Most athletes in most sports keep detailed books on what works for them and what doesn’t.
Keeping your own book will give you a record of what you’ve done, and give you added
confidence with the moves you make in training and diet. You won’t be playing hit and miss.
You may back off on the documentation after being on the diet for some time and becoming
familiar with it, but you’ll still want to make at least weekly notes on your findings as you proceed.
LONG-TERM LOADING ON WEEKENDS
Some people will cheat in the other direction on this diet, and they’ll pay for it. They get to
Thursday and then decide they’re going to start their carb load on Friday. They continue it on
through Saturday and Sunday and, guess what? Their body shifts back to carbohydrate
metabolism. 3 DAYS IS TOO MUCH. At that point, you’re running a real risk of losing the
fat burning advantage this diet gives you.
But the high fat diet is forgiving to a large degree. If you’re at a birthday party in the middle
of the week and don’t want to be anti-social, you can have that piece of cake. Likewise, business
or social conditions may warrant a high carb meal during the week, on occasion. Don’t worry
about it. As long as you get right back on the high fat diet, you won’t find your body shifting
back. After you’ve been on the diet for awhile, it will usually take 3 days of continuous carbs for
the metabolism to shift back.
In fact, the longer you’re on the Anabolic Diet, the more time it seems to take to go back to
a carbohydrate metabolism. It will eventually become as difficult to make the switch back to
burning glucose for energy as it was to go through the metabolic shift to become a fat-burner.
It may be tough to make the metabolic shift originally, but it’s also tough to shift back.
The Anabolic Diet suppresses the glycolytic pathway used when carbs are the primary energy
source. At the same time, the lipolytic (fat burning) pathway is activated. The longer you’re on
the diet, the more carbohydrate loading it seems to require to kick in fully again. Even if you go
out on the road and you’re forced to change diets for a week, you can generally return to the
diet without going through the difficulties of the original metabolic shift if you’ve become an
Anabolic Diet veteran.
One bodybuilder who’s been on the diet for nearly 3 years began limiting most of his
carbohydrate consumption to a bowl of ice cream at the end of the day after being on the diet
for several months. Several months later he took a closer look at the package his favorite ice
cream came in, and found he was actually eating double the carbs he thought he was. Yet he
never spilled back over to the glucose metabolism. It seems that, through the suppression of the
glycolytic enzyme, his body had set a new level of tolerance for carbohydrates.
Not that we suggest you double your carb intake during the weekdays. This is just to say that
the Anabolic Diet doesn’t make you pay dearly for any mistake. After shifting over on the diet,
it will generally take 3 days of carbs to do serious metabolic damage to your cause.
VARYING CALORIES
Bodybuilders have found that if they do the same workout every day, their body will eventually
SPECIAL MODIFICATIONS 67