Contest Preparation: Boiling it Down for the Natural Bodybuilders – Part 3

2009 January 11

By Matt

In parts one and two, I went over weight-training/strength training and conditioning methods for contest preparation. In this final segment, I want to take a look at arguably the most important bit, which is nutrition.

Diet and Supplementation

I shouldn’t have to tell you that diet is a critical part of ‘getting shredded’. You’ll often hear percentages trotted out like “diet is 80% of your gains” or “diet is everything”. In reality, it’s a bit naive to assign a relevant percentage; you either diet and see effects, or you don’t. There’s not exactly room for percentages there.

However you decide to go about it, you’re going to be restricting calories. You can do it intentionally, by counting calories, or you can do it by picking better food choices, but this is the key thing to remember: no matter what gimmick or rationale is offered, it’s always going to come back to calorie restriction.

The reason is simple: conservation of energy and matter, otherwise known as thermodynamics. Energy can’t be created or destroyed – it only changes forms. Your body is a closed system – energy comes in via food, and energy leaves via activity, metabolic life processes, and other avenues. As much as people have tried to handwave it and make this reality go away, you can’t change the reality of energy balance. Energy input will always equal energy output.

The problem comes in when people start trying to cheat the system. Insulin is often the number one factor trotted out as having the magical ability to violate thermodynamic equilibrium. Studies are often cited showing that insulin spikes can reduce catabolism and increase nutrient uptake by various tissues; this is used as a rationale for the idea that “a calorie is not a calorie”.

Well, no, in actuality it is. A Calorie (capital C, aka kilocalorie since I’m using proper terms here) is a well-defined unit of energy – it’s the amount of energy required to raise a gram of water by one degree C. In that regard, a (kilo)calorie very well is a (kilo)calorie.

What they’re really trying to get at is that some kinds of food are actually causing fat gains in and of themselves; to these people, energy balance isn’t even relevant. What matters is what you eat, not how much. This argument is commonly cited by “aficionados of low-carb diets” (to be nice about it), and they like to justify their belief that carbs are bad and make you fat.

Well, actually, no. The research has been pretty equivocal; when controlled for energy balance and nutrient requirements, low-carb diets don’t really offer any physiological advantages. They may offer psychological advantages, such as appetite control or ability to stick to it, but there’s just nothing to validate the idea that carbs are inherently “bad” once calorie intake is taken care of. Indeed, what we see with low-carb/high-fat (ketogenic) diets like Atkins is that people simply eat less, because protein and fat are more filling.

These concerns are easily dismissed even without that data, though. There is no possible way that any chemical reaction, even as complex as those in your body, can violate thermodynamic equilibrium (energy balance). Energy that comes in will match energy going out, and it’s just not a matter up for debate.

In short, energy balance is king, and what you eat doesn’t matter nearly as much as how much you eat. This isn’t to say there are no concerns for the food you eat, because there are plenty of reasons to pay attention to your food. You do need a certain daily amount of protein and essential fats, for one thing, and not getting these can skew the results. It’s just that your ability to drop fat isn’t going to be hampered because you ate 150 grams of carbs.

What really goes on is that people don’t account for loss of body mass and decrease of metabolic rate. The body’s metabolic rate can vary somewhat depending on your activity level and your energy intake. In general, eating less food will tend to reduce metabolic rate, and likewise, a sedentary person will burn far less calories than a person working an active job or otherwise getting a good amount of exercise.

This isn’t changing the equation, though – all it means is that your body may be expending less energy. If you go from running six hours a week and lifting weights four hours a week, to sitting on the couch, and you make no changes to your diet, it should be no surprise to you that you put on 10 lbs in a week. People don’t make adjustments to their calorie intake, and thus it makes it seem like calorie restriction just doesn’t work.

Much of this metabolic variability is due to the hormone leptin, which is something of a master hormone governing both energy intake and metabolic rate. When you’re well fed and holding fat, leptin levels are high and everything works fine. When you’re not getting enough to eat, or when you diet down to very low levels of body fat, leptin levels will tend to drop accordingly.

When leptin drops, so does your metabolic rate. Further, low leptin levels tend to make it easier to drop muscle, while simultaneously making it harder to drop fat, due to effects on insulin sensitivity. This is a survival strategy; your body doesn’t care about being lean, it cares about being alive. In order to maximize the chances of that happening, it will try to conserve its energy stores – which would be the fat you’re holding. To read more about this, I’d suggest Lyle McDonald’s Ultimate Diet 2.0, where he covers this topic in detail.

This metabolic “crash” effect can make it seem like energy balance isn’t working; in reality, you just need to better match your food intake to your current metabolic rate. It may be tempting to assume that there’s some kind of metabolic magic at work, but we can rule this out just by Occam’s razor: if we assume that the content of your diet matters more than energy balance, then we’re also having to assume a violation of thermodynamics.

Don’t think that’s a big deal? If we had proof that energy balance was actually being violated, we’d have a solution to the world energy crisis. When you want to claim that you can violate thermodynamics, you’ve got a lot of well-established science to overcome.

Ideally, you’d have some way to raise metabolic rate, undo the drop in leptin, or both. As mentioned, metabolic rate can be increased somewhat by exercise; indeed, this is a good rationale for staying active when your goal is fat loss. While you can’t lift weights or run intervals every day, there is a good reason to not just sit around on the couch, either. Just moving around will create a higher calorie burn.

But what do you do about the decreased leptin and metabolic “crash”?

Cheat Meals, Refeeds, and Leptin

As mentioned, leptin is signaled both by energy intake (how much you eat) and by body fat. The more fat you hold, the greater the leptin signal. The less you eat, and the leaner you get, the less leptin you’ll have. From here you get the metabolic adaptations that we don’t want.

The bad thing is that, short of getting fat again, you can’t really raise leptin back to normal levels. It’s just an unfortunate reality. What you can do though is temporarily over-eat, what’s called a refeed. Effective refeeds will last from maybe half a day on up to 48 hours. The trick here is to keep it high-carb and low-fat; carbs signal leptin, and you don’t really want to get a lot of dietary fat while you’re overeating as it tends to be stored.

Although refeeding isn’t a permanent solution, it’s often enough to reset things enough to get past a sticking point. The less you’re eating and the leaner you get, the more frequent refeeds should become. There’s also a psychological benefit to not being so restrictive with your food. If you know you’ll get a break every so often, it’s that much easier to avoid temptation.

There are some cons though. Some people just don’t do well with any sort of cheat; give them a piece of fruit or something and next thing you know they’ve cleaned out a buffet. Obviously this is counter-productive.

Also this yet one more area where drug-users will have an advantage. With a decent dose of clenbuterol or better yet, thyroid hormone, most of the metabolic problems will vanish. Add in some anabolics, go spend three hours on the treadmill, and the fat will come off just fine. Remember that artificially manipulating your physiology with chemistry is certainly a viable tactic – but you as a natural can’t follow that path.

Eating “Clean”

The first thing people tend to bring up when talking about a diet is eating “clean”. I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m hostile to this term, and it’s purely because of all the misconceptions that it encourages.

On the one hand, “clean eating” can be an improvement. For most people it’s just not possible to eat as much “clean” food as junk. By default you’ll be eating less.

On the other hand, people think that “clean food” is all they need to see changes – and that’s just not true. Clean eating will usually correlate with eating less food, but it does not automatically mean you are eating in a calorie deficit, which is required to drop fat.

Worse, “clean eating” is one hell of an ambiguous term. Nobody seems able to define what it really is. The common definition is “natural, unprocessed foods” – but then these same people will be eating rice cakes.

I’ve often made it a point to demonstrate how ridiculous the concept is; there’s just no linkage between clean eating and fat loss. There’s a lot of correlation between the two, but it’s a mistake to assume clean eating causes fat loss.

Now what I would suggest is thinking in terms of “nutrient dense” foods. That’s a lot easier to quantify. As I mentioned, you do have a daily requirement for protein and for essential fats. There’s also a lot of micronutrients, your vitamins and minerals and such, that are important to get.

At the same time, if you want a cookie, and the cookie doesn’t ruin your calorie goals for the day, eat the cookie. It’s not going to make you fat, and it’s not going to ruin your entire day. In general I’m very encouraging of people that want to have small “cheat foods” if it helps with overall adherence, and I certainly encourage refeeding in people that need it.

In my view, any negative effects of overeating will be more than off-set by the effects of leptin signaling and metabolic improvement; not only is it validated by science, but I’ve seen it happen time and again. There’s no need to fight the body at every step when it will help you out if you play nice.

As mentioned, the only exception to this would be in cases where the person in question is prone to binging. Then again, when you take away the impetus for a binge – which tends to be extreme restriction and a focus on 100% adherence no matter what – the binges tend to stop. Go figure.

Needless food restrictions

To follow on with the “clean eating” thing, contest prep diets will often have arbitrary, and sometimes very strange, restrictions on what foods can’t be eaten. Usually the explanation given doesn’t make much sense, either; if there’s any kind of scientific rationale, it’s often very questionable.

The big things you’ll see taken out in a contest diet are dairy products and fruit. Both are taken out for needless reasons; ironically, both are potentially very beneficial while on a diet.

Dairy products, which would be milk, cheese, yogurt and things of that nature, are very high-quality protein sources and a source of dietary calcium.

Calcium in particular is important because it doesn’t come from many non-dairy sources, certainly not in the same amounts. Further, calcium has shown potentially beneficial effects on fat loss, making it something you don’t want to neglect. Lyle McDonald has said that there’s a strong possibility that calcium from food sources is absorbed better than pill-form, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this holds true.

There’s also several other potential benefits from dairy, such as how yogurt can help with digestion and gut health by providing ‘good bacteria’ in the intestines.

The only rationales I’ve seen from excluding dairy come from some of the anti-milk weirdos, who just think milk is bad no matter what – the fact that they have no evidence for their claims hardly seems to stop them. I’ve seen it suggested that milk makes you ‘smooth’, but that’s probably bunk. I’d need to see some real evidence of that happening. This is sometimes attributed to the sugars in milk, but I’ve already covered that: it hardly matters if your daily calorie balance is where it needs to be.

Now if you have a real food allergy to dairy, or if you’re lactose-intolerant, then you’ve got a case to be made. Lactose intolerance can be gotten around with digestive enzymes (lactase in particular), but if you’re genuinely allergic to dairy and that causes you to hold water, you may be out of luck. I find it hard to believe that so many people really are allergic to dairy products, but I’ll readily admit I have no data in front of me to support either position.

A big fear of fruit comes from a misunderstanding of fructose, which is a kind of sugar found in fruits. Fructose is known for preferentially filling up liver glycogen levels, as opposed to muscle glycogen (which is what glucose would do). The liver only holds some abysmally tiny amount of glycogen, like 100g or so, and once full, it seems that the liver begins converting fructose into fat, a process called de-novo lipogenesis (DNL). On paper that looks kinda scary.

In practice, there’s some problems. Firstly, most fruit is only 50% fructose, meaning that an apple with 20g of carbs will only have 10g of fructose give or take. Probably worse for this argument is the research done showing that overeating with fructose, glucose, sucrose (a mix of fructose and glucose), or fat causes no significant differences in fat balance (McDevitt et al 2000). In other words, overeating is overeating, and the body doesn’t seem to particularly care that fructose fills up the liver first.

While DNL might contribute to fat gains, the consensus is that it will take some very large calorie intakes to make it happen. A few pieces of fruit each day, while in a net calorie deficit, is just not going to cut it.

On the opposite side, fructose has some nice effects on metabolic activity (it allegedly influences levels of thyroid hormone), and fruits in general are very nutrient-rich. If you’re just all that worried that fruit will make you fat and oh no sugars! then you’re free to exclude them. Just realize that there’s no scientific basis for it.

Relying on Supplements

This is going to lead into a whole separate rant, I know it. People like to rely on supplements. “Fat-burners”, L-glutamine, BCAAs, magical pre/post-workout protein formulas, night-time protein formulas, and of course the piles of other voodoo crap.

I don’t want to knock all supplements, because there are some useful ones that you should be taking, but you have to realize that the industry itself is a money-making marketing machine. Overstated claims and outright lies are the name of the game. Even something as mediocre as protein powder can be turned into SUPER MEGA ANABOLIC AMINO BLEND WITH 342667% EXTRA GLUTAMINE FOR ANABOLIC ANABOLISM!!!!!11

Supplements can broadly be classified into two categories: what I call ‘packaged nutrients’, and of course ‘voodoo crap’. Packaged nutrients would be your protein powders, multi-vitamins, fish oils, flax seed oil, and all the other various vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fats you can find. You can get them in your diet, but it’s often a matter of convenience to have them in pill-form. Voodoo crap is all the other magical ingredients that are the latest fad but have no actual science behind them (note: lying about what one or two studies say is not ‘scientific backing’) and never actually work despite all the testimonials and good Bros swearing that it’s the next hot thing.

Even the packaged nutrients can be spun into voodoo crap; just look at protein powder. I’m not going to go into detail here, but check out The Protein Book for an in-depth look all the research and an honest analysis. The consensus? It doesn’t matter. Get the cheapest whey you can find that doesn’t taste like chalk. If you opt for the more expensive brands, just realize that you’re paying for flavor and marketing. In fact, despite the marketing stating otherwise, you’re better off with a slower acting protein post-workout; milk has been shown to be superior to whey PWO. Leave the fast stuff for beforehand.

Along these lines you see L-glutamine and branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) marketed to dieters on the rationale that they ‘spare muscle mass’. Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: these are all contained in any animal-derived protein source. If you’re eating sufficient protein on your diet, you’re already getting more than sufficient amounts of glutamine and all the BCAAs. Further, glutamine can’t even get into your bloodstream in sufficient amounts unless you run an IV (which is how the research is done). If you think it ‘works for you’ then by all means; just realize that there is no (legitimate) scientific support for these products as compared to just eating whole protein sources.

As for the rest? Over the counter “fat burners” don’t really burn fat, unless we’re talking ephedrine/ephedra, and even there it’s a very tiny effect. There is a case to be made for yohimbine while on low-carb diets and before cardio for those people with stubborn fat issues, but that’s something of a niche and requires specific conditions to be useful. Caffeine is a good mental boost, and it’s what you’re getting in most “fat burners” anyway. The real power of these things is appetite suppression and pre-workout energy, truth be told – just realize this and don’t spend $80 on the latest fad when a cup of coffee will do the same thing. You can find the actual effective ingredients in these things for far less than the ‘proprietary blends’ (which is supplement-company speak for ‘we didn’t actually put anything of consequence in this product’).

Finally there’s other things that can have tiny, if marginal, effects. Zinc, magnesium, and melatonin for sleep; creatine to help with strength; hoodia to help with appetite; green tea for the ECGC; L-tyrosine to help with energy and alertness; and so on. Keep in mind that none of these will make or break you – that’s what ‘marginal effects’ means. They may or may not be worth the money.

As for the rest? Well, if you like paying out the nose for a placebo effect, have at it. Everybody’s always looking for the next best thing; you need to be focusing on the basics.

The Final Week

The final week has little, if anything, to do with fat loss. Instead, the idea is to manipulate your water balance so that you come in with full, pumped muscles and minimal sub-cutaneous water (water under the skin). If you do it right, you’ll come in looking striated and veiny, with bulging muscles and thin skin.

This is arguably the centerpiece of a contest coach’s repertoire, the Big SecretTM. Shhhhh!

See also: the best drugs to take to get rid of water.

It’s often suggested to manipulate water levels by drinking massive amounts of water, then cutting intake the night before the show. Some will suggest adding sodium-loading on top of this. This is usually combined with a depletion workout earlier in the week to prime the body for a later carb-up.

The approaches are geared towards creating a rebound effect, where your body pulls water into the muscles and gets rid of the rest. Sounds good on paper.

However, I just don’t think all the water and sodium loading makes that much of a difference in naturals. At the end of the day, it’s like any other hormonal loop in your body: you can play with it a little, but you’re not going to create any significant changes with just diet. Drugs, yes. Diet, no.

In my thinking, the best bet is to play with the factors we do know can have a strong effect; this would be carb depletion and loading. Time and again what we see is that a carb or carb/fat (junk) load leading in to the show tends to create the best effect. How many competitors complain about coming in too soft or too flat, then go out and gorge on crap after the show, and wake up looking better than they did on stage?

This is the same rationale; in fact, if it weren’t for potential water-balance issues from alcohol and the gut bloating from food, I’d almost be tempted to suggest going out to a buffet and getting drunk the night before the show. You do that one at your own risk, but the point remains: naturals really aren’t going to affect water balance all that much. Cutting your water and getting in a fair bit of carbs or carbs/fat the night before and morning of is about the extent of it. If your federation allows OTC diuretics, that’s another option.

The small shifts in water balance you can achieve without drugs will happen in response to this. Now, I can’t really lay out a blanket protocol because the truth is people are going to respond differently. Some might respond to a depletion workout early in the week, while others won’t. Some will respond to carbs, some will need a “junk” load. Some might need a carb-up 2-3 days out, then coast into the show with their normal diet.

You get the idea. There’s a lot of individual tolerances and requirements that mean you don’t know how you’ll respond until you actually try it. This is one reason I’ve found Lyle’s Ultimate Diet 2.0 to be so effective during contest preparation – you get a weekly carb-up. You can toy around with the different variables to see what works, and when you end up looking your best. This is important during your first prep cycle, but also for refining your strategy as you do subsequent shows. Even if you don’t use the UD2 verbatim, there’s a good case to be made for some kind of cyclic carb-loading just to get an idea of how you’ll respond.

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