The Diet Manifesto
The Ultimate Guide to T-Man Dieting
by Chris Shugart

It's Your Diet, Stupid!

Last week, I checked my e-mail and found this message waiting on me:

"My name is Jonathan. My goal is to lose about 10 to 15 pounds of fat and really get my abs going for summer. Currently, I do weight training three or four days a week depending on my schedule at school. I'm thinking about adding in 20 minutes of cardio before or after each workout. I'll probably do cardio on my off days, too, in the morning on an empty stomach. My questions are: Should I use German Body Comp instead of regular cardio? What type of fat burner should I use?"

A few minutes later, I received another one:

"I'm 34 and all my life I've been skinny. I've yet to crack 155 pounds. I've tried high volume training programs and low volume programs, everything from GVT to HIT. Nothing seems to work. Supplements help some, but not much. I'm thinking of training twice a day. What do you think? Is this a good approach to packing on lean muscle mass? Thanks." Steve

Every week I basically get these same two letters. They're always written by different people, but they say about the same thing. Everyone wants to know how to either lose fat or gain muscle. Of course, most want to do it at the same time. My response to these letters is almost always the same: "It's your diet, stupid!" Well, I'm a little nicer than that, but you get the idea.

If this grand epiphany has yet to hit you like a bolt of lightening out of the clear blue sky, then allow me to toss out the first bolt:

If you're not satisfied with your body or your progress in the gym, it's probably not your workout, your supplement program or your genetics that's the problem. It's your diet. Accept that fact. Live with it. Tattoo it on your forehead.

If there are any real bodybuilding truths out there, this is one of them. What you shove down your cakehole is the key to getting the body you want. Diet is the missing ingredient if you're not making progress toward your goal, be it fat loss or muscle gain. If your diet is shitty, don't think you can make up for it by just training harder or taking more supplements.

What's more, I'm frankly getting a little tired of answering questions about steroids from people only wanting to gain or lose about 10 pounds. There are simply far too many people out there ready to turn to illegal methods to reach goals that could easily be achieved through minor dietary manipulations:

"I'm 17 years old and want to lose 5 pounds. Should I use clen or T3?"

"I want to put on 10 pounds of muscle. How much D-bol and Deca do I need?"

Everybody say it together now: It's your diet, stupid!

Time for a Reality Check

Strap on your seatbelts and engage your airbags. It's time to sacrifice a few sacred cows and have ourselves a big 'ol Texas style BBQ.

Reality Check #1: No diet is easy and completely painless. All require an element of sacrifice and change. You have to drop that "I want to look like a completely different person, but don't want to do anything differently" attitude. You're living a pipe dream if you think that.

If you're on a low-carb diet, you'll eventually start craving carbs. That box of Special K in the pantry will become more desirable than a Halle Berry/Cameron Diaz m?nage a trois. Likewise, if you're on a low-fat diet, you'll soon begin gazing stalker-like at slabs of bacon and red meats. Each dieting strategy has its drawbacks.

People with great physiques make sacrifices. They suffer a little for it. If you want a great bod, you're going to have to suffer a bit, too. (Don't worry, though. The rewards outweigh the punishments in the end.)

Reality Check #2: You probably won't be able to lose a lot of fat and gain a lot of muscle at the same time. It's just not in the cards for most of us. So stop eating like a bird and training like a girl and expecting to get huge and muscular! It ain't gonna happen.

You will likely gain some fat on a good muscle-gaining diet. That's okay! You can carefully diet it off later. I've known way too many 145-pound guys who immediately go on a strict cutting diet the moment their precious abs begin to fade under a little fat. With that attitude, they'll never break 150, period.

The same goes for guys who immediately stop trying to get lean once they lose a little strength or perceived lean-body mass. You aren't going to feel at the top of your game on a low-carb cutting diet, okay? You'll feel a bit flat in the gym on such a diet, too. I know, that sucks and life is unfair. I probably won't get Britney Spears' hymen for Christmas either. We all learn to deal with the incessant unfairness of life.

The secret here is to pick one goal at a time and pursue it. Decide whether you want to lose fat or gain muscle first, then pick the diet that best fits that goal.

Reality Check #3: All diets work! There's no "best diet." Low-carb/high-fat diets work. High-carb/low-fat diets work. Liquid diets work. High-protein diets work. The catch is, that while some diets work for others, they may not work for you. We're all different and the fat loss diet that makes your buddy all shredded and veiny may make you sick and constipated. Something out there works, of course, and it's your job to find it. You'll have to experiment and personalize your approach to dieting sooner or later.

We also need to redefine our definition of effective dieting. A diet that causes you to lose just as much muscle as fat does not "work," although many take delight in seeing those numbers on the scale get smaller. A truly effective diet will help lose fat, while preserving as much lean muscle as possible.

And although everyone will need to tweak their diet to fit their individual responses, don't go overboard. I've known some very smart folks who start to immediately lose IQ points as soon as they adopt a diet. Brock Strasser has had several e-mails sent to him by people who claim his no-carb/high-fat diet, the Fat Fast, didn't work. Then they go on to explain that they followed the diet "to the letter" except they ate carbs and reduced the fat intake. Huh? Do you think their parents had any children that lived? Customizing a diet is a delicate balancing act. Be careful.

Reality Check #4: There are a few people out there who can get away with a poor diet. (Yes, we hate them, too.) Don't assume that you can eat crap, train sporadically, and live an unhealthy lifestyle and do the same. These lucky bastards may have one in a million genetics, may use buckets of steroids and other drugs, or both.

Total beginners can usually make fast progress on almost any diet, as well. Newbies who go from sitting on the couch eating Pringles to sitting on the weight bench eating protein always make fast progress in the beginning. The longer you live the bodybuilding lifestyle the harder it becomes to progress. Ironic? You bet. A fact? Unfortunately, yes.

Reality Check #5: Stop it with the low-carb diets while trying to gain significant amount of muscle! The two just don't tango. Yes, excess carbs, especially the simple variety, can be bad if you eat them all day long. But if your main goal is to add slabs of muscle, you need carbs, both complex and yes, even a few simple ones after a good workout. In short, a good mass gaining diet should not be limited in any macronutrient. In the same vein, a low carb diet isn't the way to go for competitive athletes, especially during the season.

Reality Check #6: Calories do count. Back in the day, the low-fat fanatics wanted you to think that you could eat anything you wanted (and as much of it as you wanted) as long as it was low fat. They were wrong. Today, some of the low carb gurus want you to think the same thing about their favorite macronutrient whipping boy, the lowly carbohydrate. The truth is that while a low carb/higher fat diet is very filling and will reduce hunger pangs in most people, you can still get fat if you eat too much.

Reality Check #7: You're going to also have to accept the fact that you need to keep a food log and record everything you eat. If you're not doing this, you're kicking your own self-defeating ass. A food log means lots of label reading, weighing of food, and measuring of serving sizes. It's a huge pain in the butt and the key to your success with any diet. Cut the excuses and start logging your daily food intake now. Include calories, fat, protein and carbs.

The Testosterone Diet Guide

T-mag has been around for almost three years. In that time we've published several diets, some for fat loss and a few for muscle gain. So far, the success rates of these diets has been pretty good. Most work great if they're followed correctly. However, a couple have turned out to be real stinkers. What follows is a short summary of every major diet we've written about here at Testosterone. I also rate the effectiveness of each diet based on the feedback we've received from readers and our own experimentation.

The Chanko Diet

Synopsis: This is primarily a weight gain diet written by TC. It's based roughly on the diet of sumo wrestlers, only in TC's variation you'll add muscle, not fat. There's also no need for you to wear a giant thong, although TC does so occasionally around the office to "give the secretaries a little mid-day thrill." (We go through a lot of secretaries.)

The premise of the diet is simple: you'll make better gains if you eat six or seven times a day instead of only two or three times. This holds true even you're eating about the same amount of calories. To accomplish this without spending all day in the kitchen or going broke, you use a bodybuilders' version of chanko, the mixture of rice, meat, and vegetables traditionally eaten by Sumo wrestlers.

TC's version contains albacore tuna, corn, and rice. Between regular meals and MRPs, you simply woof down a fast chanko meal. It's quick, cost efficient, and a startlingly simple way to increase your daily caloric intake. Those new handy-dandy waterless tuna packets should make this diet even more convenient. TC gained about 14 pounds in two months, most of it muscle, by using the Chanko Diet.

Reader Feedback: Readers who tried this diet reported good results. That's really no surprise. You eat enough quality foods, get plenty of protein, and lift weights and you'll put on muscle. Simple, really.

Conclusion: The Chanko Diet works. It's a no-brainer diet that can help you skinny guys out there finally put on some real skeletal tissue. The original article can be found here.

The Warrior Diet

Synopsis: Man, this one got people excited. We've received more e-mails about this diet than any other diet we've posted at T-mag. The diet was written by the editor of the now defunct Mind and Muscle Power magazine, Ori Hofmekler.

Here's the skinny: Don't eat all day long. Workout in the evening, then come home and stuff yourself with just about anything you want, just like the romantic warriors did it in olden times. Oh, there's a lot of talk about warriors, instincts, and anthropology, but that's the gist of it.

The concept flies in the face of so many of bodybuilding's accepted maxims, that the diet was either going to be revolutionary or a total flop. Among other things, this one-meal-a-day plan is supposed to stretch your glycogen reserves, increase your sensitivity to insulin and boost your protein efficiency.

Reader Feedback: Very mixed. About half who tried it said it was a failure. The other reported fat loss and really liked the convenience of not worrying about eating all day. We received no feedback that I can remember concerning muscle gains during this diet.

Conclusion: This one is a coin toss. Try it at your own peril. Ori was supposed to come out with a book on this diet, but now than M&M Power has folded, I'm not sure if the book is still in the works or not. If you choose to give the Warrior Diet a whirl, I'd suggest you use Tim Patterson's modified version found here. (Ori wasn't too happy with Tim's version at first, but it seems to make more sense to me.) The original diet can be found here.

The Delta 1250 Diet

Synopsis: You may remember a diet called the ABCDE Diet (Anabolic Burst Cycling of Diet and Exercise) proposed by Torbjorn Akerfeldt in an old issue of Muscle Media 2000, you know, back when it was a bodybuilding magazine. Basically, you were supposed to eat your lungs out for two weeks, which would elicit all sorts of cool anabolic reactions and cause you to add muscle like gangbusters. Then for the next two weeks, you'd turn things around by going on a strict cutting phase. Done correctly, you'd lose the fat you gained during your hog fest and keep most of the muscle.

The only drawback was that, well, the darned thing didn't work! Personally, I tried it three times and every time I'd gain and lose the same ten pounds, even after modifying the diet. Most others who tried it either gained too much fat or lost too much muscle. Some did both.

Enter the Delta 1250. Basically, our man TC modified the diet, tweaked the caloric recommendations (the caloric changes aren't as severe in this new version), shortened the overfeeding and underfeeding phases, and improved the training recommendations.

Reader Feedback: This proved to be one of the more successful diets we've published. Most every reader who tried it liked the diet and was pleased with his results.

Conclusion: The Delta 1250 allows you to lose fat without losing muscle or hitting any big plateaus. This is the diet I usually recommend for those who don't want to use a low carb approach to fat loss. Give it a shot. The details can be found here.

Protein Cycling

Synopsis: Dr. Marcus R. Jones believes that bodybuilders eat too much protein. Yep, he actually said that. Out loud, even. The theory is that since bodybuilders are constantly clobbering their systems with protein, they become less efficient at using it. However, he maintains that by cycling between periods of low (20 to 40 grams per day for about four weeks) and fairly high protein consumption (one gram per pound of bodyweight), the body will be put into a state of "perpetual growth without plateaus."

Reader Feedback: As fascinating as this all sounds, it just didn't ring the cherries for those who tried it. The feedback from readers was mostly negative. Most felt they were shrinking away during the low protein phases. There were a couple of people who said the program worked for them, but these success stories were few and far between.

Conclusion: Sounds great, looks great, comes from a smart dude, but dammit, it just didn't work. The original article can be found here, a follow-up can be found here and an article by Cy Willson that attempts to explain why the diet went balls-up can be found here.

The MRP Diet

Synopsis: Life is hectic and you're busy. You want to be a buff bastard but don't have time to cook or chew or anything. The solution? Drink quality MRPs all day and don't worry about it. At night, you can have a solid food meal. The catch here is to modify each shake to fit the needs of that particular time of day. You may want to add some flax oil or fiber at certain times and bump up the glycemic index with maltodextrin powder or Ribose-C for post-workout. This should be thought of as an "emergency diet." When life gets crazy there's no need to let your diet go to hell. MRPs can be the answer in hectic times.

Reader Feedback: Readers like the convenience of this diet and now that most quality MRPs actually taste good, the diet isn't very painful. Still, protein shakes can get a little boring all day long, which is why we recommend you only use this approach for short periods of time. The cost of this diet isn't that bad either. You're supplement bill will go up, but your grocery bill will drop dramatically.

Conclusion: This diet can be used for weight gain or fat loss depending on how many calories you consume. Try the MRP Diet whenever work or school has the nerve to get in the way of your bodybuilding endeavors. The complete plan is found here.

The Fat Fast Diet

Synopsis: Want an extreme diet? Want to lose as much fat as possible in the shortest period of time? Do you mind suffering a little to do it? If not, this is the diet for you.

Here's what you do: Get yourself some flax seed oil, lots of it. Half of your daily caloric intake will come from this stuff. Then go find some low carb protein powder. Now, live of that stuff until you lose all the fat you want. Sound crazy? It sort of is, but it's actually a well thought out diet plan. You'll need to use certain supplements to prevent you from losing muscle. Don't try the diet without them!

Reader Feedback: This diet is a lot like your ex-girlfriend, you know, the one that told all her friends you have a "short fuse" in the sack. In other words, it's a bitch! The thing is, the diet works. If you can stick with it, you'll lose fat at a rapid rate and keep most, if not all, of your hard earned muscle.

Conclusion: Quick and effective, the Fat Fast works. It's pretty painful, however, and even with the required supplements you'll need more than a little willpower. The original article can be found here.  Part II can be found here. An updated version of the diet can be found in the third paper issue of T-mag.

The Get Big Diet

Synopsis: As the name implies, this is another diet designed to help you gain muscular weight. Tom Incledon covers the basics, from figuring out your caloric needs (this is where most skinny guys screw up) to laying out several sample meals for you.

Reader Feedback: Chalk another one up in the "win" category. Followed correctly and consistently, this program can help you put on muscle without getting too fat in the process.

Conclusion: So-called "hardgainers" are usually people who don't know how to eat. The Get Big Diet shows you how. 'Nuff said. If you want to give it a go, check it out here.

The Anabolic Diet

Synopsis: This diet has both a bulking and a cutting phase. Both phases are about the same, only you eat a lot more in the bulking phase. Basically, this is the high fat diet to end all high fat diets. You get all kinds of fat, both good and bad. Eggs, cheese, bacon and red meat are on all on the menu. Of course, high fat means low carb. However, this isn't an extreme low carb diet like the first phase of the Atkins diet. You get about 30 grams of carbs per day. Dr. Mauro DiPasquale, author of this diet, doesn't want you to be in ketosis, only "near ketosis". (At what point a person actually reaches ketosis is debatable, however.)

You follow this diet for five days and then you get to carb up (and basically pig out) on the weekend. This is what makes this diet "anabolic" according to DiPasquale.

Reader Feedback: Readers usually respond favorably to the cutting portion of this diet. Although pretty extreme, those who don't have any problems oxidizing the fats report good results. The bulking phase, however, doesn't have that great of a track record. Most people find it very difficult and even nauseating to eat that much fat at every meal. We've heard of a few success stories with the bulking phase, but not many.

Conclusion: If nothing else seems to work for you, the high fat diet may just be what you're looking for. We've published two articles on this diet, one is an overview and can be found here. The other is a test drive of the diet (taken by myself) and can be found here.

The T-Dawg Diet

Synopsis: Take the aforementioned Anabolic Diet. Make it healthier and throw in adequate post-workout nutrition (something no one thought much about when the Anabolic Diet book was originally published). What do you get? The T-Dawg Diet. The purpose of this diet was to take all the good parts of the popular low carb, higher fat plans and combine them in one effective approach. While we were at it, we removed a lot of the potentially unhealthy aspects of the traditional high fat diet.

Reader Feedback: Not to toot our own horns, but?. Oh hell, toot toot! This is by far the most successful diet we've ever posted. Reader feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Readers claim that the diet is easier to stick to than most lower carb approaches and is pretty painless to boot. Their workouts are much better since the diet doesn't give them that "flat" feeling common to other fat loss programs.

Conclusion: The Dawg has a great record for most people who try it. This is the first diet I usually recommend to readers and I use it myself whenever I need to uncover my lower two abs. The diet can be found here.  A follow up Q and A session can be found here.

Other Interesting Ideas

While these aren't complete diet plans, they are interesting concepts. In his Protein Conspiracy article, wonderkid Cy Willson proposes a fairly radical concept: Ingest fully half of your daily protein intake post-workout. That means if you need to eat 200 grams of protein a day, you should suck half of it down right after you train. Cy claims this approach has turned many a hardgainer into a hardbody. We haven't received much feedback on this idea, so if you want to give it a shot be sure and let us know your results.

In his Bad Protein article, TC claims that rampant ingestion of soy can lead to decreased T levels and basically slow your gains in the gym, maybe even impair your health if you're a man, or at least a real man. Of course, avoiding soy isn't going to turn you into a muscle freak overnight, but over a period of years, getting your protein from better sources like casein and whey could make a substantial difference.

The Diet Graveyard

Even though I said that all diets work, there are a couple that need to be put out of their misery.

The very low fat, very high carb diet: Ah, didn't you just love the early 90's? "Fat makes you fat!" spiky haired fanatics screamed. "As long as the ice cream and angel food cake are fat free, you can eat all you want!" Yeah, and people got fatter and fatter, didn't they?

Even those on the T-mag staff who dislike high fat/low carb diets don't suggest you live on bagels and pasta all day. Everyone admits that the glycemic index of foods must be taken into consideration and that certain fats are a necessary and healthy part of a bodybuilding diet.

The low fat/high carb approach was based more on marketing and processed food sales than science. Sure, they worked okay if you kept the calories in check, but not many people did. The high carbohydrate intake, much of it coming from high GI sources, lead to cravings and drastic swings in energy levels. Also, these diets were notoriously low in protein. No protein, no muscles.

Extremely low calorie diets: Many of today's sheep diets (diets aimed at fat housewives) fall into this category. The Slim Fast diet perfectly illustrates the idiocy of this type of low fat, low protein, low calorie diet.

You're supposed to drink a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then have a "sensible" dinner. First off, not many people can eat sensibly after having nothing but 24 ounces of liquid "food" all day. Anyone on this diet will be wracked with cravings.

Each Slim-Fast shake has 220 calories, ten grams of poor-quality protein, 42 grams of carbs, and three grams of fat. Throw in the sensible dinner, which is usually something like chicken, a baked potato, and a couple of vegetable side dishes. Total all that up, and you'll get around 900 to 1,000 calories per day. Will a person lose weight on this plan? Yes, but the weight lost will include several pounds of muscle.

In fact, if you lose 20 pounds on this diet, almost half will be from lost muscle tissue. According to a recent study, 25 to 50% of weight lost on reduced-calorie diets comes from muscle (especially if you drop below the 800-calorie mark). In case you didn't know, muscle tissue is largely responsible for how many calories you naturally burn each day (and, of course, how good you look). Since extremely low-calorie diets like the Slim-Fast plan will slowly destroy a person's metabolism, he or she might lose ten pounds, then gain back 12, lose 12, gain back 15, etc. After all that pain and suffering, the person is fatter in the end.

The lesson? If you really want to lose fat and keep it off, use weight training to built some calorie eatin' muscle and skip the excessively low calorie diets.

The Role Of Supplements

Do you have to use supplements along with an appropriate diet? No, you don't, but they can certainly help. Supplementation plays three main roles. Supplements can:

? make the diet easier to follow. MRPs and protein bars fall into this category. They're fast, economical and convenient. You can use them to add extra calories and protein to your diet for mass gains or use them in place of more fattening foods during a cutting diet.

? make the diet more effective and faster. Fat burners fall into this category. They can speed up your metabolism, give you an energy boost and curb your appetite. Other supplements may help prevent catabolism (muscle wasting) during strict diets. Topical prohormones and products like Methoxy-7 can be a great help in this area.

? make the diet healthier. Extreme fat loss or muscle gain diets aren't always synonymous with health. Supplementing your diet with fiber, fish oils, multi-vitamins, probiotics and extra antioxidants can not only help you look good, but help you stay looking good for years to come.

Conclusion

Today at the gym I want you to look around at someone besides the sports bra-wearing goddess doing one-arm rows. You'll see a bunch of guys who are really strong and who are obviously hauling around a lot of muscle. Of course, they don't really look good because there's a substantial layer of fat over those muscles. You'll also see some guys who are really lean and ripped up. The problem is they weigh about 150 pounds soaking wet, so they don't look that great either.

But every once in a while, you'll spot a guy who's lean and muscular, a guy who's struck the perfect balance between overall size and body-fat percentage. (Chances are, he's the one working out with the sports-bra goddess.) What separates him from the other guys? I'll bet you can answer that question without my help.