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Hey hope everybody is fine...i was just wondering how to cut on GLAD? i mean, i always was a AD or MANS eater..but now, i decided to try GLAD, and i really liked it, but yeah, i gained some fat, so i dont wanna cut on TSPA because i would lose too much water weight, and decided to cut on GLAD, just that i dont know how...quiting some calories but every how many weeks? how many calories? and those calories that are being eliminated should come from fats or carbs? should we still respect the 15gls per meal or we should make that numer of gls smaller?

just thought of that thread because i didnt find it anywhere in the site

cheers

krooy wrote:Hey hope everybody is fine...i was just wondering how to cut on GLAD? i mean, i always was a AD or MANS eater..but now, i decided to try GLAD, and i really liked it, but yeah, i gained some fat, so i dont wanna cut on TSPA because i would lose too much water weight, and decided to cut on GLAD, just that i dont know how...quiting some calories but every how many weeks? how many calories? and those calories that are being eliminated should come from fats or carbs? should we still respect the 15gls per meal or we should make that numer of gls smaller?

just thought of that thread because i didnt find it anywhere in the site

cheers

I just finished an attempt at cutting with the GLAD diet, so I'll share what I - somewhat successfully - did. I don't have TSPA, I'm a penniless college kid right now; but if you really want to cut, everybody seems to love TSPA, and Mark's been doing a great thing so he's worth supporting.

Anyway... a little background, to clear up the variables in this equation. I went from 187 to 167 from December to May; a combination of swine flu, life stressors, and just plain slacking off. It was mostly muscle that was gone, my bodyfat % looked about the same at 167 as at 187. So my body was already quite a bit under it's normal weight, and I decided to cut down to a six pack before bulking again.

I ate under 40GL's a day; my calorie requirement for maintaining is roughly ~2750, so I aimed for 2000 calories a day (a 750 cal deficit). For working out, I did the THT3.0 workout roughly twice a week. Somewhere in the testimonials section on Mark's site there's a bit about two soldiers who tried that, and they got RIPPED; might want to check out that post.

It worked; I went down to 163 in about three serious weeks (there was some cheating in there), and had abs starting to peek out; but just felt too damn skinny (163 at 6'2"!) and exhausted to keep it up for much longer. I'm saying that because the last few pounds of fat are usually the hardest to lose, and at that low weight, the body hangs on to everything it can and really doesn't want to let go.

So you could give that a try, but Mark says GLAD isn't mean to be a cutting diet. Doing MANS with very low carb-ups might burn fat faster.

Hi Triple,

You never mentioned how much body fat you lost, where did you start and where did you finish in those three weeks?

I'm just trying to cut on GLAD, ive been on the diet three weeks and just gone into deficit for 6 days and Ive gone from about 17.6 - 17.4 % in that week.

Hearing your figures, I may reduce my calories even further to gain better results.

Keep up the good work!

Did you do any cardio while cutting on GLADS.

Neb wrote:Hi Triple,

You never mentioned how much body fat you lost, where did you start and where did you finish in those three weeks?

I'm actually not quite sure; I don't have calipers, although I've used a bodyfat% scale a few times (those aren't too accurate though). I'm usually pretty good at eyeballing fat% though. I'd guess I lost a few%... probably something started around 13% or 14%, and ended around 10% or 11%, right around the six pack threshold. It's hard to say, because I've seen pics of people without abs who say they're at 8%, and pics of people with ripped abs who say they're at 15%. Basically I went from having to flex and having abs show through so having abs outlined (not very defines) without a flexed stomach, and a lot more muscle fibers visible around the body.

Neb wrote:I'm just trying to cut on GLAD, ive been on the diet three weeks and just gone into deficit for 6 days and Ive gone from about 17.6 - 17.4 % in that week.

Hmm, how much do you way? I think you should be able to cut a lot more than that; a minimum of 1lb a week if your body really loves its fat, and a max of probably 3lb a week unless you want to lose too much muscle with the fat.

Neb wrote:Hearing your figures, I may reduce my calories even further to gain better results.

750 cal deficit from maintenance calories worked well for me, I calculated the maintenance calories using the formula in one of mark's blog posts, idk which one. Of course, if you find you're not losing fat on that, drop it lower - nobody's metabolism or body responses to stimuli are exactly the same.

The one thing I'd be worried about at a lower calorie deficit for a while is the body adjusting to that, and lowering your metabolism. I'm experimenting with a cycling thing - a few week cut, and then a few week bulk, back and forth. My theory is that the body won't be able to raise or lower my metabolism too much, once it drops from cutting it'll suddenly be flooded with protein and calories and start packing on the muscle again; once it get's used to lots of food I'll be cutting and it'll burn up the fat faster; we'll see.

Cheers for that man,

Yeah I guess I probably wasn't enough in deficit. My Resting Metabolic Rate is 1512 and then add to that calories burned at work, its about 1965 and I was eating about 1800 a day.

So if I ate around 1200 a day then perhaps I would start to lose body fat then.

I might give that a try, I'm in a quandry at the moment trying to decide if I should focus on Bulking or Cutting. I'm getting good gains from 3.0, but at the same time I do want to lose my belly fat!

How did you manage to eat so few calories? I found it hard enough to eat only 1800 without being hungry!!

What were you eating? Oh and did you do Cardio also?

Here's a recent photo of me at around 10% bodyfat. I only found this site a couple of weeks ago and am trying workout 3.0 just as a change to my usual stuff. I turned 40 back in March and over the last 25 years or so I've done mostly gymnastics and strength based training where muscle wasn't the focus because any added bodyweight is a hindrance. As far as diet goes I'm pretty strict, not sure how many calories I eat but I tend to avoid cereals and bread as they are a couple of things over the years that I find bloat me out. Cardio, about 20 mins a day at a fairly hard pace and this is key to me for staying at this sort of bodyweight. Without the cardio I start to gradually creep up maybe 1/2lb to 1 lb a week. Since starting 3.0 I'm trying the GLAD diet too, just to see how it fits in as I had been eating a lot of pasta and potato up till now. I'm eating more protein and less pasta/potato and keeping the GL's around 10 per meal, 5-6 meals a day. I don't use any of the formulas for working out how many calories I need to eat. I just keep a graph and weigh myself first thing every morning and plot the weight on the graph. That gives me an easy to see trend over the weeks/months and as long as the trend is level or gradually going down then I know I'm on the right track as far as weight loss goes.

triple wrote:

krooy wrote:Hey hope everybody is fine...i was just wondering how to cut on GLAD? i mean, i always was a AD or MANS eater..but now, i decided to try GLAD, and i really liked it, but yeah, i gained some fat, so i dont wanna cut on TSPA because i would lose too much water weight, and decided to cut on GLAD, just that i dont know how...quiting some calories but every how many weeks? how many calories? and those calories that are being eliminated should come from fats or carbs? should we still respect the 15gls per meal or we should make that numer of gls smaller?

just thought of that thread because i didnt find it anywhere in the site

cheers

I just finished an attempt at cutting with the GLAD diet, so I'll share what I - somewhat successfully - did. I don't have TSPA, I'm a penniless college kid right now; but if you really want to cut, everybody seems to love TSPA, and Mark's been doing a great thing so he's worth supporting.

Anyway... a little background, to clear up the variables in this equation. I went from 187 to 167 from December to May; a combination of swine flu, life stressors, and just plain slacking off. It was mostly muscle that was gone, my bodyfat % looked about the same at 167 as at 187. So my body was already quite a bit under it's normal weight, and I decided to cut down to a six pack before bulking again.

I ate under 40GL's a day; my calorie requirement for maintaining is roughly ~2750, so I aimed for 2000 calories a day (a 750 cal deficit). For working out, I did the THT3.0 workout roughly twice a week. Somewhere in the testimonials section on Mark's site there's a bit about two soldiers who tried that, and they got RIPPED; might want to check out that post.

It worked; I went down to 163 in about three serious weeks (there was some cheating in there), and had abs starting to peek out; but just felt too damn skinny (163 at 6'2"!) and exhausted to keep it up for much longer. I'm saying that because the last few pounds of fat are usually the hardest to lose, and at that low weight, the body hangs on to everything it can and really doesn't want to let go.

So you could give that a try, but Mark says GLAD isn't mean to be a cutting diet. Doing MANS with very low carb-ups might burn fat faster.

Hey Triple, that is EXACTLY what happened to me. I was so stressed with work that despite going to the gym and eating well I was losing weight. I then got ill, and decided to try a cut instead of bulking again. MISTAKE! I won't do that ever again. I lost 6 kg in 2 weeks and freaked out, I was so skinny. Thankfully in the following 6 weeks I gained 3 kg back but that seriously screwed my progress. My advice would be that if you are naturally skinny then keep bulking, but fine tune your calories so you very gradually lose fat. It's so easy for a whole year's worth of gains to go. Still, we live and learn. Back to bulking for me.

stickupkid wrote:Did you do any cardio while cutting on GLADS.

No - I loathe cardio; Mark has some good reasons for why folks like me don't need it, and back in the days when I did do cardio, it never had a noticeable impact (except perhaps slowing down muscle gain).

Neb wrote:Yeah I guess I probably wasn't enough in deficit. My Resting Metabolic Rate is 1512 and then add to that calories burned at work, its about 1965 and I was eating about 1800 a day.

So if I ate around 1200 a day then perhaps I would start to lose body fat then.

That sounds like a good place to start. I think a pound of fat is roughly 3500 cals, so if you could burn between 500-750 a day, that's probably around a week for each pound or two of fat. The higher your bodyfat, the faster people seem to be able to burn it too.

Neb wrote:I might give that a try, I'm in a quandry at the moment trying to decide if I should focus on Bulking or Cutting. I'm getting good gains from 3.0, but at the same time I do want to lose my belly fat!

It's definitely a headscratcher... my reasoning was that I could either carry some pudge and bulk for the next 6-12 months or however long, then cut to a six-pack; or I could just cut now and then bulk for that time while wearing a six-pack. And, somehow a compromise happened

Neb wrote:How did you manage to eat so few calories? I found it hard enough to eat only 1800 without being hungry!! What were you eating?

That part definitely gets hard, and the hunger was starting to really get to me after a few weeks. Foods have satiety levels, though; so I tried to focus on foods that were more filling (which doesn't necessarily equal more calories). There was also bit more fat in my diet (which keeps the hunger away better than most carbs calorie-per-calorie), and not many carbs (it's hard to eat many carbs while you're under 10GL's a meal). You'll be a bit hungry though at times. I would just remind myself that if I was hungry, it meant my body was eyeing my pudge for a snack (dunno if that's really true, but...)

As far as actual foods: quite a few hardboiled eggs, chicken, oatmeal, coconut oil, olive oil, small amounts of brown rice, lentils (lentils are pretty damn good for this diet I found), almonds, salads here and there, and some fruit like apples and such. Those are the staples that stick out in my mind the most, and stuff I had around the house; there's probably better food, but I'm still slowly discovering those.

Neb wrote: Oh and did you do Cardio also?

No.

And, it wasn't like this cutting cycle was a great success, or I hit upon a crazy effective strategy - I was a little disappointed, and am thinking about buying TSPA for next time. It was the first I've ever (intentionally) done, and there were a handful of cheat meals, a few beers a day usually (which don't help at all, alcohol is bad news when it comes to burning fat), and at that point I was still using chewing tobacco (I haven't been able to figure out if that speeds or slows fat loss, but I quit, so we'll see at the next cycle) and a caffeine fiend. But, that's what I did, and something did happen, and probably would have happened a lot more with more strictness - hope it gives some people things to try and experiment with.

paulcorfield wrote:Here's a recent photo of me at around 10% bodyfat. I only found this site a couple of weeks ago and am trying workout 3.0 just as a change to my usual stuff. I turned 40 back in March and over the last 25 years or so I've done mostly gymnastics and strength based training where muscle wasn't the focus because any added bodyweight is a hindrance. As far as diet goes I'm pretty strict, not sure how many calories I eat but I tend to avoid cereals and bread as they are a couple of things over the years that I find bloat me out. Cardio, about 20 mins a day at a fairly hard pace and this is key to me for staying at this sort of bodyweight. Without the cardio I start to gradually creep up maybe 1/2lb to 1 lb a week. Since starting 3.0 I'm trying the GLAD diet too, just to see how it fits in as I had been eating a lot of pasta and potato up till now. I'm eating more protein and less pasta/potato and keeping the GL's around 10 per meal, 5-6 meals a day. I don't use any of the formulas for working out how many calories I need to eat. I just keep a graph and weigh myself first thing every morning and plot the weight on the graph. That gives me an easy to see trend over the weeks/months and as long as the trend is level or gradually going down then I know I'm on the right track as far as weight loss goes.

Ah, welcome to the boards So are you trying to bulk up, cut down, or stay the same weight?

triple wrote:Ah, welcome to the boards So are you trying to bulk up, cut down, or stay the same weight?

Thanks for the welcome.

I just fancied bulking up a little but without much in the way of fat gains, fat comes easy at my age lol. I've been all shapes in the last 20 years or so. In my early 20's I had Mentzer's Heavy Duty book and really gained well on the basic outlined program. In the recent photo above I'm around 138lbs at 5' 8" tall. On the Mentzer workout I got up to around 180 lbs so I've always been a fan of training to failure which is how I stumbled across this website. That got my enthusiasm going again so I thought I'd give it a try. In my early 30's I had a couple of years off training where I'd do the odd workout but nothing regular, had too much food and beer and ballooned up to a high of 203lbs. It took me about two years to get back down to where I am now and I did that with just gymnastics, mostly training on the rings and some floor based stuff. That all hits te joints pretty hard so that's the main reason I fancy a change. Been doing THT 3.0 for two weeks and already gained 1/2" on my arms which is nice. Started GLAD just over a week ago and weight has stayed constant so far.