Kraz
It all depends on what you want to accomplish. You are now trying to get rid of your body fat%. The best way to do this, is by increasing your lean body weight(lean muscle weight). If you decrease your calories too much at once, you will loose fat, but you will also \"starve\" your muscles from essential nutrients and thus loose lean muscle mass at the same time - not a good scenario!!
OK, what I'm about to teach you, is something you will have to experiment with, as it is also an individualised response. Say for argument sake you weigh 100kg with BF% = 12%. That means you have 12kg's fat and 88kg's muscle and skeletal tissue. Say you would want to decrease your BF% to 8%. That means you need to drop 4kg fat(and hopefully retain all the muscle or even pack on some more). 1gr fat = ±9,2kCal. Thus, 4kg's = 4x1000x9.2 = 36800kCals. Now let us say you want to loose this over 8 week period. That = 36800/56 days=657kCals per day. If you subtract that amount from your daily allowance of X amount of calories for maintenance, YOU WILL DEFINITELY LOOSE LEAN MUSCLE!! Always remember that, when \"cutting\", try and protect your LBW. It will help to be as \"anabolic\" as possibly during your endeavour, if you catch my drift....
Generally, dieting is about calory defeceites, irrespective from which source these calories come from. By the end of the day, you must have burnt up more or taken less than needed to maintain your current BF% status.
I believe it best to eat about 200kCals less than your calculated maintenance and do enough aerobics to burn the rest. In the case of (hypothetically) the 657kCals, I would suggest you take 2200kCals and cycle/aerobic the remainder of 457kCals. Up the intensity level of your stationary gym cycle to the level that you burn that amount of calories in a 20-30 min session.
The bigger athletes do well on the regime I supplied you. When they diet, they try to maintain their calculated minimum calories - 200kCals, and all they do is shift the amounts of prot vs carbs.
But, you will have to experiment and see what works for you.
If you look at Mike007's method, you will see that he consumes ± 3430kCals on his low carb days, but on his high carb days he will consume 4685kCals. That equates to an average of ± 4058kCals/24h over a 3 day period. If you look at his physical stats and you run the formula in his case, you will find that he is eating much more that what is required acc to the formula. But why??? Look at his BF% - it's 7%. He can eat that much and not get fat. Why? Because he has a high volume of lean muscle - and that is a absolute furnace for burning calories. He further \"tricks\" his body by shifting the \"gears\" so to say, by his way of carb cycling. You would probably do well with the same method if you only had 7%BF. But you need to get there first. So, the calory defeceite method is the way to go. I have seen many a body builder eat more and more calories as they get closer to competition day, in order to maintain the lean muscle mass. But they lost their BF% slowly during their pre-contest build-up, without having to crash Total Body Weight. If your BF% is 12% 8 weeks out from comp time, you will loose some lean mass in your indeavour to reach 4,5% BF. That is the typical example of \"crashing\" your weight pre-contest.
About the carbs. Try and have a serving of high and medium GI carbs right after your main workout. Vitargo is a excellent product in this case. Try and stay away from starchy type carbs after your post-workout meal/drink, especially if you are trying to decrease BF%. Stick to the cruciferous veg, like brocolli, cabage, cauliflower and brussel sprouts. You only need to replenish your liver and muscle glycogen levels without over compensating - the latter will lead to glycose then shifted to fat stores. Basically, you need to replenish just enough to have enough glycogen reserves to use during your recuperative period when you sleep. Next morning, upon waking, your glycogen stores should be totally depleted and your first carb meal again should be of high and mediunm GI origin, and then after that you build up on your reserves by eating low GI carbs, up to your workout time.
Hope this answers your question.
Knowledge is power!
Topic Author
that I started doing some research into different and update methods to approuch the bodybuiilding industry. That when I realised that the method that my coach an I followed was completly off course. Thats the reason for my 15% bodyfat at the moment.