Holy Grail Diet: Wks 1-9 +8.42lbs Lean Mass / -4.404lbs Fat Mass

Previously... I spent 4 months on the Rapid Weight Loss program and once I achieved my goal of sub 240 pounds bodyweight, I switched things up to a cycle diet, which plays on insulin spiking to lose fat while gaining muscle; a fool's dream if you ask me...

The diet that on now is completely proprietary, because 1; I didn't come up with it, 2; I don't own it 3; it works and 4; I've only come across one doctor ever that didn't throw his arms up and say, "but if you do that, you'll probably die." Based on the results, I'm going to call this "The Holy Grail Diet: The Most Powerful Diet You've Never Heard Of" or The Holy Grail or "HGD" for short.

I got in the BodPod done after four and nine weeks on the Holy Grail and the results justify the name:

13.05.10: 237.050@ 18.7%
(192.780 Lean Mass / 44.270 Fat Mass)
13.06.07: 241.455@ 17.7%
(198.610 Lean Mass / 42.848 Fat Mass)
13.07.12: 241.066@ 16.5%
(201.200 Lean Mass / 39.866 Fat Mass)

 Weeks 1-9:
+8.42 pounds Lean Mass
-4.40 pounds Fat Mass

Because I'm not getting in the thing daily, or weekly for that matter, I can't tell when over the months that Lean Mass was gained or Fat Mass was lost but over a period of nine weeks, adding about eight and a half pounds of Lean Mass while losing about four and a half pounds of Fat Mass is damn good results.

When I tested this diet in 2009, I was able to stay on the Holy Grail for nine strict weeks. The HGD  requires much more effort to plan / prepare / execute than the Rapid Weight Loss diet. It's getting easier and here I am again at the nine week mark, four weeks from my next show and roughly 10 pounds overweight.

Since I started on the HGD, I haven't done any conditioning other than weekly events training, and even then sometimes I'll only to a single set of rope pulls or sled drags. There's a temptation here to get back on the Rapid Weight Loss kick but, with the results from the past nine weeks, I don't want to chance it. Aside from the body composition changes, I've been getting stronger every workout and waking up feeling good and refreshed no matter how hard I hit the weights or the amount of sleep I get.

I know it's not that impressive without progress pics but it's like this; I'm back to work full time, my daughter just turned 7 weeks old, I'm prepping for Pol/Fir/Mil Nationals and trying to help coordinate and plan Northern Nevada's Strongest Man, so... the garage scale and BodPod are what I'm using now to track progress.

At my new, lower body fat percentage (16.5%) I think it's safe for me to add some hardcore conditioning work and tweak my food intake ever so slightly to make it to sub 231.5 in the next month.

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~SAVAGE~

30 Day Challenge / Rapid Weight Loss Results

Coming back from in-residence training, I was around 260 and carrying much more fat than I wanted to. The goal of the initial phase of my diet was to lose as much weight as I could, as fast as I could. I got on the same program that I used in 2007 when I lost 65 pounds in 16 weeks and guess what? I worked again!

Every time I need to drop some quick pounds, after the holidays or in preparation for a physical fitness test, I get back on the Rapid Weight Loss wagon and achieve comparable results. I’ve been criticized for years about my practices of ‘crash-cutting’ and ‘dirty bulking’ and I’ve been told time and time again and it isn’t good for me and it won’t work forever; I keep coming back and proving the critics wrong, most of whom believe that making slight modifications and losing 10 pounds over a year is the real way to get healthy results. Life is short; make things happen.

13.04.12: 257.454@ 23.4%
(197.104 Lean Mass / 60.350 Fat Mass)
13.05.10: 237.050@ 18.7%
(192.780 Lean Mass / 44.270 Fat Mass)

 Weeks 1-4:
-4.32 pounds Lean Mass
-16.08 pounds Fat Mass

Following this I transitioned to a diet that I’ve tested a few times in the past, it’s by the same genius behind what I based my Rapid Weight Loss program off of. The diet is a play on carb cycling with the goals of gaining muscle while losing fat. Personally, I believe that you end up spinning your wheels if you try to both at the same time. I’m a fan of ‘crash-cutting’, even at the expense of muscle mass, and ‘dirty bulking’ because if you want to get big, you’ve got to get nasty.

The longest I’ve tested this cycling diet in the past was nine weeks, the nine weeks leading up to my first North American Strongman show. While I won the show and came in feeling like I looked my best ever, I wasn’t utilizing the BodPod as I should have been so I can’t tell if or what the changes to my body composition were but I do know, for those nine weeks I ate like a king, lost weight, felt cut up and was more fast and powerful then I can ever remember being.

But... It wasn’t as easy to lose weight on the cycling diet as it was on the Rapid Weight Loss model, that’s why it was so important to drop the 19 pounds as fast as I could / did.

Moving forward to the cycling diet, I’m going to do a better job of getting in the BodPod to see if it really is the Holy Grail of diets for strength athletes.

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