Anabolic Diet – If you’re a weightlifter, athlete, or fitness enthusiast, you must understand that your diet plays an integral role in ensuring you achieve your desire to get in shape. With the right diet, your journey toward achieving your desired fitness level will be a lot simpler. Because of this, the anabolic diet promoted by Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale, which helps in fat loss without causing loss in muscle, has become quite popular.
Thanks to this low-carbohydrate diet that’s based on alternating between high-carb and low-carb days, you’ll get to achieve your desired physique. Here’s a comprehensive guide on the anabolic diet to teach you what you need to know about it, and decide whether or not trying it is worthwhile.
Table of Contents
What’s The Anabolic Diet?
When the human body is in an anabolic state, it usually builds more muscle than reducing its size. With this in mind, the term anabolic refers to a diet that entails eating low-carbohydrates and changing between low-carb and high-carb days.
This diet is ideal if you’re hoping to gain as much muscle as possible while simultaneously losing weight. Because of this, following the anabolic diet and understanding amino acids are considered vital among individuals looking to build or maintain their lean muscle mass while avoiding stored fat.
The anabolic diet routine typically follows a five + two-day cycle. During the five days, you’ll be required to eat high-fat, high protein, and low carbohydrates meals. For the next two days, you’ll be expected to eat a diet comprising of high carbohydrate, very low fat, and moderate protein. The carb levels should ideally be less than 30 grams each day during the low carb days, almost equal to avoiding carbs completely.
Consequently, you can realize its benefits on your body, such as increased strength levels, loss in weight, and increased testosterone levels in your body.
How Do You Start An Anabolic Diet?
If you want to start the anabolic diet, you’ll need to know that this diet usually follows specific phases. During each of these phases, your body’s calorie intake is changed to help you achieve your goal of losing, gaining, or maintaining your weight.
This diet’s macronutrient composition is directly proportional to calorie intake. In addition, you can personalize the duration of each of the phases depending on your fitness goals and current body-fat levels.
Without further ado, here are the three different phases you need to follow to start an anabolic diet:
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The Induction Or Initial Phase
This first phase of the anabolic diet, which lasts for four weeks, aims to get your body to start burning as much fat as possible quickly. During this phase, you should eat just enough calories needed to sustain your current body mass. This step is essential as it starts preparing your body for the macronutrient manipulation that’ll start later.
During this phase, you should expect to experience some unpleasant symptoms due to the rapid fat-burning, including;
- Fatigue
- Brain fog
- Dizziness
However, these symptoms will die down after 48 hours once your body switches to burning fats instead of carbohydrates.
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The Bulking Phase
After the first four weeks, the fifth week will mark the start of the bulking phase. During this phase, you’ll need to be keener on details such as your calorie intake needed to reach your desired body weight.
Determining the ideal calorie intake levels needed to build your body mass is usually by trial and error. To arrive at this figure, you’ll need to take your desired body weight and add 15%.
The ideal calorie intake should preferably lie between 20 to 25 calories per pound of the ideal body weight, which translates to around two pounds of body mass weekly. If you’re gaining less than desired, increase the calorie intake and cut back when gaining more than the desired level.
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The Cutting Phase
This is the last phase of an anabolic diet, and how long it can take will depend on how long it takes you to lose weight to achieve your desired physique. The cutting phase is somewhat similar to the induction phase, except that you’ll be cutting back the calories to between 500 to 1000 each day.
It would be best to be very careful about how much weight you lose each week, which should ideally be between one to one and a half pounds each week. Anything greater than this isn’t advised as it has a counterproductive impact on your muscle gaining goal.
Takeaway
You should consider the anabolic diet if you want to build muscle, lose fat, and remain fit in a legal, healthy, and safe way. Sticking to this diet will help you continue leading a fairly normal social life without being concerned about eating excess carbs or counting calories.
With that said, this diet isn’t ideal if you’re a vegetarian who does exercise as you’ll have a very hard time during the low-carb days. But if you have no issue with eating lots of fish and meat, this diet can be helpful in your hopes to build muscle and remain fit.