I’m running out of battery, I’ll reply more in detail when I get home.
Anyway, the intakes he recommends for refeed days (that’s what he’s referring to there, check out his ultimate diet 2.0 and the rapid fat loss handbook) are even higher (we’re talking about 800 g over the course of a day), so compared to that 300 g aren’t even that high.
I’ll write more in detail in a few hours.
so first things first, i have some bad news: for some obscure reason, my book seems to be lacking the reference page at the end. it’s listed in the index, but it’s not there.
i don’t know if that’s something with my copy of the book or if it’s an actual print error. anyhow, i can’t link the study directly for this reason.
i also did some searching on google but couldn’t find anything simply with the keywords. if you are more used to browsing research websites maybe you could help me out?
anyway, regarding the video you linked:
it’s a podcast i watched last month i think, in which lyle talks about some new ideas about the refeed used in his diets.
so since you never heard of this guy, i’ll give you a brief introduction about his way of dieting:
in the ultimate diet 2.0, you diet cyclically, eating severely low cals and carbs three days a week, two of which also have you do a “depletion workout,” basically a high rep full body workout.
then on thursday, you do a lower rep workout (“tension workout”), following which you being a carb load that lasts from thursday pm all the way to the end of friday.
you are prompted to eat a large, large amount of carbs (easily totaling 800 g/day or more) during this period, and on saturday morning you undergo a “power workout” that supposedly can lead to muscle gain even while losing fat (according to metabolic mechanisms that he describes in detail in the book and are basically based on the fact that when muscles are severely glycogen-depleted, incoming carbs only go towards storage in the muscles and you keep burning fat for little more than a day). he then has you start over.
in his other diet, the “rapid fat loss handbook,” he divides dieters into 3 categories, a b c, ranging from active lean individuals to overweight or obese, inactive dieters.
the diet is a protein-sparing modified fast, which means you only get to eat protein and veggies and nothing else. lyle suggests that cat a dieters be on this diet for 13 days in a row maximum. after that period, they do a full two-day refeed following the same principles of his ultimate diet 2.0, and then 1 week at maintenance before getting back on the diet.
in none of those two other books does he provide references, stating that people aren’t going to read them anyway and “promising that everything he states is backed up by studies.” i don’t know, this guys seems legit for real so i honestly believe him.
in the article we are discussing here, instead, the amounts are more modest, and he mentions 90 minutes of exercise. he doesn’t specify which kind, and i’d note that his book isn’t focused only on weight training individuals but also, for example, endurance athletes. however, seen as distance running and the like are more based on fats for fuel, i would exclude he could have been referring to that kind of activity there.
in any event, i still adjusted that number down to 4 g/kg because that seems more realistic to me (i won’t be training for an hour and a half) and i still don’t want to gain a ton of fat if things don’t quite work.
have you taken a look at the program i’ll be doing? to me, it looks like a pretty intensive workout, which should grant me some glycogen burning. goal is maximum muscle mass gain.
so after these considerations, my questions are:
does my proposed intake of 300 g carbs post workout (375 g total in workout period considering pre and intra supplementation) seem sensible for my goal? am i better off spreading those carbs more during the days or eating less altogether?
if it’s good, how should i consume my other carbs for the day? even when consuming that many carbs, i’ll still have some room for others at other times.
what suggestions would you give about the whole protocol i came up with based on all the information i provided?
thank you!
So that is different from what I thought you were suggesting. I think that a 2 day re feed after 5 days of depletion AND 20 set workout may make sense. That is going in to that last workout in a depleted state. If you do it once a week, I think that you will get supercompensation. I don’t know if it makes up for the 5 days of protein sparing fast as a mass gain approach.
Do you know of anyone who Lyle McDonald has trained this way? Glycogen supercompensation does work for endurance events like 10Ks. You can temporarily raise glycogen levels above baseline after a period of depletion. ITs also what bodybuilders have been doing for decades with carb depletion and loading.
In that case, 5 days depletion, 2 days refeed, I would go for 500 grams of carbs. When losing fat, I have done 2 day refeeds that have resulted in a rapid increase in fat loss over the next 1-2 weeks.
i’ll have to apologize here, i probably didn’t make my point clear enough.
when talking about the depletion protocol, i was referring to another diet of his. you deplete for days, then workout and consume an enormous amount of carbs (800 g or about).
in my case, i’m referring to working out 3 times per week under “normal” conditions, so no depletion, and then consuming a very big amount of carbs but not quite as big as in first case (so 300 g).
would that work?
this is what i’ll be doing next month, during my final fat loss phase.
i plan on following his ultimate diet 2.0 which is basically similar to what you said.
3 days of depletion, 2 days of refeed, 2 days of moderate deficit following refeed. and the amount will probably be close to the 500 g you mentioned (i’ll have to look up the numbers in the book again).
this is for fat loss. what i have been referring to this whole thread, instead, was my plan for mass gain following my fat loss phase. hope that makes sense now, it was a little bit all over the place 
I recall an interview with Eric Helms and he was asked if he’d ever recommend Lyle’s Ultimate Diet for clients. He said in his training career only 2 clients tried it because they were curious and it didn’t go well for either! Helms wouldn’t touch it and neither should most folk, unless your shooting up insulin!
Did he mention any reason as to why he thinks it’s ineffective? How did it not “go well,” did he elaborate on that?
First off, Helms and McDonald are pals so hats off for his honesty. He basically said it’s an extreme diet with little application to real life (probably a throw back to the Dan Duchaine days). He didn’t elaborate any further, from memory.
I’m honestly finding it difficult to understand the implication of this statement.
Do you think he meant it’s impractical and too much effort is required (hence “extreme”) or that it actually doesn’t work and doesn’t yield the results one might be looking for?
I’m asking this because I’m keen to try this diet; I’m currently on a cut and would fancy trying it when I get bored of “traditional” cutting (taking a week off from dieting first like he suggests), and because the premise of being able to build some muscle while losing a good amount of fat sounds really good.
I think it’s the latter. I love Lyle’s work as much as the next guy but his biggest contribution is his Flexible Dieting book, which is common sense. Everything else is an extreme diet marketed towards the ‘I can binge eat and still lose weight’ crowd. Extreme carb loads have no application to the vast majority of folks (Helms argument). That said, there is nothing wrong with self experimentation so why not try it? It can be fun and motivating, which are two good reasons for running any program.
It sounds similar to the anabolic diet without the anabolic (high fat) part. Also similar toTthe Velocity Diet with refeeds. Basically, we all know that you need to cycle carbs and calories to provoke continual improvements in body composition. The 2 day re-feed seems to be his brainchild, better than any other time frame, especially as someone is getting on the leaner side.
There may be a few issues. If you get significant ketones during the depletion phase, it will take extra insulin to clear out the ketones when you add back the high carbs. I have seen people go from ketosis to super high blood sugar on the start of a carb-up. It takes about 48 hours to totally upregulate glucose metabolism after long carb restriction, but glucose burning probably does not down regulate a lot in 5 days which seems to be his motivation for the 5 day depletion phase.
I think it is largely dependent on how lean you are going in. If someone is not really lean, they almost certainly don’t need to refeed at that level every week.
Bodybuilders carb load at the end of a competition cut. Many have noted that they often grow muscle fastest for 2-3 weeks after a competition cut. If doing this on a weekly cycle was really best, why don’t bodybuilders refeed every week of a competition cut? What I don’t like is that your weekly workouts seem to be occurring in very different energetic states which can be tough.
Even in a “normal” day, we have fluctuations in insulin sensitivity. Training, creates a situation where you will have periods of higher insulin sensitivity. We can try to manipulate this on a weekly basis, or we can do it over 6-10 weeks with mini-cuts. The weekly approach seems to create the most extreme fluctuations in training energy levels. The daily fluctuations put you in the the same state each day. The mini-cut approach creates smoother changes from day to day. The weekly variability seems to provide periods that are most vastly different from one another. It sounds to me like Lyle’s strategy is an idealized nutritional approach that does not do a good job of considering the training side of the equation and how nutrition affects it.
I find eating sufficient good quality food and training hard works pretty well. But that’s way too simple.
May I just say everyone lifter should try this diet out for a few months just for fun. Bacon, cheese, olive oil shots, ribeye, salmon all week long (and yes salads). Then Saturday morning an entire box of rice Chex with skim milk just as a start. I’m fatter so I only carbed up a few meals. Insane pumps and the best sleep I’ve ever had.
Yeah that was my first thought when I read it last year. Next winter, when I have a more stable schedule I might give it a try, although I’m more of a carb guy like I said before.
Ew, as much as I like olive oil on other foods, this sounds mildly disgusting.
@samul, I don’t know if McDonald gets into this, but on a carb reload, it is optimal to load fructose/sucrose first before starches or glucose polymers. The reason is that the fructose will load the liver first but it won’t start to shut down muscle sensitivity, and then all of the glucose polymers are available to go to the muscles fast. If you start your loading with glucose polymers, they get split between the liver and muscle at the same and the supercompensation tapers down before the muscles are maximally overloaded. The fructose preferrentially fills up liver glycogen as well as glycogen stores in the cells of the intestinal tracts but keeps the muscles primed at top sensitivity. Something like grape juice or fruit first, then glucose polymers after about an hour. Just on the beginning of refeeding.
There is also a strategy called fat loading, where you load alternately on carbs, and carbs+saturated fat every 2 hours after a depletion phase. Muscles will supercompensate on saturated fat loading too.
I can’t remember if he gives any specific recommendation on the order (he does suggest the lifter eat high-GI, starchy carbs in the first part of the refeed and move onto lower-GI, more fibrous carbs last), and I recall that he says the lifter should limit their fructose and sucrose intake to about 50 and 100 respectively, claiming that too much fructose won’t be up taken effectively by the muscles.
Thank you for the advice, I will keep this in mind!
Any specific recommendations as to quantities and possibly different types of fruit being better than others (to my knowledge, for example, pineapple is lower in fructose)?
When liver glycogen is low, its safest to eat fructose because the liver has extra room to turn fructose into glycogen. Muscles can’t do it. Gut cells can, and they will turn a lot of the fructose you eat into glucose quickly and send it into the bloodstream. Most fruit nets a little less than 50% fructose.
The highest fructose fruits are mangoes and cherries and watermelon. Frozen cherries might be a good one. Again, the first 2 hours after depletion is the one time that higher fructose intake is less harmful because the liver has room to turn it into glycogen (instead of making it into triglycerides which happens if liver glycogen is full). Its not about the GI here, but that you can get the liver full faster without starting to turn off muscle sensitivity.
Then maybe go to apricots and bananas which are low fructose (about 30% counting the starch), and potatoes, HBCD, white rice.
Talking about starches, would white flour products (pasta, bread…) be acceptable?
Also, for the more fibrous ones towards the end (if that distinction makes sense at all in the context of a refeed), I’m thinking beans and lentils.
In the past, when first testing out carb loads, I also consumed meringues (almost pure sugar), which are one of the very few sweet foods that I like (I tend to crave them when dieting, not really wanting them under normal circumstances).
The very first time I did a little bit of a binge of cookies and snacks similar to twinkies (apparently we don’t have twinkies themselves here). It’s incredibile what sugar and dieting (hence decreased leptin) can do to our brains: I don’t even like most of those foods that much!
There are too many individual differences in the responses to beans and wheat for me to generalize. They both cause me to get headaches and sinusitis. Pasta and beans both have low GI, maybe in the 30s so you won’t need to eat every two hours on them. And since you don’t eat much fat the lower GI starches may have benefits.
This is one of the recurring factors on diets set up on these binge and bust diets. In addressing this, McDonald in his Rapid Fat Loss suggests minimal strength training. So not eating ‘optimally’ has now become not eating optimally and not training optimally (at least for part of the week). This doesn’t sit well with me.