The Hunger Game: Eating for Satiety and Sanity in a Pre-Contest Diet

For the next ten or so weeks, many bodybuilders and figure competitors will be dieting down for the MABBA Novice Championships on March 23, 2013. There is so much anticipation of what everyone hopes will happen at this contest, particularly that everyone comes in as peeled and shredded as possible--or at least as much as necessary. And, for the most part, to get there, they're gonna have to be a little hungry.

If you want to figure out how to combat this, you can try a few of these techniques:

Coffee

In addition to acting as a stimulant and keeping your energy levels up, caffeine also acts as an appetite suppressant. Be careful though, as this can cause you to get a little bit of a crash (this may vary from person to person).

Veggetables

Any kind of high volume, fibrous veggetables that add volume to a diet are a friend. Broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, green beans, asparagus...all reasonably low in calories, and high in volume.

Protein

Yeah, I know, I'm sure most of you are getting your share of protein, but try including some kind of whole food protein in a decent amount. While for most people, this should be common sense, there is also a learning curve for what specific amount will work the best. Someone eating around 1 gram per pound of bodyweight (a fairly standard amount for naturals) in the off season may find themselves much hungrier come contest time, once calories are dropped down. Increasing it to 1.25 or 1.5 per pound might help diminish this--or even more on a lower calorie diet.

Fat

It seems very counter intuitive, that something that doesn't even really take up space on your plate would be so filling. However, this is more of a systemic thing. Even though the higher carb diet will have more volume of food, usually, one effect here is that low fat diets, aside from being sub-optimally healthy, will cause far more hunger issues than low carb diets. Even if you don't feel it right away, depriving yourself of dietary fat (less than 0.2 grams per pound of lean body weight, and that's already approaching suboptimal amounts) will usually lead to binges and mental failure before the diet can become effective. See this video Q and A by Eric Helms and Matt Ogus:

That being said, being too low on carbs will have a similar effect--so any dietary imbalance can do this sort of thing.

This article is short, however I'll also be posting about another interview soon enough. Anyway, make sure to go to bodybuilding.ca for more info on the MABBA Novice Championships on March 23, 2013. It's going to be a blast for everyone involved, so just keep pushing through guys! I'm rooting for all of you!