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Does anyone have any info or suggestions about me taking Creatine? How much?? how often?? I am 22 years old, 144.6lbs, on the TSPA diet/training routine, and looking to gain some lean body mass and drop another 20 lbs.

katy.slaughter wrote:Does anyone have any info or suggestions about me taking Creatine? How much?? how often?? I am 22 years old, 144.6lbs, on the TSPA diet/training routine, and looking to gain some lean body mass and drop another 20 lbs.

My biggest suggestion on Creatine? Cheap is good. Do not buy any creatine funnified powders (jack3d, ethyl-esters, etc). The best, the most thoroughly and rigorously proven, is the original creatine monohydrate. Bought on its own in an un-tinkered state, it's dirt cheap.

As to how much... the goal is to saturate the muscles and stay there. You can theoretically accelerate this with a "load phase" - 5 heaping teaspoons over the run of the day for 5 days, and then the regular "maintenance" of 2 heaping teaspoons a day (basically before and after your workout). You literally can't OD on this stuff, you just pee out any excess. There's also no real reason to cycle off it, either. Creatine is best absorbed on an empty stomach, dissolves best in warm to hot liquids (I like to mix mine in 8 oz of piping hot water, then water it down with cold til it's drinkable), and is unstable in water - meaning you absolutely cannot let it sit for any length of time at all, mix and consume. There are creatine pills, but a fistfull of pills can be a nuisance and they just aren't cost effective.

Thanx! I actually have some I bought on Bodybuilding.com and wasnt going to start taking it til I got more info. Im also curious about the weight gain(water weight) as well. As a girl, when your pants dont fit, they dont fit...regardless if its just water when we see on the scale or feel bigger its emotionally draining!! As well as not knowing if im dropping weight from the diet/training or not from the bloat! I know the benefits of taking it are more than I should be worrying about me "maybe" gaining 1-4lbs, just gotta get my thoughts out there!

I used to supplement with creatine. My friends started noticing my hair thinning and I did to, I read in a few places that creatine can be related to premature balding I don't know how true this is, but my hair thickened out a little bit when I quit using it.

katy.slaughter wrote:Thanx! I actually have some I bought on Bodybuilding.com and wasnt going to start taking it til I got more info. Im also curious about the weight gain(water weight) as well. As a girl, when your pants dont fit, they dont fit...regardless if its just water when we see on the scale or feel bigger its emotionally draining!! As well as not knowing if im dropping weight from the diet/training or not from the bloat! I know the benefits of taking it are more than I should be worrying about me "maybe" gaining 1-4lbs, just gotta get my thoughts out there!

Lemme break down this bloat thing a little bit then.

This isn't simple bloating. Yes, I know, as a girl you have a few unique challenges in terms of body shape and clothing, and you are probably more acquainted with bloating than any guy will ever be. But this is not just a matter of 5 extra pounds of water making you look pudgy. This is a matter of your skeletal muscle taking up the creatine - and water with it - which it uses in a round about way for energy. When contracting (i.e. moving somethign, like a barbell or anything else for that matter), ATP converts to ADP and then the muscle will break apart the Creatine to put phosphate back into the ADP and re-use it. This means your muscle can do more work and will take longer to fatigue than without. More work before fatigue means more reps before failure means more muscle growth since strength directly correlates to cross-sectional size.

The water bit comes from the simple fact that your muscles are mostly water, and they take in water to store creatine for later use. For most folks, this is hardly noticeable. We're talking maybe a pound or two of water weight, spread across every last cell of skeletal muscle you have from head to toe. Additionally, all this storage happens in your muscle - so we're talking your arms or your legs or buttocks might look more muscular, but you won't look like you've gotten fatter.

Now, this water weight thing works both ways. Your body stores extra water to store extra creatine, but it also stores water to store glycogen - and the reverse is also true. Since we are low-carbers (be it TSPA, MANS or GLAD), you do not have sufficient carbs incoming to fully replenish muscle glycogen, and each workout depletes your glycogen a little more. The body stores 5g of water for every 1g of glycogen, and you'll burn off way more glycogen than you're taking in creatine. The net effect basically makes the one cancel the other. If anything, over the first two weeks starting MANS or TSPA, you'll look slimmer since the water retained from the creatine is less than what's lost from glycogen depletion. On those two programs you'll also see a bit of an increase during your carb-up periods, but it burns right back off. For this reason, always do your weigh-ins and your BF% measurements right before you begin your carb-ups, or you'll screw up your measurements - and stay off the scale the rest of the week, or you'll just make yourself insane.

As for dropping weight... you don't want to drop weight. You need to make peace with your scale. It is not your enemy, it does not hate you, and all your frustration towards the number it displays is futile. You want to drop fat. This means you will invariably reach the point at which you look at yourself in the mirror, and you notice how much more toned and fit you look - and discover you've lost a miniscule amount of overall weight. You'd said you were 145 lbs and 23% body fat. For your abs to show (aka have a six pack), you need to get under 17%. If you gained absolutely no muscle, and you lost only fat, you'd be dropping about 12 pounds off your 5'4" frame. What actually happens if you do not take great pains to preserve and build muscle mass while cutting is you end up losing closer to 80% fat and 20% lean mass for every pound lost - which means you're going down to 123, taking 22 pounds of person off, of which nearly 5 lbs is muscle and the rest is fat. You do not want these results.

Back me up here, guys. Scrawny women are not any more attractive than scrawny men. The one and only way around this is to disassociate losing weight from success, and start thinking in terms of losing fat. This means when you weigh yourself (weekly, and not more often than that, and ideally about the same time of day on the same day each week), you're going to weigh yourself, take a body fat reading, and look at just the fat lost as being good. Losing mostly fat? YAY! Great! Losing fat and not losing weight? Even better! Losing fat faster than losing overall weight means you're building muscle tissue, which makes it easier to actually stay lean, and it looks a lot better, too. I mean, come on, you've seen those uber-fit trainer women right? Those are the results you want. The firmer buns, the sexy lean midsection, the god-awful underarm jiggle gone buh-byes - these are products of muscle gain, not fat loss.

I completely understand the emotional baggage that goes along with not fitting into somethign for all the wrong reason. I've been there, and I've done that; I know exactly what you're talking about. I know how much it sucks when you've come such a long way and you step on the scale and you haven't done anything different, haven't even sniffed a treat let alone eaten one, and there's no more weight lost - or worse it goes up. When you work your ass off and you pull those skinny jeans out of the closet and either they don't button or they're so tight you can't breathe, it feels like failure. Maybe it's because I'm gay and we're as image-brainwashed as women, or maybe it's just human nature, but it fucking sucks in the worst way possible to the point of making you question whether or not all the effort is even worth it when this happens. Remind yourself of your goal - and remember where you came from. I kept a pair of my biggest pants in my closet, though I will likely never fit into them again - and I keep them right next to the skinniest of my skinny jeans in my closet, specifically for the bad days when they don't fit, so I have the visual of several extra inches of material from the pants that used to be the only ones I could wear comfortably to the ones that are now just a bit too tight. I'd encourage you to sit down and think about what you can use as a reminder of your progress, if for no other reason than to help yourself get over the horrible psychological impact of a bad day. No matter what you do, no matter what program, you are going to have these days, and they are going to feel like soul-crushing disasters. You will have crappy work outs. You will have struggles with your diet. You may even have a major issue or twelve along the way. But you've come entirely too far to give up over one lousy day.

The fat will go. You will make the fat go, if for no other reason than you're bent and determined to get rid of it. You've already done a bang-up job of getting rid of loads of fat, proving that yes, you do in fact have what it takes to look the way you want to look and have the body you want to have. Yes, you will have bad days, and you will get through them, just like you've gotten through every other bad day this far. Yes, with that fat loss will come weight loss, but at 5'4" and 145, you simply don't need to shed twenty pounds. You want to get rid of 12 pounds of fat - or less, if you can manage to build some muscle along the way. Bust out your calipers, and start thinking more about body composition than weight. Your weight might dictate which size jeans you're fitting or not fitting these days, but it's your body composition that will determine how good you look in them. Sure, we got a little off track from your original question on creatine bloating (which I hope I adequately addressed, scream at me if I didn't), but I hope this helps just the same.

mhcoss wrote:I used to supplement with creatine. My friends started noticing my hair thinning and I did to, I read in a few places that creatine can be related to premature balding I don't know how true this is, but my hair thickened out a little bit when I quit using it.

In some subjects, yes, but it's not very common.

The physiology is basically more creatine and more strength training means more DHT, a metabolite of Testosterone, which directly causes male pattern hair loss. However, Katy is a girl, so she doesn't have testosterone to metabolize into DHT in the first place.

Now, if you're a girl, and you had this problem, then something else may be at play - or I need to do tons more digging for a more accurate explanation!

JoH wrote:

katy.slaughter wrote:Thanx! I actually have some I bought on Bodybuilding.com and wasnt going to start taking it til I got more info. Im also curious about the weight gain(water weight) as well. As a girl, when your pants dont fit, they dont fit...regardless if its just water when we see on the scale or feel bigger its emotionally draining!! As well as not knowing if im dropping weight from the diet/training or not from the bloat! I know the benefits of taking it are more than I should be worrying about me "maybe" gaining 1-4lbs, just gotta get my thoughts out there!

Lemme break down this bloat thing a little bit then.

This isn't simple bloating. Yes, I know, as a girl you have a few unique challenges in terms of body shape and clothing, and you are probably more acquainted with bloating than any guy will ever be. But this is not just a matter of 5 extra pounds of water making you look pudgy. This is a matter of your skeletal muscle taking up the creatine - and water with it - which it uses in a round about way for energy. When contracting (i.e. moving somethign, like a barbell or anything else for that matter), ATP converts to ADP and then the muscle will break apart the Creatine to put phosphate back into the ADP and re-use it. This means your muscle can do more work and will take longer to fatigue than without. More work before fatigue means more reps before failure means more muscle growth since strength directly correlates to cross-sectional size.

The water bit comes from the simple fact that your muscles are mostly water, and they take in water to store creatine for later use. For most folks, this is hardly noticeable. We're talking maybe a pound or two of water weight, spread across every last cell of skeletal muscle you have from head to toe. Additionally, all this storage happens in your muscle - so we're talking your arms or your legs or buttocks might look more muscular, but you won't look like you've gotten fatter.

Now, this water weight thing works both ways. Your body stores extra water to store extra creatine, but it also stores water to store glycogen - and the reverse is also true. Since we are low-carbers (be it TSPA, MANS or GLAD), you do not have sufficient carbs incoming to fully replenish muscle glycogen, and each workout depletes your glycogen a little more. The body stores 5g of water for every 1g of glycogen, and you'll burn off way more glycogen than you're taking in creatine. The net effect basically makes the one cancel the other. If anything, over the first two weeks starting MANS or TSPA, you'll look slimmer since the water retained from the creatine is less than what's lost from glycogen depletion. On those two programs you'll also see a bit of an increase during your carb-up periods, but it burns right back off. For this reason, always do your weigh-ins and your BF% measurements right before you begin your carb-ups, or you'll screw up your measurements - and stay off the scale the rest of the week, or you'll just make yourself insane.

As for dropping weight... you don't want to drop weight. You need to make peace with your scale. It is not your enemy, it does not hate you, and all your frustration towards the number it displays is futile. You want to drop fat. This means you will invariably reach the point at which you look at yourself in the mirror, and you notice how much more toned and fit you look - and discover you've lost a miniscule amount of overall weight. You'd said you were 145 lbs and 23% body fat. For your abs to show (aka have a six pack), you need to get under 17%. If you gained absolutely no muscle, and you lost only fat, you'd be dropping about 12 pounds off your 5'4" frame. What actually happens if you do not take great pains to preserve and build muscle mass while cutting is you end up losing closer to 80% fat and 20% lean mass for every pound lost - which means you're going down to 123, taking 22 pounds of person off, of which nearly 5 lbs is muscle and the rest is fat. You do not want these results.

Back me up here, guys. Scrawny women are not any more attractive than scrawny men. The one and only way around this is to disassociate losing weight from success, and start thinking in terms of losing fat. This means when you weigh yourself (weekly, and not more often than that, and ideally about the same time of day on the same day each week), you're going to weigh yourself, take a body fat reading, and look at just the fat lost as being good. Losing mostly fat? YAY! Great! Losing fat and not losing weight? Even better! Losing fat faster than losing overall weight means you're building muscle tissue, which makes it easier to actually stay lean, and it looks a lot better, too. I mean, come on, you've seen those uber-fit trainer women right? Those are the results you want. The firmer buns, the sexy lean midsection, the god-awful underarm jiggle gone buh-byes - these are products of muscle gain, not fat loss.

I completely understand the emotional baggage that goes along with not fitting into somethign for all the wrong reason. I've been there, and I've done that; I know exactly what you're talking about. I know how much it sucks when you've come such a long way and you step on the scale and you haven't done anything different, haven't even sniffed a treat let alone eaten one, and there's no more weight lost - or worse it goes up. When you work your ass off and you pull those skinny jeans out of the closet and either they don't button or they're so tight you can't breathe, it feels like failure. Maybe it's because I'm gay and we're as image-brainwashed as women, or maybe it's just human nature, but it fucking sucks in the worst way possible to the point of making you question whether or not all the effort is even worth it when this happens. Remind yourself of your goal - and remember where you came from. I kept a pair of my biggest pants in my closet, though I will likely never fit into them again - and I keep them right next to the skinniest of my skinny jeans in my closet, specifically for the bad days when they don't fit, so I have the visual of several extra inches of material from the pants that used to be the only ones I could wear comfortably to the ones that are now just a bit too tight. I'd encourage you to sit down and think about what you can use as a reminder of your progress, if for no other reason than to help yourself get over the horrible psychological impact of a bad day. No matter what you do, no matter what program, you are going to have these days, and they are going to feel like soul-crushing disasters. You will have crappy work outs. You will have struggles with your diet. You may even have a major issue or twelve along the way. But you've come entirely too far to give up over one lousy day.

The fat will go. You will make the fat go, if for no other reason than you're bent and determined to get rid of it. You've already done a bang-up job of getting rid of loads of fat, proving that yes, you do in fact have what it takes to look the way you want to look and have the body you want to have. Yes, you will have bad days, and you will get through them, just like you've gotten through every other bad day this far. Yes, with that fat loss will come weight loss, but at 5'4" and 145, you simply don't need to shed twenty pounds. You want to get rid of 12 pounds of fat - or less, if you can manage to build some muscle along the way. Bust out your calipers, and start thinking more about body composition than weight. Your weight might dictate which size jeans you're fitting or not fitting these days, but it's your body composition that will determine how good you look in them. Sure, we got a little off track from your original question on creatine bloating (which I hope I adequately addressed, scream at me if I didn't), but I hope this helps just the same.

First, you definitely know your stuff and two, THANK YOU SO MUCH for what you wrote. You did not only clear up my creatine question but threw some info in there that I needed. The whole “is creatine going to make me fat” just sounds stupid now! Lol. The benefits will be greater compared to maybe a little difference on the scale or feeling a little bloated. The way you explained it made a lot of sense and hearing that made me feel better about it.

As for losing that much weight, it’s just something I’ve always said. “I want to lose weight…I want to be 120lbs” but I know in order to look the way I want (lean/muscular/fit), that CANNOT be what happens. As losing fat I would also lose muscle and I DON’T want that…I do understand that part. As much as I know I shouldn’t worry about the scale number it always gets to me, but I feel a lot better about it since I read your message. I know these things in my head but it’s almost like I need to keep having them drilled in my head for me to see the light…lol. Every week, on the same day and time, I will take my measurements, my bf%, my weight and even take pictures and just know I am doing all I can to get to my goal and not get frustrated with the little things (like the scale). Everything with this goal is a learning process and getting better day by day with everything I hear, read, and learn!

Thank you for your inspirational words When I do have a bad day or I am really craving something bad, I get frustrated and want to quit. But I do look at how far I’ve come, all the crap I’ve endured, how hard I’ve pushed myself through workouts/diets and knowing that I did all that just means I can keep going as long as it takes! It takes rare people like you and I to see a goal and even though we hit snags (and lots of them) we continue to push ourselves through hell to see heaven. Thanks again