[POWERJIM]

Well, we've already determined that dieting can be an arduous process, and most certainly restricting your caloric intake when you are used to eating massive meals takes a lot of determination and some planning.

Perhaps one of the most asked questions in bodybuilding is "how can I get abs?" closely followed by "I need to lose some weight around the waist. What do I do?" The funny thing is that people think that exercise alone can help them achieve this.

Repeatedly I reply that cardio and a good low-calorie, low-carb diet will form 80-90 percent of the workload here and not so much their training and supplementation.

So here is a short list of things to watch when planning your next cutting diet :

1. Thou Shalt Eat Less

This makes a lot of sense since gaining weight involves eating more calories than you expend, obviously eating less calories than needed to maintain your mass will form the cornerstone of a dieting regimen. A rough estimation would be that you are aiming for under 10 calories per pound of lean bodyweight.

Meaning if you weigh 220 with 10 percent body-fat, a cutting diet would be based on 200 pounds and your overall intake is 2000 calories. Now if you tend to stock body-fat easily this number can be a little lower, and if you have a speedy metabolism, often times a little higher will work best in preserving lean mass. Only when your total amount of calories drops below your maintenance line will the adipose storage of the body be called upon as back-up fuel and be burned to help you survive your low-calorie ordeal.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that cutting is not immediately the healthiest thing in the world and should not be maintained for long durations of time.

2. Thou Shalt Work Into It

Although everyone is eager to lose fat as soon as they can, and the sooner the better, don't jump into a low calorie diet. I applaud your vigor, but it's best to take it slowly now and save your vigor for when the dieting gets really hard : when you've been starving for a while. It makes no sense to drop from 4000 to 2000 calories all at once.

Your body will take this as a sudden threat to the system and start storing body-fat in a hurry to be able to survive more sudden drops. This means that any kind of cheat day you have , or any calorie consumed above maintenance on any given day will be stored as body-fat for later use. This is a bit counter-productive. You need to gradually decrease the amount of calories, like 250 cals per week.

This will just seem like you are taking in a little less food and give the body time to adjust to the new amounts every time. This way, when dropping below maintenance chances of storing more body-fat have severely decreased.

I know I mentioned this when bulking as well, well it applies just the same here. You can't make sudden changes when training. You won't double your maximum bench press overnight. So why would you rush something as crucial as your diet?

Do things gradually, make the changes over time so the body can adapt to new circumstances and situations. In the long run it will save you a lot of hardship. You spend less time one a starvation diet, and though the losses will come slower, they will be lasting and you won't have to spend an extra 2-3 weeks shedding fat your gained because you were too hasty. And extra 2-3 weeks you would be spending on a starvation diet.

3. Thou Shalt Get the Right Amount of Nutrients

Just as with bulking, not only the amount, but what you are getting will play an important role in your progress when cutting. For starters your high-carb days are over. Invariably on any diet the amount of carbs should be restricted because an overdose of carbs is readily stored as fat and in times of deprivation fat-storage increases.

Also carbs spike insulin, and insulin increases sugar cravings, wanting you to take in even more carbs. This is vicious circle best avoided by simply restricting your carb-intake. Moreover, by letting the amount of carbs drop below the daily amount of protein will cause the body to produce cortisol. When bulking cortisol is your enemy, here it is your friend you love to hate.

Cortisol will increase glycogen storage and decrease blood sugar, but at the same time prohibit glycogen from being used as fuel. That means it will switch to burning protein and fat instead. The latter is what we are looking for, the former is an unwanted side-effect.

Protein consumption stays important. The percentage of protein will increase in the diet, but since calories drop the actual amount will be the same or slightly less (1 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight).

Keeping enough protein will be essential to maintaining a positive nitrogen balance, avoiding catabolism by allowing the dietary protein to be burned instead of it being robbed from muscle protein and to repair any damages suffered from training or cardio.

Not only that, you'll want to keep a steady supply of protein throughout the day to avoid muscle being burned at the most catabolic times of day. That means at least some protein every 2.5 hours. The protein remains the most important part of your diet and is now also the larger part of your diet.

Fats should be increased, percentage wise, to make up for the loss of carbs. First of all there is the anti-catabolic issue. Fats can be used as an alternative fuel and supplying ample fats for the body to process can teach the body to use fat as fuel more readily, which will aid in the burning of adipose tissue as well.

Secondly raising the amount of fats can make you reach satiety sooner, helping you limit calories, and will decrease carb-cravings, helping you limit your sugar intake. One of the many reasons fat should be increased on a diet. Many people shy away from fats on a diet because they are 9 calories per gram, which is a lot. But if they help restrict overall calories that will aid your diet.

Fats also form cholesterol needed to make steroid hormones such as testosterone and Vitamin D. This too will optimize the protein sparing effect and assure proper repair of damaged tissue. And the fact that fats are also beneficial to hair,nails and skin is a bonus too. The thing to watch here, if you are increasing fats, is that you increase calories from healthy fats such as flax or olive oil, canola, sunflower or safflower oil and fresh nuts. Saturated fats, the kind commonly found in processed foods, increase bad cholesterol, increase the risj of cardiovascular disease and have very little use in the body.

But clean fats, meaning unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fats increase the good cholesterol and contribute to health and in this case fat-loss. Taking two tablespoons of a healthy oil prior to a meal three times daily can go a long way in this.

The optimal ratios for cutting are a hot topic of discussion. I usually recommend 40-40-20 (carbs-protein-fats) for the skinny by nature and up to 25-50-25 for heavier individuals. As a given I recommend 35-45-20 to most people, since that will have some effect to some extent on everyone. The important thing to notice is that carbs decrease and fats increase percentually.

The best way to do this is by dropping carbs from your diet when you start dropping calories, that way you'll automatically move into this position since protein and fat will percentually increase to carbs eventhough you aren't adding protein or fat to the diet.

4. Thou Shalt Continue to Eat More Often

Don't think that because you'll be eating less you can go back to 3 square meals a day. Now more than ever is it extremely important to keep getting 6-8 daily meals. This puts an additional strain on you because that means truly tiny meals compared to what you were having before.

But maintaining a constant influx of nutrients is necessary for two main reasons : the first is keeping nitrogen and GH levels high, which counters catabolic effects. As long as there is some food in the body that is not a carb (high cortisol disallows the use of carbs) it can be used to burn as energy, instead of having to resort to the burning of muscle protein. Since the body will favor fat, its best to use protein.

That way you'll still burn body-fat, but when looking to burn protein it will have dietary protein to burn before resorting to catabolism. High GH levels induced by optimal amino acid delivery also makes sure that protein can be used to repair damaged muscle tissue, preventing your workouts from becoming catabolic pitfalls.

The second reason is one of synergistics. Keeping food intake regular increases the metabolic rate, which in turn burns more calories. Combined with the low calories that will encourage the burning of body-fat.

Your energy expenditure from simply digesting increases and along with the anti-catabolic effect on muscle you create a catabolic effect on fat. This is called thermogenisis, your system works faster and blood pressure increases to process a constant intake of nutrients. Body temperature rises and the amount of calories being burnt increases.

5. Thou Shalt Use a Fat-Burner

This is a big controversy for many. The thing with fat-burners is knowing how effective they are or are not. You seem to have two camps.

One which is content accepting that they do not work, are harmful beyond belief and absolutely unnecessary. The other camp tends to accept that the fat-burner is the what-all of diets and that you can't even think of cutting down without one.

And you see where I'm going with this : they are both wrong !

The most effective fat-burners today operate on ECA : Ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin. This is a proven stack with wide scientific backing. Usually there are more ingredients in these products like carnitine, chromium, HCA, yohimbe, guggulsterones and what have you. But all these have limited backing. One study says they work, another says they don't.

Now it's a good fact to assume that they work to some extent but not under all circumstances and most of them truly aren't worth the money. As a result we conclude that the effect of a fat-burner is largely (70-90% depending on other content) based on the effects of ECA and that fussing about which one is better is ultimately pointless.

We all have our favorites, but fat-burners are only a percentage of the result, and the other content is only a percentage of the fat-burners efficacy so which ever one is better, if it brings 1% improvement to our diet, it's a lot.

Now as I already hinted at, fat-burners are not crucial. They can speed up the results a lot. How much depends entirely on what you have to lose. The more you have to lose the more it is in your interest to get a fat-burner. But for a bodybuilder carrying less than 15 percent body-fat it never adds more than 20% early on, to 5% or so in the final stages of your diet.

Everything hinges on cardio and diet. But fact is, the fat-burner makes me diet down in 10 weeks instead of 12, so I'm not about to pass up on it. The main point is to make sure that you get the right mix of ECA at the right times of day, usually two to three times depending on content and whether or not it is a time-release component.

In conclusion the use of fat-burner must be standard and it should rely on ECA. You can diet down without a fat-burner, no matter what any company says, but they are helpful. They don't shed the pounds overnight, no matter what any company says, but in our game every little bit helps.

Now I advise the use of these products mainly in the final 6 weeks of a diet. I don't endorse long term use of a product containing ephedrine.

Ephedrine raises cathecholamines which turn glycogen back to glucose. Since glycogen is the main energy storage of the body that leaves you utterly depleted. Now ECA gives you energy while on it, but then you come off and there is no glycogen to replace it. This can lead to fatigue, lustlessness and even severe depression after you finish a cycle.

ECA stacks also increase your blood pressure and the result is often dangerously high blood pressure to the point of cardiovascular risk. These are all good reasons not to stay on these products very long. As long as you are aware of your own condition no life or health threatening risk is attached to using these, but be aware of possible consequences if you do not check in with a clean bill of health.