I’ve been on the anabolic diet for about 16 weeks now. In that time I’ve gone from 185 to 163. As with other diets I’ve tried in the past I seem to be plateauing at this weight. (10% bodyfat) I’m already down to about 1600 calories a day, any less and I might as well not eat. What the hell do I need to do to get ripped? Should I change my diet at this point or am I just getting impatient?
I am no expert or anything, but I know for a fact that if you are not getting enough protein in your diet, then your body will steel nutrients from your muscles and you will lose a lot of muscle weight, but all the fat will still be there. Make sure if you are going to go real low in calories during your diet that you are still eating healthy. Get about .5-.75 grams of prot. per day to maintain most muscle.
Well 16 weeks is a long time for your body to be on a constant diet without a break. As you’ve seen your calorie requirements are getting lower and lower and at that weight 1600 is pretty damn low. What you need is to take a break from dieting and let your metabolism recover. I’d suggest taking a few weeks off at maintenance calories to allow it to recover. Then once it’s back up to normal slowly work your calories back down again, starting at the standard deficit of 500.
It’s not natural for our bodyfat levels to be that low and our body will fight us all the way down. I’d even suggest adding a refeed day every 5-7 days to keep leptin levels in check and your metabolism up. So eat 500 calories below maintenance for 5-7 days, then take a 1 day refeed of high carb/low fat and same protein as usual. Also strive to hit maintenance calories or a bit above. It may seem that this would slow down your fat loss because you take a day off of the diet, however in the long run it will actually speed it up as your metabolism won’t shut down like it obviously already has.
At 10% you don’t have much more fat to burn off and going to extreme in dieting right now will only burn muscle up.
Vageta is right. That’s a long ass time to do the anabolic diet. Check out Fred Hatfield’s zig-zag diet for a change.