Even eating as much as I felt like yesterday, I still ended up with a caloric deficit of 2,147 calories (i'm very active). I felt ground down, and did not complete the two of the last three WODs. I'm chalking it up to the diet and considering it a sunk cost to have missed them. I am much closer to my weight goal for the quarter though (165, 11% bodyfat by Oct. 4th).
July 24th: 179.5 18% bodyfat (147 lean)
Aug. 2nd 171.5 14% bodyfat (147 lean)
- size 34 pants fit (barely) again.
The weight loss on Atkins seems to be as advertised, I seem to have low "metabolic resistance".
The mental/performance/physical benefits seem vastly overblown at least for me. I did experience some exercise-induced euphoria (perhaps the runners high occurs when the body is totally depleted of glycogen and has to use fat as fuel?). My performance overall was compromised as follows:
Strength/muscle mass: not affected
Stamina: down perhaps 20%
Endurance: totally compromised, perhaps on the order of 50%
Conclusion: a VLCD is fantastic for reducing bodyfat without loosing muscle mass. In addition, there is NO hunger on such a diet, which seems to reinforce Gary Taub's hypothesis that hunger causes fat and not the other way around. A VLCD does not, however seem to enhance performance, at least for me. Coach has stated that a diet much under 40% carbohydrate will not support CF-type metabolic loads, so this was not unexpected. Being able to loose 8 lbs of pure bodyfat in less than two weeks with no loss of muscle mass is pretty amazing, and this might be a great diet to pair with a two-week strength cycle at some point.
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"there is NO hunger on such a diet, which seems to reinforce Gary Taube's hypothesis that hunger causes fat and not the other way around."
Actually, his hypothesis is that being fat causes hunger, because insulin resistance around being fat causes anything you eat to be stored as fat rather than acting as fuel. So you get hungry because whatever you eat is quickly made unavailable for energy needs.
But your point about no hunger is absolutely true. Once you get off the carb-based ups and downs, and start burning more of your stored fat for energy (which is how things are supposed to happen between meals) you just aren't hungry anymore.
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