kinds of foods you eat on the weekends to see what gives you maximum muscle size. You’ll know
on Tuesday or Wednesday morning if what you’ve been eating is right for you. If it is, you’ll be
looking good. Muscles will be huge and you’ll be cut up with a nice, pronounced vascularity.
If you don’t look good, you’ll know you did something wrong. Go back and rework your
diet the next weekend and see if you can get some improvement. That’s the beauty of this diet.
By the time a contest approaches, you’ve already perfected your contest diet by practicing it
during the “cutting” phase.
On the old carb diet, you did this only once. On this diet, you do it every week during the
“cutting” phase, and you become an expert in how to manipulate your body for a contest.
Experiment with high and low-sugar foods and percentages of fat intake on these weekends.
See what they do for you. Treat each weekend as if your contest were imminent. That way you’ll
know what it takes to come into a contest looking your best. You’ll also experience an increase in
confidence because you’ll know what to expect from your body and how to get it contest ready.
The “Pre-Contest” Phase
One of the many advantages of this diet is that, if you want to enter a lot of contests, you can
manipulate your diet so you never get much above the 8 percent bodyfat level. You don’t have
those huge gains in bodyfat here. At 8 percent, you can drop to contest level in 2–3 weeks. It
won’t take a great deal of time.
Still, for most purposes, you’ll want to go into the “pre-contest” phase of diet and training about
16 weeks before a major contest to get ready. Again, because you already know what you need to
do from previous weekends on the diet, you will only be doing some fine tuning here by lowering
and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn’t be doing anything much out of the ordinary.
By the final 6–8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to be on
stage. With this diet, you can control things so you know exactly where you’re at each week. Following
the weekend carb loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Tuesday or Wednesday,
as the fine balance between glycogen loading to water depletion hits its optimal level.
PANIC ATTACKS
One of the things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic. They’ll
find themselves too fat and begin doing aerobics, thinking this will get the extra bodyfat off for
them. At a maximum, doing about a half hour of aerobics consistently is not going to harm
you. You’ll burn up more free fatty acids than you would not doing enough work, and this will
take off some bodyfat and get you closer to your goals.
But bodybuilders begin to panic and overdo it. They’ll start doing 3–4 hours a day of aerobics
to get that fat off, and all they do is exhaust energy stores so that the body starts using its own
muscle tissue for energy. Obviously, this is not what you want to do so close to a contest.
Likewise, if you’re really in trouble, you can start pigging out to build mass while thinking
that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It’s not going to work. Increasing calories and
aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body.
THE ANABOLIC DIET — HOW AND WHY IT WORKS 43