Pizza with Purpose

I haven't been on the scale at home in a good while.Turns out I'm at the lowest I've been in almost 6 years. I wasn't anywhere near this lean back then though. As for the other pictures, read on:

Day 89

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

I’m down to the wire for planning my peak week. I’ve heard about four different approaches directly from people who’ve done it and I’ve read many many more. There’s sodium manipulation, carb depletion followed by carb loading, fat loading, and water depletion. Some people do all, some one or two, some none. Most recently I read about “crap loading.” No, don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds! Basically that means you eat crappy food for dinner the night before your show. It’s essentially doing your big cheat meal 24 hours early, but for a purpose. Time and time again I see people writing on the forums about amateurs looking way better the day after their show than the day of. Why? The cheat meal they had after. A big influx of carbs and sodium inflates and hardens your muscles by filling them with glycogen and the sodium draws the water in where it is supposed to be instead of spilling over and flattening out your look, or so they say. I don’t have the time for a trial run peak week, but a trial run of crap loading, to determine whether or not I should include it in my peak week was doable.

I put a lot of thought into this. There is a local non-chain pizza place I love, but pizza has substantial variance and I need carbs and sodium to be constants not variables here. Answer? Domino’s. There’s one here that delivers and there is one within delivery range of the host hotel for my crap dinner the night before the show if I do it. I had 4 slices for a total of 36 grams Protein 104 grams Carbs and 32 grams Fat. Craziness! I haven’t had a meal with that many carbs in it in months! That’s more than 60% of my total daily carbs allowance and more than 50% of my total daily fat allowance, but only about 20% of my daily Protein allowance. You can see why bodybuilders consider pizza to be “crap,” don’t get me wrong, we think it’s yummy just like you do, but it is the opposite of what is needed to lean out and cut body fat. If a bodybuilder was a car, putting pizza in it would be like putting diesel in a gas engine. You won’t be getting on the road to your goal anytime soon!

Alrighty, I’ll stop dissing pizza before I offend everyone! I decided to trial crap load today because I was super-duper well-behaved on nutrition all day (my 1st 4 meals were made of oatmeal, whey protein, sweet potatoes, and Isernio’s spicy chicken sausage) By 2 pm I had burned about the same number of cals working out (1,124) as I’d eaten (1,191), never mind BMR. As I was rolling in heavy on cals burned and rolling in light on cals eaten I decided it was a good day to completely blow my macro ratios and cal budget. Well, it’s never a good time for that, but it was a better time than already running heavy on my counts would have been. Tomorrow morning I’ll allot an extra couple minutes to do some posing when I first get up. Then I can make the call on whether or not I should crap load for The EC. If I look bloated it’s a definite no. If I don’t appear bloated and my muscles have a nice hard filled out look then it’ll be a yes. I’ll let you know tomorrow.

I did my am cardio today, but got cut off at 25 minutes. C woke up and came in at 21 min, but I got him jumping on my bed until I hit 25. He then insisted I jump on the bed too. I noticed that bouncing really accentuates my abdominals so I said “oooh, my abs came in.” He said, “I don’t have abs! I have spider-man boots!” Haha. It’s true too, he may be Mr. Skinny, but he does have a little belly =) I also trained biceps, triceps, and shoulders at The Rec for an hour and 15 minutes immediately followed up by my second cardio session (30 min on an AMT machine).

I feel good about doing this to plan my peak week right, but I regret eating the pizza. I wouldn’t have done it for its own sake. I wasn’t even really craving it, neither was C. I asked him if he wanted pizza or salmon and he kept answering salmon. I only talked him into pizza by telling him a delivery guy would bring it (he’s used to it being freezer derived). We’ll be having the salmon tomorrow night.
What happened to the extra slices? The freezer. I have frozen pizza around for C all the time and it doesn’t tempt me.

Macros

147 grams Protein 248 grams Carbs 77 grams Fat

Scary!

That’s a blown ratio if ever there was one.

At least I did it for a purpose ;)

Pizza with purpose, haha.

Cal Tally

2,273 Ingested
(1,448) BMR
(1,124) Training Burn
(299) Net loss (Still!) =)