I am getting much more muscular...which is what I am after. The Excel seems to work for me, as it reduces the muscle soreness the next day and I don't feel as tired.

It is almost impossible to gain muscle on a strict Atkins-induction type of diet. With such a diet, your body canablizes itself.

Weightlifters train in two "cycles"; bulking and cutting. There is also a difference between a "clean bulk" (eating the right way...kind of like an Atkins maintenance phase) and a "dirty bulk" (eat everything in sight). The purpose of the bulk is to gain muscle, and the trade off is that some fat will also be put on. The cutting phase is extremely low carb, as the lifter tries to shed water and burn every bit of excess fat, with the knowledge that they will also lose some muscle in the process.

The diet I try to follow is called the "T-Dawg" diet. Here are the details (although I do not take the supplements called for):
-------------

In a nutshell, eat a very low-carb, high-fat, adequate-protein diet all day, but after your workout, drink a big shake that includes carbs—in essence, Atkins meets Poliquin. A weekday might look like this:

Breakfast
• Eggs, bacon

Lunch
• Hamburger meat topped with cheese

Afternoon snack
• Nuts, cheese, beef jerky, boiled eggs, etc.

Pre-workout (optional)
• Dose of Ribose-C

Post-workout meal
• Grow! with optional hit of Ribose-C

Dinner
• Testosterone "mess o' greens" salad (described later in the article), steak, chicken, or fish, etc.

Here comes the Anabolic diet's influence. On Saturday, eat whatever you've been craving during the week. Then the tweakability factor kicks in—if you're a "hardgainer" or naturally lean, eat what you want all day. If you're on the chubby side, have only one "free meal" that weekend.

Other considerations:

• Add one day of cardio to your routine, if necessary.

• Your carb limit for the day is approximately 30 grams, not including your post-workout shake! Your total carb allocation for your workout day, including your post-workout shake, is about 70 grams: 30 from your regular diet (or your regular diet and one pre-workout serving of Ribose-C) and 40 from your post-workout shake (the carbs found in Grow!, with some added maltodextrin or one serving of Ribose-C). On non-workout days, your total allocation of carbs is 30 grams.

• You'll need to count calories for a few weeks to help you manipulate the diet to fit your individual needs. Keep the macros the same, but toy with the calories until you reach your goal. Then, you could probably eat instinctively.

• Weigh yourself once per week and at the same time of the day, say, Saturday morning upon rising and just after taking a morning wee-wee.

• Other supplements that you may want to include are Power Drive on free eating days to combat drowsiness (incidentally, a carb-free Power Drive is in the works and should be available any time now), Tribex-500 and ZMA to further the anabolic effects, MD6 to make the whole process faster and easier, and EAS alpha lipoic acid to make Saturday's carb loading even more effective. (If you're a woman, don't use the Tribex.)

• Supplements that you must use include folic acid to help control homocysteine levels, flaxseed oil and fish oil capsules to counter any cholesterol problems, and a high-quality multivitamin to fill in any possible nutritional gaps.

• Don't use MD6 on your Saturday carb-up day. For one, taking MD6 would make you forget about food, thus negating the benefits of the carb-up day. Two, your receptors need a day off from MD6 so they can "up-regulate."

• Add psyllium fiber (Metamucil) to your shakes so that you get about 25 grams of fiber a day. (The Testosterone "mess o' greens" salad, although nutritious, only contains a gram or two of fiber, so you'll need more.) Incidentally, vanilla Grow! blended with Ribose-C and orange-flavored Metamucil is pretty damn good! Tastes like Richard Simmons—smooth and fruity. Then again, maybe that's a really bad analogy, sorry. (In lieu of the Metamucil, you could always use the unfortunately named Colon Cleanse product at night. It's carb-free and calorie-free, sort of like eating some emulsified plywood.)

• Protein intake should be 1.4-1.8 grams per kilogram (0.6-0.8 grams per pound) of bodyweight. The rest of the calories should come from carbs (limits defined above) and fat. Don't try to make up the rest of your calorie requirements by eating more protein. The body will eventually deaminate the amino acids and make glucose so that you'll have no hope of reaching ketosis, even though this diet doesn't necessarily require you to enter complete ketosis in order for it to work.

• If you're going to use a high-carb (or higher-carb) post-workout shake, it's best to drink it later in the day so that you don't feel groggy. In other words, work out later in the day, if possible.

The following offers some simplistic but effective guidelines to help you figure out your caloric needs:

1) Weigh yourself.

2) Determine if you have a slow, medium, or fast metabolism. If you always feel warm and find yourself fidgeting all of the time, chances are that you have a fast metabolism. If you gain weight easily and often feel sluggish, then you probably have a slow metabolism. And, if you fall somewhere in the middle, alternating between periods of high energy and low energy, you probably have a medium metabolism.

3) If it's slow, remember the number 16. If it's medium, remember the number 17. If it's fast, remember the number 18.

4) Take this number and multiply it by your bodyweight. Don't make the same mistake that NASA made and get the metric system mixed up with pounds, or you could end up crashing into Mars instead of losing some bodyfat. The number that you come up represents the number of calories that you need to take in each day in order to maintain your weight.

4) Subtract 500 calories per day, and that's your daily caloric target. However, for the first week—until you get used to the diet—subtract only about 250 calories per day.


A synopsis of the T-Dawg diet

Again, to synopsize, you're going to figure out approximately how many calories that you need each day to maintain your weight (using the guidelines above). You'll start the diet immediately, but for the first week, you'll only reduce your daily intake by 250 calories, until you get used to the low-carb diet. After this "breaking in" phase, you'll need to drop it by 500 calories per day.

Your daily protein intake should be 1.4-1.8 grams per kilogram (0.6-0.8 grams per pound) of bodyweight. On workout days, you'll take in roughly 70 grams of carbs, while on non-workout days, you'll only take in 30 grams of carbs. The rest of the calories will come from fat—either from the fat contained in the protein foods that you're eating, or from flaxseed oil or fish oil capsules. During these "diet days," you might want to make the whole thing easier by taking MD6. You must, however, use folic acid to keep your ticker healthy.

On Saturday, eat all the carbs you want, but don't take MD6 on that day. Instead, use 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid, three times a day (600 mg total). If you really pig out, you might want to increase the dosage another 300-400 mg a day (900-1,000 mg total). Go back to the high-fat, low-carb program on Sunday.

Follow the program for eight weeks, only weighing yourself once a week to monitor your progress.


Questions

Why are you recommending the T-Dawg diet instead of TC's Delta 1250 diet? Good question. Although we think that the Delta 1250 diet is a commonsense approach, we're intrigued by the current spate of high-protein, high-fat diets, and we want to know what works and what doesn't. Besides, the Delta 1250 diet is geared a little bit more toward gaining mass while losing a modicum of fat. The T-Dawg diet is geared more toward fat loss, although you could well gain some mass from it. Both diets work, but we want to compare the results. As we mentioned in TC's earlier diet, you're all our lab wabbits.

Why moderate to high fat intake? Dietary fat has been called the most anabolic "supplement" that you can take. 'Nuff said about that, but fat also helps the brain signal the "stop eating" sign. In other words, you get full faster and stay satisfied longer. Also, according to some studies, a low-fat diet can lead to low T levels. And perhaps most importantly, as far as this diet is concerned, it ensures an even insulin release.

Why low carbs? This will control insulin, reduce or end cravings, counter the "store fat" message, and keep physical and mental energy levels constant. It will also cause a carbohydrate "deficiency" that will lead to a several-fold increase in the oxidation of fatty acids. (For you science types, the lack of carbs will cause the body to go into ketogenesis, which results from messing up the equilibrium between the degradation of fatty acid to acetyl-Co-A and its incorporation into the TCA cycle. As a result, the oxidation of fatty acids increases big-time.)

So why some carbs after a workout? They will lower cortisol levels and, to a smaller extent, help increase glycogen levels. Combined with a high-quality MRP, it will provide the body with everything that it needs to quickly get to work with repair and recovery.

Does this diet rely on ketosis and, if so, won't taking carbs after a workout kick me out of ketosis? If you talk to Atkins, you need to keep your daily carb intake under 20 grams to enter ketosis. Still, this will vary from person to person. Some of you may find yourself entering ketosis, but others won't. It doesn't matter too much. Just plain avoiding many of the highly processed carbs that we all normally end up eating every day will cause this diet to work. If you enter ketosis, and you have some carbs, you'll only exit ketosis temporarily. The key is to not overdo it. The amount of carbs in a serving of post-workout Grow! (23 grams), one serving of Ribose-C (12 grams), and a scoop of Metamucil (5 grams) isn't enough to screw things up. Besides, the benefits could outweigh any potential negatives.

How can I incorporate Ribose-C into this program since it contains some carbs? Easy. One pre-workout serving of Ribose-C contains 12 grams of carbs. Just subtract that amount from your daily carb allocation. And, instead of including maltodextrin in your post-workout shake, add one serving of Ribose-C. You can probably skip Ribose-C on non-workout days.

Why a free eating day? The moment that a diet—any diet—puts certain food off limits forever, it's doomed to failure. You want pizza? Fine. But according to your own customized version of the T-Dawg diet, you can only have it at a certain time during the week. It's easy to stick with a diet if you only have to put cravings off for a few days. If you're thinking, "I can never have pizza again," you're likely to say, "Screw that!" and get off the diet. Also, you can plan your free day or free meal around social events like dates, holidays, and business lunches. No more misery at restaurants, if you time it right.

Why use MD6? You don't have to, but it will make the diet even more effective. MD6 works on the parts of the brain that control appetite (it decreases appetite). It also increases thermogenesis through both thyroidal and non-thyroidal mechanisms, along with increasing the insulin sensitivity of skeletal muscle. In short, it burns fat like a mothuh!

Why use folic acid? Homocysteine is a byproduct of protein metabolism that's been implicated as a "smoking gun" in heart disease. Simply taking 400-800 micrograms of folic acid a day will keep homocysteine levels in check.

Why use alpha lipoic acid? ALA is a potent, insulin-mimicking agent, among other things. If you're following this diet, you'll want to remove as much glucose as you safely can and as fast as you can from your bloodstream. If you've got too much glucose in your plasma, there's absolutely no chance that you'll enter—or be able to maintain—ketosis. To accomplish this, the muscles have to utilize glucose peripherally. Additionally, you want to minimize or stop amino acid-derived gluconeogenesis from occurring in the liver, as this can also throw you out of ketosis. A recent study found that ALA dramatically increased peripheral glucose utilization in diabetic patients. Administration of ALA to fasting nondiabetic or diabetic rats caused a rapid reduction in blood glucose with no effect on circulating insulin levels.

Even if you're not following a "near ketosis" diet, ALA can help you. Another recent study found that ALA is able to stimulate glucose uptake in insulin-resistant cells, and it may have therapeutic implications in increasing glucose availability in tissues such as skeletal muscle. Since glucose is the predominant fuel that powers your muscles, increasing the available glucose in muscle cells is akin to putting a bigger gas tank and intake manifold in your car—you can go a "whole lot farther" (or increase the number of repetitions that you're doing for a given exercise), and you can "increase the horsepower and torque" (or increase the amount of weight in a given lift).

Biotest MD6 contains ALA, but you may want to use the ALA formula by EAS on Saturdays, when you're not taking MD6 and you're loading up on carbs. We recommend using 200 mg, three times a day.

What type of workout should I do while on this diet? It depends on how much fat that you've got to lose. If you're tired of people rallying around you to push you back into the ocean so you can live out your life at sea with the other cetaceans, you might want to try the German Body Comp workout described in the Bowlful of Jelly article from Issue 34 of Testosterone. If you're close to your fighting weight and want to gain muscle mass while on this diet, you may want to try any one of the other programs described in past issues of Testosterone, like the German Volume Training, the 1-6 Principle, or the Maximal Weights programs.

How much fish oil or flaxseed oil do I need to take? Unfortunately, any fat you don't get from the protein foods that you'll be eating will probably come from flaxseed oil or fish oil capsules. Remember, one tablespoon of oil contains about 135 calories.


The Testosterone "mess o' greens" salad

Hey, we need roughage and the various nutrients and phytochemicals that can be found in salads. We offer the following low-carb, high-fat salad that meshes rather nicely with the T-Dawg diet:

Romaine lettuce
Amount—1 cup (3 medium leaves), shredded
Calories—8
Protein—1.0 grams
Carbs—1.4 grams
Fat—0.2 grams

Green peppers
Amount—1/4 cup, chopped
Calories—6
Protein—0.25 grams
Carbs—1.3 grams
Fat—0.15 grams

Radishes
Amount—5 medium
Calories—4
Protein—0.1 grams
Carbs—0.8 grams
Fat—0.1 grams

Cucumbers
Amount—1/4 cup, sliced
Calories—3.5
Protein—0.15 grams
Carbs—0.75 grams
Fat—0.02 grams

Hard-boiled eggs
Amount—2
Calories—158
Protein—12.2 grams
Carbs—1.2 grams
Fat—11.2 grams

Feta cheese
Amount—1 ounce
Calories—100
Protein—6.0 grams
Carbs—1.0 grams
Fat—8.0 grams

Italian dressing (Kraft)
Amount—1 tablespoon
Calories—72
Protein—0.0 grams
Carbs—1.0 grams
Fat—8.0 grams

Totals
Calories—351
Protein—19.7 grams
Carbs—6.91 grams
Fat—27.67 grams

We recommend that you follow this diet for eight weeks. For Chris and myself, the whole low-carb, high-fat approach is about balance—not about fearing fat or overdoing carbs. We think that when those among you who have traditionally been low-fat, high-carb eaters see the results of the T-Dawg diet, you'll probably keep your highly processed carb intake in check forever. After all, stable energy levels and lack of cravings can be kind of addictive.