Post: #176

@Hannibal, strong points. It will be interesting once i become a category 1 dieter. Looking forward to the challenge.

Just had a a bingy weekend of free pizza and beer and i managed to only gain a pound. Next 10 days I won't have an opportunity to binge, so it's down to business and dropping weight like a madman.

Post: #177

Anyone have crazy energy when on RFL? I feel like I need less sleep.

Come Wed I will have been on it for about 12 days. Going to refeed. Can't wait.

Post: #178

Trouble sleeping is definitely a thing. I use a Melatonin/5-HTP/L-Theanine stack for that when RFLing.

I need more or less the same amount of sleep.

Tomorrow is my first gym day of RFL round 2. I'm doing it at the hooked-up gym at my workplace (it even has a squat rack!).

I've decided to have the free meal the first week tomorrow after all. I did my MFP for tomorrow and found that between the pre-workout carbs and the Gatorade I consume enough carbs to go out of ketosis anyway, so no real point to skipping the first free meal. Pretty sure it won't slow down my fat loss much.

My first refeed (Sunday) is going to be three cups of brown rice (cooked), homemade carrot juice (10 carrots worth), a can of beets, and a homemade high-carb strawberry smoothie (two cups of strawberries, a half cup of oats, a cup of chia seeds, 2 scoops of ON Performance Whey, 1 scoop of Barleans Greens, and a cup of almond milk). That's about 420 grams of carbs according to MFP. Probably more conducive to progress on this program than the pizza-and-sandwiches refeeds I did in round 1.

Post: #179

I went nutty on my refeed today - maybe next time I will do better. Today it was all you can eat sushi, some pizza later and a soda and a smoothie.

Looking forward to being filled out a bit tomorrow - was looking deflated

Post: #180

I'll do my round 2 of RFL after this week. Lots of casual drinking and celebrating going on this weekend.

Post: #181

I'm not sure whether I should find it ironic that the weight loss book writer is named "McDonald".

But anyway, gotta give it a try. Got some belly to cut.

Post: #182

wow samurai power

Post: #183

Doing my second round. One thing I'll say is that my work outs definitely suffer. Can't lift as much and things just harder. Don't care because it's just a short diet but there are side effects.

Post: #184

yeah man I lost a rep off my front squat and about 10 pounds off my bent over row as of my last workout.

I think the latter is due to cleaning up some form issues though. You lose a little strength but you get it back quickly when you're back in an anabolic state.

Theoretically once I'm < 15% BF I should be able to gain strength and muscle easier too when I get back to bulking (less body fat = more testosterone). Before, I always bulked when I was > 25% BF which is a horrible idea, I gained more fat than muscle.

Post: #185

Yeah I'm not at all worried. Long term it will all come back, but I've read some things where people have no change at all in their lifts, and that was not my experience.

Post: #186

If you are experiencing loose skin in your stomach. I went through it the other times, I did RFL but wanted to share this.

Quote:Completely normal and a sign that your doing well. Fat cells are emptying out and the structure that used to support it is getting compromised, hence the sag. It is kind of like emptying out a water balloon, it was firm, then as the water drains out it gets squishy and jiggly.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat...uishy-fat.html

At first my loss was real linear, as I've been trimming down more though, I'm getting in to more of a similar pattern. I'll notice I'm getting squishy, and even look worse for a few days or put on a pound or two, then suddenly it changes overnight.

Anyone know if cauliflower is alright? My search has indicated it is ok.

Tomorrow, I plan to have some steak and mashed garlic cauliflower.

I hate veggies and need some way to make it enjoyable to eat.

If you got any suggestions of appropriate vegetables/vegetable dishes - please share!

Or else it is just more fiber pills for me.

Post: #187

Yeah cauliflower is ok. It's a fiborous vegetable so it's ok for RFL.

I'm in the middle of my first refeed of round 2 and getting sleepy already. Gotta motivate myself to crush this last plate of rice then eat these beets and make some carrot juice to close out the refeed.

Post: #188

[/quote]

Anyone know if cauliflower is alright? My search has indicated it is ok.

Tomorrow, I plan to have some steak and mashed garlic cauliflower.

I hate veggies and need some way to make it enjoyable to eat.

If you got any suggestions of appropriate vegetables/vegetable dishes - please share!

Or else it is just more fiber pills for me.
[/quote]

Just googled, so might not be entirely accurate but what the hell.

Cauliflower is 2g *fibre* per 100g
Sweetcorn is 2.7g per 100g and
Peas is 5g per 100g.


Personally when I know I need veggies peas and corn is my first stop, sometimes just the mixed veg packs you can get at supermarkets, which is normally peas, corn, shredded carrot and broccoli, quick and easy to make as well.
I don't know if beans are off limits, but they generally have very high fibre content.

(And yes, that quoting was woeful, deal with it)

Post: #189

Thanks Ass Ass In.

I googled a bit before asking and what I found was that maybe it was a bit high in sugar but the same level as broccoli. Which was weird, because everyone swears by broccoli.

I made my mash and gonna have it with a steak soon. I was able to get the consistency right, after I got the water out - had to actually bake it a bit for the final touch.

Post: #190

That refeed was tough. It took me a while to finish that last plate of rice and I had a hard time eating it all. Might go easy on the rice next week and diversify things even more; already planning to get some sweet potatoes in the mix.

Post: #191

(05-09-2016 02:29 PM)eatthishomie Wrote:  That refeed was tough. It took me a while to finish that last plate of rice and I had a hard time eating it all. Might go easy on the rice next week and diversify things even more; already planning to get some sweet potatoes in the mix.

I tried spaghetti on a refeed - man couldn't finish it all.

Post: #192

Not going back to dirty refeeds, just not eating as much rice.

Just for shits and giggles I put my anticipated scale weight and body fat % at the end of this round into the calculator to see if I would be cat 1 if I did a 3rd round. I would be and holy shit Hannibal you weren't kidding about the protein requirements being higher. 330g of protein a day for me at 195 lbs and 15% body fat.

Post: #193

15% bodyfat is the cutoff.

I thought about not lifting for a couple weeks so I could do category 1. The protein requirements go down when you're not lifting. It would probably be more worth it in the long run to just do something more standard at that point.

As far as refeeds:

I have an easy time eating a lot of mashed potatoes.

The secret is to use a ricer to mash them. You hardly even need butter, they're decent on their own. I pressure cooked them first but I'm sure boiling (or even the crockpot) works too.

Mash, mash, and mash some more. I did a whole refeed once with just mashed potatoes, I believe it took 7 lbs of raw potatoes to get it all done.

I used a pretty standard gravy, which is just flour, salt, pepper, and water. If you want it a darker color, throw in some broth.

I got an easy 550 grams of carbs and almost no fat with that refeed. Plain white rice is a bitch to eat a lot of in comparison.

Post: #194

Yeah I'm probably going to start eating clean at a modest deficit, continuing with IF, and biking into work 2 days a week for cardio to try to get down to 10-12% BF before I start bulking again in August. A month or so of a traditional keto diet is an option as well. RFL as a cat 1 sounds like hell on Earth, but it's such a short run that it may be worth doing as a last resort if I want to get to 10-12% quickly and am stalling out with other methods.

Mashed potatoes is a good idea. Also thinking frozen sweet potato fries would be a good easy-to-make refeed food, if I can find a brand with as few unpronounceable ingredients as possible. Maybe also throw in a 2-3 decker PB (minus the J because sugar) on HFCS-free wheat bread.

Post: #195

The last couple of days I have been very strict on this diet. I conveniently hurt my arm tossing a frisbee around so that put me out of the gym for a week. Fortunately, not lifting means lower protein requirements, which is a godsend, because I'm on a meal plan and have no meals left, so I'm rationing the 250g of protein I have left to last the remaining 3 more days before I can chow down on some of momma's home cookin'. Ideally I'd be consuming 150g of protein per day, and this would make me less worried about muscle loss, but according to the AMA, sedentary males need about .36g of protein per pound of body weight per day to maintain muscle mass. Link For me this is about 60g of protein. Since over the next 3 days i'll get 83g of protein per day, I should still be safe. Less than ideal, but safe.

Anyway I've noticed a few things from the past 10 or so days following this framework.

One is that when this diet is followed to a T, you will be able to physically see and feel the weight coming off. I've only been strict the last 4 days (since I used up my last meals), and of the 4 pounds I've lost over the last 10 days, all of it has been in the last 4 days. It's been pretty dramatic. Abs popping like they were at the beginning of last summer, feeling light and athletic, waist trimming up. Some of it is definitely confirmation bias, but this diet gets results.

The second thing I've noticed is that alcohol fucks up weight loss to an unimaginable degree. Until recently, I had never tried to lose weight while consuming any alcohol. Last week I was being pretty good with generally eating a healthy diet (certainly not RFL level discipline, but healthy and low calorie), but I was also drinking quite a bit of alcohol. On 3 seperate nights I drank more than a thousand calories worth of alcoholic beverages, and this was enough to completely negate any and all progress I made in the first week. Mathematically this makes sense, but it never really entered my mind that I could drink enough to stall weight loss. Now I know that it is extremely easy to do so. Lesson learned.

Last thing I noticed is minor but important and has already been discussed somewhat extensively in this thread. If you take psyllium husk, your guts will behave relatively normally, and if you don't take psyllium husk, you are in for some explosions on the pot.

I will have a final weigh in for y'all on friday morning after a minor refeed on thursday.

Post: #196

I am being maybe 85-90% strict if I'm being completely intellectually honest. I'm following it mostly to a T. No EC stack or Yohimbine. Planning to start on small doses of Yohimbine in week 3. Gotta be cautious with it because heart issues run in my family. I'm mostly doing the dietary stuff to a T on non cheat/refeed days except for the occasional fattier cheese or fish. My preworkout ritual is also a little different from the book; I don't train fasted. I usually eat a Quest bar or a spoonful of jelly, some BCAAs and whey protein before working out.

I'm cutting down on artificial sweeteners for this round also; still allowing for stevia in my coffee 1-2 times a day and sugar-free pancake syrup once a week but cut out diet soda entirely. I suspect that large amounts of aspartame and sucralose put a slowdown on my results last time.

I haven't been taking psyllium husk because I've been eating fiborous vegetables, but will give PH a try.

Post: #197

The stack is good, will make you sweat like a mofo. Just remember not to eat for 4 hours from when you take Yohimbe. To make sure it is out of your system. At least that is what is suggested for Yohimbe HCL.

Post: #198

Man my hunger is surging today.

Don't recall ever being this hungry.

Fuck, time to find some veggies.

Straight to the emergency broccoli

Side note, my hardcore lifting buddy (used to compete) was explaining back in the day he used to mess with insulin (apparently it helps you gain size). He said he had to carry orange juice, etc in case he was going into shock. My emergency broccoli made me think of that story.

Post: #199

Got down to 167 after 6 days of RFL, down from a 10-day peak of 173.5 (both morning weight but different scales). Anyway, I estimate 3-4 pounds of actual fat loss. Now sitting at what looks like 15% BF. Going to start eating an extremely low carb diet following this guideline : http://www.burnfatnotsugar.com/. Generally just not eating foods with a high glycemic index. Will mix this with intermittent fasting to get down to 158 lbs, and I will re-evaluate body fat levels at that body weight. I might be higher than 15% BF.

Post: #200

Somehow I gained a pound this week. I don't know how the fuck that happened. I'm in a 1200 calorie a day deficit.

215 seems to be a sticking point for me for some reason so it's clearly time for new measures. Cutting out all artificial sweeteners, cutting carbs and calories even more, doing more aerobic activity (mainly walking) and starting on Yohmbine next week.