I have been
chasing some squat and deadlift numbers in the gym and eating with reckless abandon
for the last 6 months because I know the weight gain will help me hit my
numbers. I don’t have a scale and the gym scale is broken, so I’m just guessing
here: I’m probably running at about 230-240lbs. It’s quite a bit lower than
you’d expect from a 6 month unlimited bulk, but the local Filipino diet really
isn’t conducive to gaining and holding weight.
The plan was
to gain as much weight as possible for six months and then start cleaning up my
diet to “grow into” that weight. Basic re-composition; put on a little more
muscle and lose a bit of fat and try to keep the bodyweight about the same. Yes
I know that you can’t put on totally lean weight because some fat will
accompany it, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. You can lean out and
maintain weight. I’ve done it plenty of times.
By the end
of May (6 month mark) I was feeling like total crap and happy to be done. I
didn’t really let myself go completely, but my body fat was getting up there.
Every lifter with a 2 pack is convinced that they are at 15% body fat but I’m
not that guy. I’m not pulling out the calipers, but I’d say I’m easily 20%+.
So here I
was just poking around on line trying to get some diet structuring ideas beyond
the basic “just eat cleaner” thing (which still works by the way). Several top
powerlifters that I respect are running Kiefer’s Carb Backloading protocol with
good results in both fat loss and strength, so I looked into it. http://www.dangerouslyhardcore.com/
What I found
was a diet structure that mirrored one that I ran about 12 years ago. I refer to that time of my life as “the bait
and switch” because that’s when I met my wife and I was lean as fuck when we met
and then I blew up about a year later.
At the time
I was a typical meat head bachelor and besides work, my life revolved around
training and paddling. I worked up to it, but by the end of the season my
training looked like this:
Monday: Lunch- Lift Afternoon-Paddle Practice
Tuesday: Lunch- Run Afternoon- Lift
Wednesday: Lunch- Off Afternoon-
Paddle Practice
Thursday: Lunch- Run Afternoon- Lift
Friday: Lunch- Lift Afternoon- Paddle Practice
Saturday: Off
Sunday: Race
This kind of paddling
Despite my
steady diet of frozen pizza, frozen burritos and ice-cream sandwiches, at the
end of the season, I was super lean with a 32” waist at about 190lbs. I felt
strong every day and still kicked ass in practice. I always figured that I
managed to out train my diet back then, but since then I have replicated that
training volume during triathlon seasons but never managed to get that lean
again. Up until now, I kind of figured it had more to do with father time.
Usually 2-3 of these
and a box of these
So when I
started researching carb backloading it hit me. The thing that was different
about that paddling season was that I was carb backloading and maybe I didn’t
lean out like that in spite of my diet…but because of my diet. At that time I
was running on protein shakes during the day up until my 2nd
training session or practice, and then I’d go home and pound pizza and
ice-cream sandwiches before crashing out. I was carb backloading by accident and didn’t know
it. Hell, the system wasn’t even invented yet.
First off,
let me issue a disclaimer here…I did not buy and read the Carb Backloading
book, instead I just read, listened to, and watched everything I could find
online and oddly enough, there really isn’t that much information out there. If
you want the entire fine tuning details you’ll need to buy the book, but Kiefer
has freely given enough information to run his system in broad strokes. Here’s the gist of it as I understand it:
The cornerstone of the system is the
manipulation of your insulin levels. Insulin affects everything, but I’m only
going to discuss fat and muscle cells here. Your body is most sensitive to
insulin in the morning and it tapers off throughout the day. Insulin is an
anabolic hormone for both fat and muscle, so the idea is to use it to drive
nutrients (grow) muscle and minimize fat growth. Since insulin will grow both
muscle and fat cells, you want to keep it low throughout the day to minimize
growth in general.
What Kiefer
recommends is to skip breakfast (I’ll touch on this later), eat low carb up
until training at 3-6 p.m., and then pound carbs until bedtime. The reason for
this is because insulin sensitivity bottoms out at this time of day and the
heavy training “turns on” your muscle’s sensitivity to insulin. The heavy
training does not increase fat cell insulin sensitivity, so you’ll be eating
all of your carbs when your muscles can easily soak them up (due to training)
and your fat cells are disadvantaged (due to the time of day). That’s it in a
nutshell. The caveat here is that it’s a diet for hard training individuals and
it wouldn’t be nearly as effective for “regular folks”.
As for
Kiefer’s recommendation to skip breakfast, it’s because of the catabolic
hormone cortisol. Apparently, cortisol levels peak in the morning along with
insulin sensitivity. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone which means that it breaks
shit down, which is bad for muscle. According to Kiefer, in the absence of
insulin, cortisol prefers to attack the fat cells. So his recommendation is to
leave well enough alone, skip breakfast and let the cortisol go to work on the
fat stores. I’m majorly paraphrasing of course.
I’m almost 3
weeks in and feeling pretty good. As I said, I don’t have access to a scale so
I took body measurements at the waist, chest, thigh and arms. I carry most of
my fat in my gut and chest and my arms and legs tend to stay pretty lean, so I figure
that this is probably the best way to track progress. As of today I’ve dropped
1.5” on my waist, dropped 1” on my chest and my arms and legs are unchanged. So
far so good and it looks like I’m slowly dropping fat and still maintaining my
lean mass. It’s not a drastic improvement, but that’s not what I’m after. I
initially planned to give Backloading a 3 month run, but I really think I might
take it for a 6 month ride now. It’s an easy diet to follow consistently and over
time, all of those inches will add up to a decent change. I’m pleased so far
and it sure as hell beats out “eating cleaner”.
"Slow and steady"
