My Digestive Tract Hates Me, But I Look Awesome

I couldn’t track down the original pic for this article, but this is me at 175lbs in competition.

Today is Glycogen Supercompensation Day! Today caps off a 5 day keto run, during which time I did not have more than 30g of carbs a day. A normal person would lose a considerable amount of water weight during such a time, but not me, my fuckers, not me. Apparently, I exist in a near-constant state of glycogen depletion, so I lost a mere 4 lbs this week, taking me from 170 to 174. I am ripped to pieces though. Two weeks out from a bodybuilding competition type ripped.

“But Jamie, I have been living under a rock and have no idea what glycogen supercompensation is!”

Well then allow me to shed some light on the subject. I’ve no idea which mad scientist figured this out, but I read about it in two separate places simultaneously- Better Than Steroids, by Dr. Warren Willey (which I HIGHLY recommend), and an article written (I think) by Christian Thibedeaux on T-Nation (the two methods are vastly, vastly different, which I just discovered by reading an article on it.

I tried the T-Nation method and really saw no difference in my physique, so I’m trying the Wiley one now). Anyway, one spends between 5 and 14 days on a keto run (that is, running a constant macronutrient ratio of about 60-70% Fat, 25-35% Protein, and 5% Carbs). That sounds like fun, but it’s actually harder than you’d think to stick to, even with my insanely strict regular diet. Food literally dominates all of your thoughts, and eating out is a massive pain in the balls, unless you’re eating wings. Wings are the key to that diet, in my opinion. If you look at my diet for last week, practically all I ate were wings and ground chuck burgers.

So, at the end of the week, you have a 24-48 hr supercompensation period. Wiley explains the metabolic pathways in great detail, but in my carb-depleted state, I forgot the fucking book, so I will relate the formulae to you from memory (but here’s an article giving you a bit more background). I’m that good. He recommends a 36 hr supercompensation period, but I honestly don’t see myself waking up all night tonight to feed every two hours.

On a wholly unrelated note, Annotations of an Autopsy has a Song called “Sludge City”, in which the only intelligible lyrics in the song are at the beginning during a brutal breakdown, and are “SHE BLED FROM EVERY FUCKING HOLE” and “WHEN I’M FUCKING DONE, SHE WON’T HAVE A CUNT LEFT.” That’s bringing the brutal, and it’s what I am currently enjoying on my iPod while typing this nonsense on my Mom’s Mac. I am a bad person.

Back to supercompensation. It breaks down into three parts.

Lean bodyweight in kilos x 12 / 6 meals. That’ll tell you how many grams of carbs per feeding. Thus, my feedings are:

170x.93=158 lbs lean mass. I then divide by 2.2 for kg = 71.81

So, I then multiply my lbm in kg by 12 grams of CHO, and get a total of 861.81, and divide that by 6 meals, which gives me 144g of carbs every two hours.

Same deal but half of the carbs, and they are high-glycemic solid carbs (he likes Lucky Charms).

72 g of carbs for me, and I’m going with Cap’n Crunch

Halved again. I doubt I’ll do this.

So, this morning I awoke for my first feeding at 6AM to start refilling my glycogen. I made two shakes last night so I wouldn’t have to stand around mixing while half asleep. The shakes were so big that I had to put them in Tupperware, rather than my shaker bottle, and consisted of 3 cups of nonfat milk, 1/2 cup of Hershey’s Syrup, 2 tsp of creatine, and 1 scoop of whey protein. Thus, I had two meals of 44g PRO (double what he recommends, but I got a lot of pro from the milk), 142g CHO, and 1.5G of fat, and 20g of creatine in two hours.

My stomach informed me at about 930AM that those shakes were not my best idea. I never drink milk, due to its pasteurization and homogenization (which I’ll address another time), so I was whacking back a couple Multi-Enzyme pills with the shakes to help me digest the lactose. Either that or the creatine disagreed with me though, so I switched to three lemonade vitamin waters (I needed the water anyway), a scoop of protein with 1 tsp of creatine, and 1/4 cup sugar, which gave me in the neighborhood of 148g CHO, 17g PRO, and no fat at all. That’s waaaaaay too much to drink in a sitting, so I’m switching to 3/4 cup sugar in my protein shake for the next meals.