TDawg 2 and Refeed/Cheat Meal

I am just finishing up my first week with Tdawg2 and was wondering what people have found works best for their refeed/cheat meal.

  1. What have people found works better a 6 hour refeed or just having one meal of whatever you are craving? If refeeding, what kind of numbers should I be looking at for carbs in that period, and what would my split for macronutrients look like for the day?

  2. Do I just eat whatever I want and not include it in my calories for the day and still try and get the 15Xweight in terms of calories in all my other meals, or do I cut back in other meals, or just try and add up the calories in the one meal?

  3. Also, I understand that calories can be a little bit higher, on lower carb diets but isnt 15X bodyweight the kind of numbers people use for maintenance. After one week eating at that, I was going to try and drop calories a little bit, maybe to 13 or 14 x bw, How many people have tweaked this number? I gain fat easily and lose it even harder so I think might need it a little lower to get the response that most would get from the standard numbers.

I would love to hear some input from people who are on T-dawg, or any of the resident diet experts out there, as there are many who know much more about this stuff than myself.

Right now I am at about 180, 10-12 % bf, with my macros coming in at about 50%fat, 35% protein, and 15 % carbs on workout days with 1.5 grams of protein per lb of muscle.

You got the formula slightly wrong…
It’s (15X BW - 500)…for you that gives you about 2200 Cals. Do that for a week or two, and if you feel the need to tweak, I wouldn’t go below 2000 for a while.

I’d say count the calories of your refeed/cheat meal. But what I’ve done (and it worked well for me at least), is allow my overall daily calorie count to be slightly higher than 15x BW-500, however, being sure that I never went above my maintanence (ie. at most I took an extra 500 calories in).

Hope that helps. Good Luck.

I’ve done th T-dawg last year with one cheat meal a week and this year with a refeed every 4-6 days. I think I had a lot more success with the refeed. I lost fat quicker and had more energy in the gym. On my refeed days I didn’t go as high as some recommend, but I went around 1200 calories higher than my t-dawg calorie amount. I ate mostly carbs and protein and tried to keep fat to a minimum. My only fat meal was the last meal of the day where I took in 15g of fish oil and 10g of olive oil with 5oz of eye of round steaks. I think my overall breakdown of my refeed days was ~350C, 250P, and ~60-70F. I didn’t count exactly but I knew about how much I was consuming.

Thanks for the advice guys. I the 15x -500 completely slipped my mind, but since this was just my first week, and I have been seeing good results, I am glad I caught it now. Anyways just out of curiosity, are you guys naturally lean or do you have a propensity to store fat easily. Judging by some of the post in the DP, it seems that there might be some anecdotal evidence that one option might be better for a specific body type, so where do you guys fall.
Also, how long did you guys stay on the diet and what were your results.

Thanks for the input

No, I definitely not naturally lean and have a tendacy to store fat in the abdomen area. I’m a former fatty that lost around 75 pounds of fat 3 years ago. I stayed on the diet for 5 weeks and went from 174(~14%) to 164(~9%) without any loss in strength. I was also using Hot-rox the last 4 weeks of my diet. I’m sure Hot-rox helped a lot but I’m sure the refeeds worked better than the cheat meals.

JasonL, sounds alot like me. Thanks for the input I am gonna wait till tommorrow and try a refeed.

I’m don’t know if I’m naturally lean as I’ve always been competitively athletic since I was a kid, so I never had the chance to see how fast I’d store up large amounts of fat.
I can say, however, that I easily store fat in my midsection, but am one of the lucky one’s that I can easily lose it as well (I think you call it a mesomorph?).

My goal was to lose 3-4 lbs of fat in 4 weeks. I did it in less than 2 wks, while losing no size (or LBM), and maintaining my strength (Though it may not be long enough to tell). As a poor student, I can’t afford anything but protein in terms of supplements. Everything else was diet, and timing my meals. I think your right about refeed vs. cheat meals being dependent on body type (or at least starting bf levels prior to dieting). I couldn’t spend 4-6 days refeeding since that would be over half the extent of my diet. So instead I use 1 cheat meal (with increased healthy carbs).