recap

Post-Pull Session this week. One more week till the Diet Break.

Last week, I touched on the fact that my body was very stressed and that the diet was starting to catch up to me.

Although, you want to work with your body as MUCH as possible while dieting, (Read THIS) this week it was apparent we were NOT happy with each other.

nOT FUN

The first 3 days of week 4 were the HARDEST of my entire cut. Some of the negative things that were starting to happen:

Sleep Quality: Although I was getting to bed on time, I could tell upon waking most mornings that it was not the best sleep. This is even more the case if I compare it to how I slept on my diet break.
Brain Fog: Work on Thursday was very hard to get through. It took a lot of my mental focus to make sure I was still as lively as I had to be and that I was still being a good co-worker.
Food Focus: On top of the low energy, I was starting to THINK about food more. About 30 minutes-1 hour after eating, I would start to look at the clock and think about when I was eating next. Overall hunger was manageable, but I was starting to get sick of the same meals over and over again.
Negativity/Self-Doubt: On top of the lack of quality sleep and food focus, I was starting to really think how much farther I could push myself with this dieting phase.

Overall, I was in need of a Diet Break. But I tried to make the most of my situation and deal with them.

My strategies:

Sleep quality: The two biggest things I tried to control were:
Relaxation: I made sure every night to have some planned relaxation after bed. I have the luxury of living by myself and being able to leave my day job’s focus for DURING the day and not take it home with me. To help relax after work I do a combination of going on walks, talking to clients on the phone, and watching TV to wind down.
Bedtime routine: I have my casein pudding right around 9PM every night to get me in the routine of winding down for the day. I also make sure my gym bag and food are ready to go for the next day when I wake up. Lately, I’ve been watching the Sopranos for about 30 minutes to get me sleepy and go right to bed.
Brain Fog: I couldn’t change too much how alert or energetic I was, BUT I could use more efficiency strategies to help me out throughout the day. By using less energy to do more tasks, I was making sure that I was as adequate of a worker as I was before the start of my diet. See the pictures below for some strategies I used to help with functioning at work.
Food Focus: covered in the Nutrition Section
Negativity/self-doubt: covered in the Mindset Section

Nutrition

dealing with food focus:

One subtle thing that happens when dieting is that you start to THINK about food more. The slow battle against your body in what is essentially “strategic starvation” yields a lot of unwanted psychological and physiological outcomes throughout the diet.

As I mentioned above, food was becoming more and more of something I wanted and NEEDED. Which makes sense, I have lost over 10% of my starting body weight at this point and am dipping to body weights I have not seen since probably high school.

To lessen the focus of food, one thing I have incorporated over time is a “Meal Template”. It's essentially a framework of my day that is more or less consistent 5 days a week and then only a tad different on weekends. This is the next step after meal prep that ends up taking even more of the guesswork out of what is going into my mouth day to day.

Why it helps me:

Taken from one of my IG stories @brandonjod

Sodium/Potassium: When the diet gets harder, you only want to make changes when NECESSARY. Therefore, its wise to be more in tune with your scale weight fluctuations. By having a consistent day to day sodium and potassium intake, you are controlling one more variable to NOT worry about with scale weight changes.
Eating at similar times: I have also gotten into the habit of eating at similar times throughout the weeks. This allows me to be more in tune with my circadian rhythm and get even MORE consistent and efficient with my routine.
During the week: Carbs pre-training: 6AM, BF-8/830, Lunch 12, GY 230/3, Dinner 6/630, Late night snack: ~9. Like I mentioned in week 1, this habit formation has also helped me get the most consistent bedtime schedule of my diet so far.
Less Stress: The nice thing about this “template” is that I can easily manipulate it on days where I need to call audibles because of outside events. Sometimes, I’ll have to skip that mid-afternoon snack because I had a bigger lunch, which then I’ll just include the GY at night.
On weekends, when I can wake up later, I can have my larger BF before I train and just have it more easily digestible carbs and then have my sweet potato later at dinner.
Addtionally, it makes it super easy to buy things in bulk because you have centered your habits around certain meals and FOODs as opposed to actual Numbers that you have to hit. It makes things a lot less stressful and helps you develop an intuition over time of what needs to be done to hit your macros.
Money: By eating similar things day to day, I save money by two different avenues.
First off, I end up eating out less. I like to eat out less and less as I get further into a diet because the margain for error gets lower and lower.
Second, by eating similar meals, I can buy more food in bulk knowing that you will end up using all of it throughout the week.
Digestion: the LAST thing you want on show day is to have a bloated stomach after all the hard weeks of dieting you did prior. To help combat this potential roadblock, I am starting to get in a groove of eating foods that sit well with ME.
By eating similar foods, its easier to manipulate individual foods to see what happens when you add them or remove them from your diet. This is something I’ve slowly refined as I’ve gotten more into this dieting phase.

Takeaway:

I spend less time making fancy, SUPER macro friendly, “Dieter's Dream” meals and combinations that take forever to prepare.

This then allows me to spend less time thinking about HOW I am going to hit my Macros and obsessing over every meal. And more time on other things that matter to ME in my life such as training, rest and making content!

Training

over-reaching week

My Week 4 for me is what my coach and I term “Over reaching week”. In week 1 (here) I talked about how I like my training paradigm to start off on the easier side and ramp up as the weeks go on. I will start my sets in the earlier weeks farther away from failure and then have my Week 4 training be more or less a rep or so shy from technical failure.

This type of training can be very psychologically and physically taxing on your body. When dieting, therefore, you want to use this type of training sparingly. Although, straying TOO far from this side of the spectrum can be a way of avoiding the inevitable. You DO need to push yourself at points when dieting and this week was a prime example.

In the beginning weeks I listened to a lot of chill music. Calm, melodic music that was nowhere near the spectrum that would make me get too psychologically aroused. But this week was a different story (see photos on the right):

My approach:

Warm-ups: Like any other week, I take my warm-ups the same and with MINIMAL arousal/hype associated with them.
I may even warm-up a little bit more just to make sure I am prepared for the workout. No getting hyped in my warm-ups sets either. A problem I see is people getting hyped on the way to the gym or even burning themselves out before they’ve started the workout.
Don’t spend your PEAK energy in these tasks.
Realistic Targets: My last couple of warm-up sets before my top sets will give me a good indicator for how things are moving. During these sets I might start the process of psyching myself up a little bit more to see how much in the tank I have on that day. My last 2 or so warm-up sets I will probably take it at about 80% of the psychological intensity that I’ll present on my top sets.
Top Sets: My hard working sets are where I will select a song from my “PR playlist”, put on my noise cancelling headphones and start to get in the zone. For me, anger isn’t the emotional setting that can get the most out of me.
It's oddly enough a combination of sadness and remembrance of past failures in my training and life in general. Therefore, I’ll put on emotional slow ballads like Evanescence or Emotional Metalcore songs to really get me worked up. I like to “peak” my sets so that I’m doing the movement while the “drop” that I’m waiting for happens.
Aftermath: I only take this type of approach for the set itself. Afterwards, I’ll try to come down a bit to make sure I’m not wasting energy on resting. Furthermore, the rest of the day I will try to avoid listening to any kind of arousing music.
The rest of my day is all about coming back DOWN to earth as much as I can given my circumstances. WIth a lot of sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) activation, you NEED to turn on your parasympathetic (rest and digest) so you can rest, recover and manage the diet fatigue.

MORE FATIGUE

Lastly, this type of training isn’t always as practical with certain movements when dieting.

I have taken out deadlifts from the ground and other technically complex movements because of the safety factor. At points, it was getting too difficult to use so much of my psychological arousal just to concentrate on form to make sure I didn’t hurt myself while executing the movement.

Because of this, I was wasting precious energy on getting myself amped as opposed to stimulating the muscles that I want to hit on that day.

Mindset

Although I had started my diet this past winter, I am even more thankful that NOW when it's tougher it's the beginning of spring.

I tend to get a little bit of seasonal depression and in all honesty it's just not fun when your body temperature gets colder WHILE it's freezing cold outside.

Now that it's spring, I can get a lot more of my steps done outside my house for going on walks. I find that on the harder days, it is really refreshing to be able to just step outside, no matter what I’m wearing and start being productive towards my activity levels. Most of the time, I’ll listen to music, podcasts or hop on a phone call.

But on some of my rest days, I like to go for what I like to call are “gratitude walks”. As I mentioned in previous weeks, mood and negativity that comes with the lack of energy is the HARDEST part of the diet for me. Because of this, I like to treat that aspect of the diet the same way I would any other variable, by actually addressing it.

incorporating gratitude walks

On some of my walks, I’ll leave my phone/headphones in my car or house and just go outside with only myself and my thoughts. On the walk, what I’ll do is try to think of as many things as possible that I am thankful for in that day.

They can be as specific as Day to Day:

Thankful for a good training session
Thankful that work is not stressful this week
Thankful that hunger is under control.

Larger-Scale points:

Thankful I have a great job with awesome co-workers
Thankful my Diet break coincides with my friends wedding
Thankful that I am driving distance with my friends and family

To things you don’t think about all the time:

Thankful that me and my family are healthy
Thankful that I have a roof above my head and money to support myself
Thankful that my problems only span my bodybuilding journey

practice, practice, practice

NO matter HOW BAD Life seems in the moment, I guarantee you can still come up with 30+ points if you really think hard about it.

Positivity, like training, is something I believe you can learn and thus need to continually practice until it becomes more natural and requires less effort. I strive to NEVER let my mental health take a back seat to any of my work or hobbies in life.

Especially considering my journey in bodybuilding has been a BIG contributor in helping that area of my life.

Conclusion

Week 4 was one of the harder weeks of the diet. But I got through it just in time for one of my best friend’s WEDDING!!!

Next week, I am going to talk about HOW I managed to stay on track going to a wedding while in the middle of contest prep as well as what strategies I use on diet breaks/deloads.

Any further questions, ask me on Instagram @brandonjod

Brandon's Contest Prep: Week 4