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Part 3
07 Oct 2009 4:51PM
Try foods you used to dislike or have never eaten before. After several weeks of overeating, everything begins to taste the same. Even your favorite foods lose their flavor. You exhaust your repertoire of choices. Open it up. Go for the calamari or the shark fin soup. Try a quiche. Eat at an ethnic restaurant.
Find new favorites that you can eat lots of. I hated cottage cheese as a youngster, but now I mix it in with spaghetti and dump it into soups! I even eat the fat free variety on a reducing diet! You will surprise yourself. Don't be afraid to try. You may still dislike salmon, but you may get a taste for artichoke after all.
Drink regular soda pop (possibly caffeine free) and whole milk. Never drink any fluids that don't have calories. No tea without sugar, no coffee without cream and sugar, no diet beverages whatsoever. No plain water! Canned soda pop is an excellent source of purified water. But it also has precious calories. Gatorade is fine and has electrolytes as well. 108 ounces a day is the minimum.
But don't fill your stomach without putting some calories in along with. A 12 0z. can of soda pop has about 150 calories. Quench your thirst and give your body more calories at the same time. ( I'm not knocking water, folks, I'm just illustrating that you can hydrate yourself and get calories in the bargain. )
Count your calories. You may think you are consuming an abundance of food, but you're probably giving yourself too much credit. It is very hard to eat over 5000 calories every day for weeks on end. And if its 7 or 8,000 you think you're getting in every day I think you'd better check that. Often a trainee will eat 6,000 calories on Monday, but then stoop to 3500 or so for the next two days.
Then Thursday maybe get 5500 and follow that for two days of 3000. all the while they believe that they are eating 6000 every day. Avoid this kind of fluxuation. Keep a solid average. And keep track. At least for a series of days every now and then. A few days a month check up on yourself. If your goal is 5500 calories a day add it all up and make sure. You'll soon get better at estimating and you won't have to go through this so much.
But take my advice, if you are not seeing the scale move the way you think it should, double check your count. You most likely are overestimating your intake. This gives you feedback so you can make adjustments. Even if you're an old pro at calorie counting it's a good idea to take account every so often.
Issues and Precautions
This kind of diet is admittedly not the most conducive to your overall health. But we should get one thing straight - you are not doing it for health reasons, you are doing it for better performance in your chosen sport. This is one of those "quality of life" issues. You choose to pursue powerlifting because of reasons other than improved health such as challenge, personal pride, self esteem benefits, sense of strength, or any other of a basket full of psycho/emotional reasons not to mention the sheer fun of it!
There are plenty of health benefits to the sport of powerlifting and weight training in general which have all been outlined many times before. I acknowledge those, of course, I'm just saying that if you are competing and trying to bulk up, you probably have more personal motives for continuing to put so much into this sport. And those motives most likely supersede any health benefits.
Having said that, let me turn the table back on your health. This style of diet can have very serious effects on your body. One effect is a dramatic improvement in your strength. But another effect is an increase in your blood cholesterol level! It would be irresponsible of me to ignore the down side?E So I'll give a few suggestions of what I feel is prudent and responsible behavior that would accompany such an eating program. (It's all common sense, anyway!)
Have your cholesterol checked before you begin. Get a baseline. If you have high levels, you may want to reconsider and see your doctor about options to lower it.
PART 4
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