Anabolic Diet Question(s)

Diet and Nutrition
1

So I’ve made the decision to start the diet.

Tomorrow is day 12, and the last low carb day before my first carb loading weekend. I installed software called DietController on Sunday to help keep track of everything that I’m eating, it has a few quirks, but overall I’ve been really happy with it.

One of those quirks is figuring out if the program is subtracting fiber from total carbs or not.
It reads out like this:

carbs: 34g 135kcal 4%
fiber: 14g 0kcal 0%

I thought that on food labels the listed carbohydrate count was total, and then you would subtract the fiber from that to get your true carb intake.

I added a fiber supplement in yesterday to help out, but I hit 43g of carbs. The rest of my macronutrients seem fine, with fat at ~60% and protein at ~35%. I’ve been eating about BWx21 in calories, which is more than suggested for the transition phase, but I’m still hungry. And my fiber is still too low.

So do you think that I have probably fat adapted by now? Can I start my carb load on Saturday, even though I wasn’t real sure about the carb intake last week, and I seem to have gone over by a few grams this week (43g was the highest, the rest were real close to 30g)? Should I give it another week on the low carb phase while being much stricter?

I know the answer to this is probably in the “My Experience on the Anabolic Diet” thread, but I just don’t have time to read all that tonight and tomorrow before I decide to carb load this weekend. I was hoping someone would be kind enough to help me out!

And if anyone has any experience with this software or others like it, do you have any hints or tips? I’m on a Macintosh computer so that pretty severely limits my choice for this type of software. I don’t have regular internet access so the online FitDay program is out for me too.

Oh, and by the way, my carb intake is coming from vegetables (non starchy ones), low carb cheeses (<= 1g per oz if any), and a little bit of balsamic vinigar (maybe a tablespoon a day.) This is why I don’t understand the lack of fiber in relation to total carbs.

Thank you guys so much in advance! This is my first post even though I’ve been reading T-Nation for over a year now and I am very grateful to all the contributors and everyone who posts useful stuff, this site is fantastic!

2

[quote]sbaer wrote:
So I’ve made the decision to start the diet.

I’ve had difficulty keeping my carbs low.

Should I eat more even though it goes over the maintenance calories alotted?

So do you think that I have probably fat adapted by now?
[/quote]

In reverse order:
You may be fat adapted. You may not be. If you go strict for two weeks straight (last week and this upcoming week) you’ll be fat-adapted by the end of next week. If you carb-load on the weekends, you’ll be fat-adapted the week after next week. Did you suffer from low energy over this week? Do you feel like you’re in ‘metabolic purgatory’? Your responses on these questions determine whether and how you carb-load this weekend.

Eat more. The maintenance carloric set (bdywt x18) was a minimum. You should not be hungry when on maintenance.

Carbs are tricky. Good job checking for them. Net Carbs = total carbs- fiber. Net Carbs count.

Welcome to the AD.

3

Thanks for your response. I haven’t had time to get on to post a response until now, but I decided to go another week on the low carb phase just to be safe. I also emailed the vendor of the software and they say that I should subtract the fiber from the carbs they display, so I’ve been in the green the whole time anyway.

But no, I haven’t felt any metabolic hell, I feel better than ever actually! And I started eating more too.

thanks again!