I made a few changes to the Velocity diet Shugart is following, and have been doing it for a week now. The goal is to kill this gut I’ve developed over the past fifteen years, which is currently my major dissatisfaction with my body development. (I’ve got muscle now, you just can’t really see it. There’s an iron-hard six-pack hiding under that gut, and my legs would definitely turn heads if I could just lean them out a little.)
Here’s the basic breakdown of my changes:
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Four scoops of low-carb Grow! in the morning
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One gallon of distilled water over the course of the day
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On training days, two scoops of PowerDrive and 1/4 cup of fish oil pre-workout with a multivitamin (Eclipse Hard Trainer Pack, minus the chromium picolinate, adding a Solaray 200 mcg Chromium GTF instead)
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On training days, two and a half scoops of Surge post-workout
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Four scoops of low-carb Grow! at night
I am not currently dong any real cardio, just a half-hour FMA class on Tuesday and my usual weight training on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
On Sunday, there is a window between noon and four when I’ve decided I can eat or drink whatever I want.
The calorie breakdown over the week goes about like this…
Training days: 440 + 552 + 350 + 440 = 1782
Non-training days: 440 + 440 = 880
This is a total of 9,768 Kcals over the course of the week, plus whatever my cheat meal is on Sunday. Since I haven’t had my cheat meal yet today, I don’t know what that’s going to be. I estimate that it will come in at or around 1,500 Kcals.
My weekly BMR comes in at around 25,000 Kcals, so I have about a 14,000 Kcal deficit and therefore can probably expect to see a solid four-pound weekly fat loss.
Of course, on two days out of the week, I only get two Grow! shakes all day long. I am thinking about adding cardio on those two days, as it would be an optimal time for it – I’d be doing it at roughly the same time as my usual workout, but without the fish oil calories.
The new micellar casein formula in Grow! really does keep me from being hungry throughout the day. Even on the no-oil days, I don’t feel like I’m starving to death. I do get hungry, however, and I’m always VERY aware of any food smells around me – I never realised before that there are six restaurants near the gym parking lot. I don’t know what or where they are, but I can smell each one distinctly.
Constipation isn’t an issue; a quarter cup of fish oil lubricates things pretty nicely, so anything in that area tends to be in a pretty big rush to come out. (It occasionally gives rise to interesting “reverse dry heave” scenarios, where you want to shit your guts out, but there’s just nothing there. It’s not exactly fun, but in retrospect it’s amusing.)
The workout I’m doing is semi-cardio in and of itself, which is why I’m not too worried about lacking the cardio. I start with thirty reps on the bench press in a single set (low weight, obviously), then move on to the squat rack where I do a long connected series of exercises (inspired by “the bear”) going from deadlift and power clean through three squats and two overhead presses with a good morning and a bent-over row. That’s one rep; I do twenty of these, with as many in a set as I can handle before I’m about to fall down. (The weight is necessarily light, because while I can squat a lot more, there’s only so much I can overhead press.) Then I put down the weight and collapse until my heart rate goes down enough to do another set.
So far, my average set is three, with the occasional “good” set of four; I sweat like hell and pant like a racehorse, and it hits pretty much every muscle group. I’m expecting this to balance out my muscle development – by using the same weight for everything, the weaker muscles have to “catch up” before the stronger ones get worked much. That’s the theory, anyway, but I’m not really here to talk about my workout at the moment.
I’m measuring progress by making sure I can still do the same workout in about the same amount of time (confirming no strength loss, which should roughly equate to muscle loss… I currently do the above workout in a little over 30 minutes), trying to improve my time and performance in that workout, and weighing myself on three different scales.
And at this writing, I’m down eleven pounds. I’m not too excited about that, because I expect a lot of it is just water and fecal matter (most people carry up to ten pounds of fecal matter in their large intestine at any given time, but with zero fiber, I’m now essentially empty). I think the SECOND week is where I’ll start to see “real” progress, i.e. progress that actually equates to fat loss.
Just providing an independent perspective. Thoughts, opinions, and questions are welcome. I’m going to go have my morning Grow! now. 
