I never counted calories. After about five, or so, years I became to understand how my body responded to food to stay fairly lean and lose fat for bodybuilding contests (that I was not yet challenging for the top places yet in my efforts.)
At work I became proficient at tuning the boiler controls at the power generation plant. That foundation of control theory is feedback.
I decided to incorporate feedback as how I would achieve stage conditioning. I needed to set a few metrics to track progress:
- Body weight on scale
- Strength on a upper body press exercise
- Millimeters on a skinfold test
- The mirror
I knew my maintenance diet through years of observation. The foundation of my diet was six meals per day and at least 40 grams of protein every meal. It was fairly low in fat, but not near low fat (I ate 7 whole eggs for breakfast and animal flesh the other five meals.)
12 to 14 weeks out from a show I would go totally clean: No sugar or processed foods, etc. I always used AAS for contests. Since my protein and fat intake is essentially constant, my only dietary variable was carbohydrates.
I competed in about 80 bodybuilding contests, so I had an extremely good idea what I should look like depending how many weeks remained before the contest.
This is how I used feedback to adjust my diet:
If my body weight was not going down that week, I would drop carbohydrates, or add cardio time
If my upper body strength metric dropped, I would add carbohydrates.
If my skinfold millimeters was not dropping, I would drop carbohydrates or add cardio time.
If I didnāt like what I saw in the mirror, I would drop carbohydrates or add cardio time.
The strength metric was my losing muscle alarm.
I started cardio at 30 minutes a day, and increased the time as needed. I never got to more than 90 minutes a day. I only did cardio at home walking around the neighborhood. I never did cardio near my weight training and always separated by at least one meal.
Because I had been āoff cycleā when I started preparing for the contest, I was always getting stronger during most of the 12 weeks.
All of the weeks once I got below 9%, or so, body fat were painful, and I could be losing some strength. It was then that the mirror was the final word going forward.