eggbeard

Day 3 The third day of this cyclical diet is kind of rough because you don't "get" to train. It's worse than it sounds. You have to dump all your diet-related cognitive energy into not eating all day with no "reward" of going to the gym and blasting your muscles' glycogen away. This particular Wednesday was kind of rough. Lately I've been waking up at about 2:00 AM every morning, wide awake. I go to bed at 9:30 PM so that's roughly 4-4.5 hours of sleep. I've generally stopped fighting it, especially since I recently read an interesting article on biphasic sleep and how this mid-night wake up period might be totally normal in ancestral humans. Oddly enough, this recent development in my sleep roughly coincides with a concerted effort by my wife and me to improve our sleep hygiene. No screens after 8 PM, black out curtains in our bedroom, read some fiction before bed, keep the bedroom nice and cool. I've also thrown in some cool pre-bed showers to reduce my core body temperature and help the transition to sleep. My pet theory is that by going to bed earlier and waking up with the sunrise (actually an hour before the sunrise most days) and upping my sleep hygiene habits is helping me revert to an ancestral, biphasic sleep pattern. Most nights during this period, I wake right up, use the toilet, and go sit on the couch and read a few chapters of a novel while the cats wonder what the hell is going on. Yesterday, however, I couldn't get back to sleep afterward. (As an aside: I'm reading book 2 of The Expanse and I read a particularly action-packed sequence at 2:00 AM yesterday. Maybe that's why I couldn't get back to sleep.) So, after lying in bed until 3:30 AM, I just got up, drank a bunch of water, and started my day's work. I work from home, so that wasn't a big deal. My wife woke up at 5:00 AM, confused, but I actually felt good for most of the day. I walked the dog a total of 5.5 miles, attended an hour long Skype meeting, cleaned the house, and got a lot of work done. Unfortunately, by the end of the day, my proverbial ego must have been depleted, because my wife brought home a bunch of trail mix and, after a day of nearly zero carb dieting, I gave in and ate a bunch of trail mix. I don't think the damage, from a carbohydrate standpoint, was too severe. The diet allows 60-70 g carbohydrate and all I ate all day was cheese and leftover pork tenderloin. I definitely exceeded my caloric limit, however, in the form of fat and the trail mix was very salty, which will likely corrupt my weight measurement tomorrow, which is irritating. In the end, though, damage was fairly limited. The real no-no of the "low carb" phase is eating too many carbohydrates and ruining all the hard work you put in during the depletion workouts. Despite not nailing all three low carb days in the strictest sense, I did nail both depletion workouts on Monday and Tuesday and ate very low carb for most of that span. Today (Thursday, Day 4) I will take my weight, which is the first real reliable data point in this diet. The goal is make sure my glycogen-depleted body weight goes down ~1.5 lbs each week. Since I didn't train or track calories, here's a picture of my battle station. I love working from home.

Day 2 Second day in the books and I'm feeling pretty great! Timing was a little different than the first day but I hit every item on the to-do list. 11:00 AM - Protein shake: 243 kcal, 30 g P/9 g F/13 g C 2:00 PM - Training, second day of depletion: 6:00 PM - Dinner: roast pork tenderloin with pan sauce and roasted broccoli, peppers, and bacon. Overall, roughly 1,300 calories for the day, 135 g protein, 40 g fat, and 48 g carbohydrate. A little low on the protein, perhaps, but not by much. I had a few fingers of bourbon before dinner, which is where the extra calories came from. Glad to be depleted. One of my favorite things to say about UD2 is that the diet is a commitment device for the brutal training and vice versa. The specific nature of glycogen depletion training, which is no fun, forces you to adhere to the low carbohydrate portion of the diet, because you don't want to ruin all the work you put in depleting your muscles of glycogen by eating too many carbohydrates. Conversely, you really want to force yourself to get through the Thursday and Saturday workouts (tension and power, respectively) because you're eating ~5,000 calories (and 800 grams carbohydrate!) in a 32-36 hour period and you want to shuttle all that glucose into the muscles, not into the liver and into fat cells as triglycerides. It's kind of an exciting diet if you're into extreme, cyclical dieting. I wouldn't recommend it for most people, but I'm in a unique situation where I have total control over my diet and training and relatively few life constraints. I work from home, my gym is well-equipped and a 5 minute bike ride away, I have no children, and my wife has a gloriously high tolerance for my weird dietary endeavors. If I tell her I have to eat 650 g carbohydrate in one day by eating bread and bean burritos every 3 hours, she takes it in stride. She's a treasure. I'm also really happy I began this log. Even if no one really reads it, making my UD2 experience public is actually having the effect, so far, of helping me stick to it. Thanks, nerds.

That would be the dream. Lift weights 2 hours every day, sleep 16 hours somehow, and unlimited breakfast foods. Infinite bulk.

Day 1 Excellent first day. Perfect adherence in both diet and training. 11:00 AM - Supplements: caffeine, beta alanine, citrulline malate, 10 g BCAAs 11:30 AM - Gym for first depletion workout. Fairly brutal, but not that bad. At the end of most working sets 1:00 PM - Lunch: Mexican salad with cod on top. Roughly 400 kcal, 45 g protein 3:30 PM - Protein shake with kefir. 6:30 PM - Dinner: a bunch of lean meat (leftover chicken and fish) and broccoli cooked under bacon. 8:30 PM - Another shake. Good day.

Hello It's nice to meet you all. I am eggbeard and this is my first post to NF. Here begins my log. It will begin with a ~6 week run of Lyle McDonald's Ultimate Diet 2.0 (UD2) and continue thereafter with any experiments and protocols I'm interested in trying out. Recent History I've competed in powerlifting, albeit not recently. I'm not strong, but I wouldn't call myself weak either. I tested my 1RMs roughly two weeks ago: Squat - 395 lbs Bench - 275 lbs Deadlift - 445 lbs Like many powerlifters, I sometimes let my diet get out of hand in the quest for more weight on the bar. Here is (a very poorly exposed) shot of me from October 2015 at roughly 185 lbs (I'm 5' 8"): Fortunately I got that under control and slowly dieted down to 170 lbs by mid July 2016: As of today I'm a bit heavier than in that shot, but not by too much. I imagine I'm at about 14-15% body fat. I'm interested in dieting down to 8% body fat, which will be the focus of the beginning of this log. The Plan As I mentioned, I'm brand new to this forum, so I'm not sure if Lyle McDonald's Ultimate Diet 2.0 (UD2) is popular or well-known here. Briefly, here is the weekly schedule: Training Monday and Tuesday - Each day is a full body depletion workout. Wednesday - Rest Thursday - In the evening, a full body tension workout (6-12 reps at ~80% 1RM. Friday - Rest Saturday - Power workout Sunday - Rest Diet Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - 1,200 calories (180 g protein, 30 g fat, 60 g carbohydrate) Thursday AM - 900 calories (120 g protein, 40 g fat, 30 g carbohydrate) Thursday PM - 2000 calories (100 g protein, 10 g fat, 300 g carbohydrate; 2 meals after workout) Friday - 4000 calories (150 g protein, 40 g fat, 500 g carbohydrate) Saturday - 2400 calories (150 g protein, 50 g fat, 350 g carbohydrate) Sunday - 1800 calories (150 g protein, 80 g fat, 120 g carbohydrate) I have had success with this diet before. In fact, the above July shot at 14% body fat was in the middle of a lazy cycle of UD2. I wanted to practice the diet before committing to it fully due to its extreme nature. I found it was helpful to dial in the diet and workouts before diving in all the way. The Beginning I plan to update this log daily, or nearly daily. I know from experience that this diet is incredibly taxing physiologically and psychologically. Ideally, this log will serve as an outlet for my stress and help me stick to the plan.