continue to burn at the rate it did when it was expecting an easily available 200 g complex carb. But since you've dropped the amount of carb you are eating, it hasn't slowed down metabolism yet, but is still burning at the original rate. Then on day 4, just before metabolism slows down, you jack up the carbs again so it realizes the drop in carbs was just a short term blip on the radar & it will continue to burn. So you are takign advantage of that little 2-3 day window of high burn rate but decrease the carb intake so your body will turn to your stored bodyfat to burn instead. But not so far down that it will start to eat your muscle.
If you'v'e ever kept your carbs low for a few days, you may notice that you get tired easily, no energy and may even start to feel stupid in the head -- your brain runs on carbs so even if you go too long between meals you may notice this effect. This is how you feel when you have no more immediately available energy resources to train with - that is why low carb diets like Atkins will work for a while- you will lose water weight (carbs require water to hold them in your body- that's why you tend to look fuller after a good carb up, but if you cut carbs, your body doens't need the water to hold carbs, so you will see an immediate drop in weight due to water), and for lots of people the diet itself puts them on a more controlled & calorie restricted diet - so they see the fat loss just from the diet change -- but it sux moose cawk for building muscle. This approach is just not healthy for long term fitness.
The carb cycling approach provides the energy you need to stay alert & active while still supporting muscle / training & losing fat.
Another similar approach is a modified CKD diet - CKD you only do 1 carb refeed / week - but you can also do a modified where you do at least 2 refeeds during the week so you dont' feel like complete shit on low carbs for 7 days.
