Bodybuilding Forums

Thanks again for all the responses I have had to my other questions,

I seem to have got my diet sort of on track, keeping my net carbs around the 30g'ish mark am feeling tired though.

What I wanted to know, is there a way of ascertaining how many carbs / fats and protein I need a day for my build, activity, and body weight etc ?

For instance my data for yesterday was:

3,239 Cals

216.7 Fat

40.3 Carb

255.8 Protein.

How do I know that I am taking enough or too much fats for instance ? For protein I know my lean mass requirement is 191 g of protein )at the moment) but want to build muscle so 255g is not a problem (or so I have been told)

I don't seem to have a guide on Fats, how much etc - any ideas ?

Hey there,

I can't really give you advice on how much fat, although if you're body goes from a fat burning metabolism to a carbohydrate burning one, too much fat will make you fat quick.

I do recall Mark's MANS programming suggesting to start off at 30 grams and that if your energy is low, add a few more grams (let's say 5-10) and wait a week to see if your energy goes up. Keep in mind that the switch from carb metabolism to fat metabolism can leave you sluggish and it's well known in the low carb community that this will go away. However, if you feel weak at the gym, consider a slight increase in carbs to find that 'sweet spot'.

Try using this formula to determine how many calories you might want to start with. http://www.musclehack.com/how-many-calo ... ld-muscle/

Take that number and subtract off 4 * (the number of grams of carbohydrates + number of grams of protein you ate). That's the number of calories from fat. Divide that by 9 to get the number of grams of fat.

You need to know your lean body mass to do this. Since you say your body's protein requirement is 191 g/day, you must already know it to be (191/2.75) = 69.45 kg/152.8 pounds.

370+(69.45*21.6) = 1870. So that's your "lying in bed keeping your organs alive" caloric needs. Your occupation can tell you the multiplier to use to determine your maintenance level. Let's assume you have a light work occupation, so 1870 * 1.5 = 2805. Then add in the calories you burn in exercise. You can wear a heart rate monitor or you can use one of the millions of charts and calculators available online to estimate. Suppose you lift 5 days a week for 45 minutes each and burn 225 calories doing it. So on lift days, you eat 3030 calories and on rest days 2805. Or, you could take the average-out approach, and say that 225 * 5 = 1125 and 2805 * 7 = 19635, so the total calories for the week needed is 20760, so each day you eat 2965 calories.

But there's not a whole lot of difference there, is there? So in that hypothetical example, it makes sense just to eat 3000 calories a day and call it good, experiment with it for several weeks, then measure yourself and check your progress, make any adjustments you might need, and repeat! We call that MEMAR around here, for short. Measure, Experiment, Measure, Adjust, Repeat.

I cannot undestand why limiting the carbs immediately to lower than 30g.I know it's a protocol in MANS but if some one is eating <20% of his total calories from carbs he is low-carbing even if he is not reaching the MANS protocol. For his calorie intake means anywhere lower than 162g of carbs is low carb for him. I am eating GLAD but I have done low carb days and my carbs were between 80-100g and my fat around 100-110g. I think 80-100g is still low carb since my usual is 250-300g. Please explain, do not eat me (marochka and redgiki mostly!!)

undertaker610 wrote:I cannot undestand why limiting the carbs immediately to lower than 30g.I know it's a protocol in MANS but if some one is eating <20% of his total calories from carbs he is low-carbing even if he is not reaching the MANS protocol. For his calorie intake means anywhere lower than 162g of carbs is low carb for him. I am eating GLAD but I have done low carb days and my carbs were between 80-100g and my fat around 100-110g. I think 80-100g is still low carb since my usual is 250-300g. Please explain, do not eat me (marochka and redgiki mostly!!)

From what I've read, <100 grams of clean (low GL) carbs would put your body in ketosis. If you get the ketosis strips you perhaps could use those to monitor your ketosis threshold.

undertaker610 wrote:I cannot undestand why limiting the carbs immediately to lower than 30g.I know it's a protocol in MANS but if some one is eating <20% of his total calories from carbs he is low-carbing even if he is not reaching the MANS protocol. For his calorie intake means anywhere lower than 162g of carbs is low carb for him. I am eating GLAD but I have done low carb days and my carbs were between 80-100g and my fat around 100-110g. I think 80-100g is still low carb since my usual is 250-300g. Please explain, do not eat me (marochka and redgiki mostly!!)

I agree that it's low carb, but is it going to cause you to become fat-adapted? Because that's the point, really. Otherwise, assing around dropping your carbs below 100 will just make you tired. Though, of course, if you're like me, you'll see a benefit to your skin, cravings, mental acuity and blood sugar stability even if you don't get fat-adapted.

I personally dropped down to 30 grams of net carb per day because I didn't want anybody to claim it wasn't working for me because I wasn't doing it right. I don't show ketones in my urine, however, so there is debate whether I'm fat-adapted or not. I think I'm just one of those people who isn't built to experience depressed appetite or lose weight any faster because of low carb, but I like the other benefits so much that I'm willing to put up with the pain of giving up some of my favorite foods (or at least finding reasonable substitutes).

Of course, I think most people do experience the metabolic advantages in a low-carb diet, so I don't want to discourage anyone from trying it!

I agree that it's low carb, but is it going to cause you to become fat-adapted? Because that's the point, really. Otherwise, assing around dropping your carbs below 100 will just make you tired. Though, of course, if you're like me, you'll see a benefit to your skin, cravings, mental acuity and blood sugar stability even if you don't get fat-adapted.

Do fat adapted and ketosis (from what andrew said for the strips) go by hand? I know you produce ketones anytime you burn fat but how can you really tell you are fat adapted? Do you produce ketones in a low-carb diet even if you eat hypercaloric?

As I said I do low-carb days occasionally so I don't think I have the time to get fat adapted ,anyway.

undertaker610 wrote:Do fat adapted and ketosis (from what andrew said for the strips) go by hand?

Time to dispel a myth. "Fat adapted" isn't a light switch. It isn't an on or off thing. EVERYBODY burns body fat at some point during the day!

Your fat cells act like an energy buffer for your body. When food is in your small intestine, particles that are small enough pass through the intestinal wall directly into your bloodstream. That's why your urine will smell like coffee after you have a few cups: coffee is literally passing directly into your bloodstream within a few minutes after you drink it, and most of it gets filtered out by your kidneys into your urine shortly thereafter!

While you eat, your lean tissue and your fats gobble up nutrients from the bloodstream freely. One of the reasons we talk about "post-workout shakes" so much is that your muscle tissues gobble up more than their fair share for a short while after a workout, leaving less protein for the liver to convert into glucose.

Between meals, your fat cells release fat into the bloodstream. Everybody's body does this, particularly while they are asleep. Otherwise, you'd wake up in the middle of the night starving. In fact, those people who are most guilty of midnight snacking often have a disorder where their pancreas releases insulin into the bloodstream during the night, waking them up almost immediately and sending them hunting for food. The cause of this disorder can range from dietary (stimulants late in the day) to environmental (lights left on in the room, noises causing an adrenalin release, etc.) to disease (pancreatic cancer) or genetic (cystic fibrosis). This effect is observable in rats and humans. Insulin immediately shuts off the flow of triglycerides into the bloodstream from fat cells.

What, then, is "fat adaptation" if everybody releases fat from their fat cells any time their small intestine isn't full of food? Fat adaptation is a sliding scale indicating your body's ability (in particular, your liver's ability) to harness fat for energy in preference to carbohydrate. It doesn't turn on and off. It's a measure of how well your body convert fats into ketones. Some few fats, like 60% of coconut oil, or medium-chain triglyceride oil, can convert to ketones directly in the small intestine in the presence of digestive enzymes. Most others must be broken down by the liver before they are useful for energy. Some are useful to cells as-is (such as saturated fats) for building intra-cellular structures such as cell walls. It takes some time for your body to ramp up this ability to convert fats into ketones, and the most effective way to do this in the briefest time is to deprive your body of almost all carbohydrate for a few weeks.

That's all fat adaptation is. In fact, if you low-carb for long enough and lose enough body fat, your body becomes so efficient at using ketones for energy that even if you eat almost zero carbs, you stop turning the ketone strips purple when you urinate on them. Ketones in urine is a measure of the inefficiency of your body at using ketones for fuel. It's over-producing and the kidneys are filtering the excess into your urine.

I'm discovering as my own body fat approaches the teens, contrary to my previous belief, you basically have to be pretty fat to turn the ketone strips purple consistently while burning body fat on low-carb. Your fat cells are much like balloons: the larger and full they are, the more forcefully they will push triglycerides back into the bloodstream. This is, ultimately, why many people get fat on high-carb: obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. The fat cells are taking in more than they are giving back. Most fat people don't have any problem maintaining their weight (perhaps with very slow gains); it's just the weight they are maintaining is way too high. With too much insulin release due to dietary choices or genetics, their fat cells never release enough triglyceride to fuel their body between meals, and they eat because their lean tissues are literally starving for nutrition while their fat cells refuse to release the stored energy due to insulin in the bloodstream.

Anyway, fat adaptation isn't an on-and-off thing. You must give your body enough time to ramp up production of enzymes to use fat as a primary fuel in place of carbohydrates, but once fat-adapted you'll stay that way for a while. That's the heart of a cyclical ketogenic diet like MANS: your body remains mostly fat-burning for a few days even when you resume consuming carbs. If the timing and quantity of your carbohydrate intake is precise, almost no glucose is stored as triglyceride in fat cells, but goes to muscle and liver stores of glycogen instead.

Here's a great video overview of the role of fat in daily metabolism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNYlIcXy ... annel_page

--Matt B.

Thank you for the detailed answer.

Can you be both carb and fat adapted (burn the two energy sources with equal effiency) in the same time?

In a cyclical diet with carbs and fats you eat carbs for the day (until 4-5 pm) and then you rely on fats for energy source until the next day. I read about this diet on articles on bodybuilding.com and I have tried it myself (basically I was doing it before starting GLAD). Can such a type of diet make you effiecient/adapted on both?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNYlIcXy ... annel_page

Great video!