Another thing to take into consideration is that your body’s “insulin sensitivity” levals change over the course of the day. You are more insulin sensitive in the evening than in the morning. A meal that includes a good helping of rice for example wont do exactly the same thing to you in the morning as what it will in the evening. I’d suggest to anybody who wants to lose fat that if high glycemic carbs are included in their diet then they should be avoided in the evening. Of course high carbs may be good after a high volume training session and if you only get time to train in the evening i personnaly don’t know the way round that one. I get to be able to train in the day though, i just train when i want to.
Bodybuilder Kevin Levrone(and he’s not a slow coach either, niether does he particularly like to gain to much weight in the off-season) well he has this approach;
He’ll have 6 meals a day, meat, rice and vegetables(I’ll assume he gets cooking oil fat in their aswell), the last two meals of his day are the same as the first 4, but WITHOUT THE RICE.
I’ve been looking in to the bodyfat thing more this last month as it has become one of my goals to reduce it aswell.
Maris,
What is your current bodyfat level? I agree that cutting carbs too much can have a negative effect. You are an athlete, not a bodybuilder. If your fat is a bit higher(12%), try lowering your carbs until you find that your performance is getting affected, then bump them up so as to get proper recovery and performance. Once your bodyfat diminishes, you can introduce more carbs as the insulin sensitivity will lower in adipose tissue and increase inter-muscularly. Berardi also feels that one should be more concerned with the insulin index than the glycemic index. Insulin index measures your bodies insulin response to the food eaten, whereas the glycemic index refers to the increase in blood sugar levels. Milk and some meats actually raise the insulin response higher than some carbs do. That being said, try to eat whole food as much as possible. Avoid processed foods like the plague. Diminsh complex carbs as the evening comes on. Try to eat fibrous(veggies) in the evening. As far as workouts go, after 45-50 mins, you start to raise all your catabolic hormones. You would be better served training twice like you stated than one overly long session. It takes you too deep in to the recovery curve. Leading quickly to overtrainied state. Plus you get to elevate your metabolic rate twicw in a day. It might take some experimenting to figure your body out, but once you do, you will be golden. Hope this helps out.
Recovery is certainly priority # 1. Berardi is a brilliant guy. I attended one of his seminars with Ian King and he was very informative. I tried his nutritional programming and found that I was eating a ton of food and losing bodyfat quite nicely without a dip in training performance. I would follow his advice. I did not earlier see the work schedule. Do what your schedule allows. I doubt that carbs at night will make you retain adipose with a busy work schedule.
I’m not entirely sure what my body fat % is, but I think around 15%, it’s kinda high, and I really wanna get it down. I used this machine at the gym to test it, and I knew it was unaccurate anyway, but one day it said 15%, 2 days later 17.5%, so I don’t know. I wanna get the calliper test done, but have no way of doing it right now.
I am cutting my carbs back a lot. For breakfast I am having a bowl of oat bran, and then in the afternoon I have a cereal bar. That’s almost all my carbs dealth with. I have a protein shake with breakfast, after any weights workout, and before I go to bed. My only other major source of carbs is through fruit, which I’m eating a lot of. Also after any physical workout I do have a glass of powerade, so there’s carbs in that. All the starch is mainly cut out though.
bump to idealimage and wullie are right, all lot of what i do comes from john’s stuff (espically the “foods that make you look good naked” program). BUT as athletes, we cant put fat loss ahead of performance, so therefore the guys are spot on (what ever that heck means, i mean im canadian not aussie) that recovery is the prime concern.
i am lucky that i dont have to work till 10:00 so i can train in the am, blast 90% of my carbs in before noon and completely done by 3:00.
Would somebody who smokes cigarettes/tabacco be messing around with their hormonal output?
Anybody who has read “natual hormone enhancement” (including Kyle & Trackdad), might be able to help me out on this one. Or anybody come across a study done on cigarettes and their effect on hormones? I’m assuming that if their is any hormonal effect it would be a negative one. Would appreciate if anyone could shed light on this.
I think I just put that last post under the wrong thread, was going to put it under the general discussion thread.
goose:
i ripped this from berardi’s website, doesnt adress cigarettes, but hits on some other issues:
T and Drugs
As a former willing participant in the bodybuilding subculture, I know quite a bit about what makes bodybuilders tick as well as many of the oddities of the lifestyle. One observation I’ve made over the years is that bodybuilders really like to take pills.
Regardless of whether they’re prescription drugs, OTC drugs and supplements, or even good old Fred, Barney and Wilma in sugary vitamin form, bodybuilders will down handfuls at a time as a ritual of worship to the muscle gods. And I’ll be the first one to admit that in my day, I had a thing for Betty Rubble. I used to eat mouthfuls of the tiny vixen while making poor Barney watch.
Although Flintstones vitamins probably do not impact T, many recreational, prescription, and OTC drugs do. Lets start with everyone’s favorite drug, alcohol. In my opinion, alcohol is the single best legal Testosterone suppressor known to mankind. And you don’t need a biochemistry experiment to realize that. Just look at the physique of any alcoholic for the evidence. And not only do chronic alcoholics suffer from low T as a result of sippin’ a cold one. Numerous studies have shown that even one night on the town can cause T levels to plummet.
In one particular study, men consumed the equivalent of giving 200 ml of alcohol to a 176-lb man. While intoxicated, T levels were 25% lower on average than before consumption. In addition, the time course of T decrease correlated exactly with blood alcohol so when blood alcohol was the highest, blood T was the lowest.(17) With even lower doses, T levels remained suppressed for 10-16 hours, even after blood alcohol returned to normal.(23,24)
As a side note, one question I’m often asked by men concerns why they get so aroused when drinking. Well gents, in addition to the decrease of inhibitions, the body is fighting to maintain Testosterone homeostasis. As a result, high amounts of LH are released in order to bring T levels back to normal. As mentioned earlier, LH is correlated more with arousal than T, so that’s why you get horny, you dogs. The problem, though, is that high LH secretion is ineffective at increasing T during an alcoholic stupor. Alcohol, you see, prevents T production at the Leydig cell level and not at the pituitary level. So you’re arousal is up, but T stays down.
You don’t drink? Well here is just a list of other drugs that decrease T levels in one way or another:(3,4,25)
Aspirin
Marijuana
Codeine
Opioids like Morphine, Methadone, and Heroin
You’ll notice that a few of these drugs are used for pain. These drugs act on the central nervous system to produce analgesia, a desired effect for guys who pound their muscles day in and day out in the gym. Before you load up on the painkillers though, consider that one group of researchers actually uses T depletion in the blood as an assay for narcotic effectiveness.(3)
What this means is that the better a drug is at producing analgesia, the more it will reduce Testosterone levels. It’s believed that these drugs act on the pituitary to block LH secretion and ultimately, T production.(25)
Two other drugs I’d like to mention are Nolvadex and thyroid hormone. Some authors have speculated that both drugs can increase T levels. I’m not convinced. In men who are severely hypothyroid, thyroid medication can increase total T levels.(10) But the doses needed are high. If you’re dumb enough to try huge doses of thyroid hormone to try to increase your total T, the catabolic effects of that amount of thyroid would negate any anabolic effects of the increased T.
Both Nolvadex and thyroid drugs also increase SHBG.(10) Remember that the goal in increasing Testosterone levels is to increase bioavailable T - not just total T. If SHBG goes up as total T goes up, then the bioavailable Testosterone may stay the same, or worse yet, decrease. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Optimizing thyroid function through supplements produces a different effect than taking thyroid drugs. Either way, this course of action should help you lose body fat, but I don’t think it will increase T levels one bit.
In summary, for maximum T, be cautious of how you use alcohol, marijuana, and painkillers. If you’re going to assault your boys with alcohol, perhaps a few shots of diol would be an appropriate chaser. If painkillers have a shelf of their own in your medicine cabinet, perhaps an LH booster like Tribulus would be of benefit to your testis.
Wow, thats quite a response. I’m working tonight and when they offer me a beer towards the end of the shift I’m going to refuse it. 
What!?! Heroin suppresses T-levels. I was was told the opposite. No wonder my squat hasn’t improved in the last two years…:o