The holidays are over, contest calendars are hanging in the gyms, and it's time to get to work. Every time you prepare to compete, you make the same vow to yourself. This year, I'm coming in leaner than ever, and bigger than ever.No, I haven't been reading your diary or talking to your girlfriend; we all have the same goal every year. However, have you been successful every year? Each contest, after talking to the best bodies at the show like an investigative journalist, have their pointers paid off for you? Chances are, until you learn nutrition from the inside out, just stabbing in the dark with someone else's advice will leave you guessing on contest day. So, read on, let's learn nutrition from the inside out to get shredded!

The first chapter of my nutrition manual, Metabolic Transformation: The Ultimate Fat Loss Guid,e is Metabolism: Turning Your Body Into a Fat-Burning Machine.Within this first chapter, I emphasize the absolute need for a precise nutrition plan that provides necessary nutrient levels to maintain lean body mass while losing body fat. By precision, I mean knowing the best amount of protein, carbs, and fat that will make up your caloric intake to achieve your goals.

There's a lot of detail that goes into high-performance nutrition but we must all start at the same point when attempting to lose weight. Regardless of your dieting strategy, caloric restriction must be achieved at some level for fat to be used as energy. If you do more cardio, but eat more, you won't lose weight. If you eat all "clean" food, but in the same amount as your body requires for energy, you won't lose weight. Whether you chose a low fat or a low carb diet, if your caloric intake matches your body's needs, you won't lose weight. You must eat less food than your body needs on a daily basis.

Once you start eating less food than your body needs, intermediate energy sources will be used to make up the difference. Primarily, these are blood sugar, liver and muscle glycogen, and blood lipids (fat.) The first few days you diet, you will use these sources of energy until sufficiently depleted. When this happens, if you're strong enough to not cave in to your brain's attempt to get you to eat more (hunger, weakness, headache, etc.,) your liver will start converting stored body fat into new glucose. This mechanism, gluconeogenesis, will convert as much body fat to glucose as necessary to make up the caloric deficit you create through eating less than your body needs. This is why low carb diets are effective at eliminating body fat rapidly. By virtually eliminating all the carbs in your diet, your liver has to convert more fat to glucose (carbohydrates) than if you just dropped your carbs a little bit. However, for a bodybuilder, there's a minor problem. The less carbs you eat, the more muscle you catabolize as well. Before getting too specific with nutrient totals, let's look at the big picture again. To eat less food than your body needs, you have to have an idea of how much your body actually uses per day. This is known as your basal metabolic rate, or metabolism. This, of course, varies with age, gender, activity level, and genetics, but isn't too hard to figure out with a little experimentation. Once you've figured out how much food your body requires at varying levels of activity, you can design the best nutrition plan for yourself with amazing predictability. If you plan on losing twelve pounds in twelve weeks, for example, you'll be able to lose exactly a pound a week.

Losing weight isn't often the biggest issue in contest dieting, it's being able to be consistent and predictable. When you have mastery over your nutrition plan, you can zero in on the ultimate goal: being your absolute leanest and biggest at the same time. I always start with protein when designing a program. Your protein requirements are predicated on your dieting pace, training intensity, activity levels, and muscle retention goals. Protein is the foremost nutrient to schedule into your weight loss plan because of its obvious role in building muscle. If you're going to create a caloric deficit, protein isn't the place to do it. An absolute minimum amount of protein when dieting, doing more cardio, and training hard is one gram per pound of lean body mass. A more optimum amount to ensure muscle sparing would be 1.25-1.5 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass. If you're ectomorphic and it's easy for you to lose weight, 1.5 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass would be a safe bet. If a 200 lb. bodybuilder was 15% body fat, his lean body mass would be 170 lbs. If he chose a protein intake of 1.25 grams per pound of lean body mass, he would consume around 215 grams of protein per day.

Once protein levels are established, I take a step backwards and look at overall caloric intake. This is where you need to know how many pounds you want to lose and how much time you have to lose it. My experience with high-level bodybuilders has shown that trying to lose more than one pound of body fat per week through nutrition can lead to unnecessary muscle loss. Increasing your cardio can shed another pound or so per week but I like to aim for about one pound per week through caloric restriction. Since approximately 3,500 calories are stored in one pound of fat, you'll have to schedule a 500 calorie deficit per day. If you've never tracked or estimated how many calories you use per day, this is going to take some trial and error. With initial caloric intake and protein levels set, I move on to fat intake. Not until the last stage of dieting do I like to reduce fat intake lower than about 20% of overall calories. If you go on a low-fat diet for too long, your testosterone and other muscle-supporting hormones will decline and you will lose muscle. If our 200 lb. bodybuilder had an average metabolism of 2,500 calories per day, to lose a pound per week would require dropping daily calories to 2,000. If he wanted 20% of his calories to come from fat, he would need 400 calories from fat, which would be about 45 grams.

So far we've figured out exactly how many calories per day would ensure a pound of body fat loss per week through nutrition. Secondly, we established how much protein would be optimal to spare muscle and how much fat would be needed to keep hormonal levels higher, longer. With 215 grams of protein and 45 grams of fat, we now have 1,260 of our 2,000 calorie goal. To stay at 2,000 calories per day, I would make up the last 740 calories through carbohydrates. This would be 185 grams per day.

The reason I save carbohydrates for last is that they are the least important structurally and the most important in losing body fat. You have to have a certain amount of protein and fat to maintain muscle while dieting. The big variable when dieting to spare muscle should be your carb intake during the initial stages of dieting. If I wanted to lose weight slower, I could increase my carbs. If I wanted to lose weight faster I could drop them from this level. There is great danger in dropping them too low, however, and this is why I don't recommend losing more than a pound per week through caloric restriction. Carbohydrates are a great protein-sparing nutrient. The less carbs you eat, the more body fat you'll burn for energy, but you'll also strip more amino acids from your muscle for energy as well. Carbs act as a buffer against catabolism and no amount of protein in your diet will make up for the slow but consistent leaching of amino acids from your muscle when your carbs are too low.

People with slower metabolic rates often convert more dietary carbohydrates to body fat and have to drop carbs lower than high-metabolism athletes, but still shouldn't drop them too low. You can get away with very short bursts of low-carb dieting and I save this for the end of a contest diet to ensure hardness, but it's critical that you give yourself enough time to lose your weight slowly if you want to be as full and with as much muscle as possible.

Go through these steps in the right order and you'll be able to get as lean as humanly possible with the most muscle your frame can carry: 1)Based on your body fat percentage, give yourself the appropriate time to lose your weight. A preferable amount to lose per week is one pound, however, with more cardio, 1 - 2 lbs. can be achieved with only a slightly higher risk of losing muscle. 2)Based on your estimated metabolic rate, figure a daily caloric intake deficit of 500 calories. 3)Figure protein requirements at 1.0 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass if you're an endomorph, 1.25 grams for mesomorphs, and 1.5 grams for ectomorphs. 4)Figure fat intake at 20% of overall calories. 5)The remaining calories should come from carbohydrates. 6)As contest day approaches, drop your fat intake to 10% of overall calories and adjust your final carbohydrate intake levels to slow or quicken the rate of body fat loss to nail your peak.

Remember, giving enough time to lose weight at this pace will allow you to retain your hard-earned muscle. Now, peak well during the final week and you'll be the leanest and biggest you've ever been!