Contest Dieting, The Ups and Downs

Ron Harris

Bitching about the weather is as much of a sport in New England as the Red Sox or the Patriots. But this summer so far was giving us all good reason to complain. Somehow, we were experiencing the soggy, rainy weather normally associated with Seattle. This was bad news not only because it set us up for an infestation of brooding teenage vampires with stylish hair like in the movie Twilight, but it was also limiting our already sparse amount of possible ‘beach days.’ On a recent Sunday when my wife had the day off, we decided to head to the shore for some fun in the sun. This turned out to be a terrible idea, as several million other people also had the same idea.

Just finding a parking space, even taking it up the wazoo at thirty bucks for the day, took us over an hour. This allowed my wife ample time to remind me several dozen times how this headache was all my fault. Because I am dieting for a contest, we couldn’t leave until I had popped a dozen Parrillo Muscle Aminos™ with a mug of coffee and headed off to the gym for 45 minutes of cardio. Then I had to come home to cook and eat breakfast, which is easily my largest and most complex meal of the day. Along with oatmeal, I have scrambled eggs in which I have sliced up asparagus, tomatoes, and strips of chicken breast. Sometimes there are so many ingredients in the pan I have to check twice to make sure I haven’t chopped up my Shih Tzu and tossed her in there too.

We had a nice relaxing time once we staked out our tiny piece of sand amidst the legions of other beachgoers. I had all my meals packed up inside a cooler, and stayed right on schedule of eating every two hours on the dot. Behind me from the boardwalk wafted the tempting aromas of fried dough, pizza, and fried clams. It was nice to imagine I was eating those instead of cold chicken breast, salmon, and green beans.

Leaving the beach turned out not to be so easy or relaxing. I hesitate to use the term ‘traffic jam,’ because at least jam moves. This was more like traffic glue. Rarely have I been in the situation where I could have walked faster, even on crutches, than we were driving. The five miles from the beach parking lot to the highway took nearly three hours to traverse. At one point, both my son and I had to make use of empty water bottles in the SUV to relieve ourselves. Thank God my wife was driving – and we have tinted windows. The cars coming in the other direction were dumb, horny teenagers just arriving at the beach to walk around being drunk and obnoxious and hollering inappropriate exclamations to attractive female passersby. A couple of these cars crept past us with bass so jarring from their speakers that I thought our windows would shatter. When the driver of one of these idiot teen-mobiles tried striking up a conversation with my lovely MILF wife inviting her to turn around and follow them, I had half a mind to beat the crap out of him. Luckily for the little punk I don’t have a whole mind anymore.

This was the first contest diet I had been on in two years. Last summer I had leaned out for a ‘guest posing’ appearance at the show I had won the summer before, but that’s not quite the same. You don’t diet anywhere near as long or as strictly when you know ahead of time you’re going to be the only one on the stage and won’t be in competition with anything except your own pride. No sir, the diet I was on this summer was for the first pro qualifier I had ever competed in after exactly two decades of getting up on stage in little trunks. Talk about a late bloomer, huh? I would actually be turning forty years old a couple days after this contest, though I am told I look much younger in a dark nightclub, if you’ve got a pretty good buzz going and forgot to put your contact lenses in before going out.

Contest dieting has its ups and downs, like anything else. The absolute best part, obviously, is getting ripped and seeing all that wonderful definition. Most of the time, muscles are obscured, submerged under a layer of fat. Once the fat is dieted off, you see shape, separations, striations, and veins that were previously hidden. And you can show it off with tank tops and shorts in the appropriate climate. If you’ve got it, flaunt it – that’s what I say. Why hide a ripped, muscular physique, especially since it’s not evident very often? This also garners far more attention, which can be good and bad. It’s great to know people appreciate your dedication and hard work, but after a while you grow weary of being asked for diet tips several times during every workout, as well as filling in the details to the question, “You got any contests comin’ up?”

The leaner you get, the more enthusiasm you often have for training. It makes sense – you can see the fruits of your labors so much more clearly. At the same time, you’re eating less and doing more cardio, so your actual energy levels for the workout aren’t too high. The real Catch-22 here is that you aren’t taking in the caloric surplus needed to grow, so the very best these amazing workouts can hope to accomplish is maintaining your existing muscle mass. You find yourself thinking, “Damn, if only I could eat a lot more food and do less cardio, I would be growing like a mother-loving weed right now!”

Did I mention cardio? Women have a certain ‘c’ word that makes them cringe and inspires anger, and for bodybuilders, that ‘c’ word is cardio. John Parrillo has said many times over the years that the benefits of cardio go far beyond melting bodyfat and strengthening the heart and lungs. It also builds your capillary density, so you can train harder and longer with weights. But even knowing that doesn’t make it any more enjoyable for your typical meathead like me. If it weren’t for my iPod providing a good soundtrack and the combination of the little plasma TV in front of me plus the drama on the gym floor, I would literally be bored to tears every time I had to climb up on that frigging Stepmill or the elliptical trainer.

Last but certainly not least in this circus of contest prep is the diet itself. On a contest diet, you have to eat the right meals at the right times, all the time. It’s not like the off-season, where you never worry too much about food. “Eh, I’ll find something,” is what I say then, and I usually do. But good luck finding a plain grilled chicken breast and a green salad in an amusement park. All you have to choose from in places like that are various deep-fried monstrosities laden with salt and grease, for the privilege of eating you will pay out the wazoo for. Since such places often don’t allow outside food, they are
off-limits.

Your best bet when dieting is to stay close to your own kitchen and refrigerator. Any time you venture away, you had better bring your own meals or risk either blowing your diet with the wrong food and re-gaining fat, or losing muscle mass because you went too long between meals. Thank God I have my wife to cook plenty of chicken, turkey, and the occasional steak, or else my meals would be limited to what I can make in the frying pan and the toaster oven – eggs and fish. Recently she threatened to let me do just that if I didn’t do a better job of limiting my portions of the big batches of meat she was cooking up. You best believe I was on my knees apologizing and promising I would – eating nothing but eggs and fish would have me down to looking like a toothpick pretty fast.

And of course, getting lean by today’s standards, which means deep, clear separations in all the muscle groups including the glutes and hams, demands that certain items not be consumed at all. The obvious no-no’s are things like fast food, candy, and pastries, but a bodybuilder trying to get into his or her best condition must also refrain from eating any breads, dairy, or fruit. Walking through the produce section of the supermarket when you’re dieting in the summer totally sucks. All you can see and smell are the big, ripe, juicy grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, and watermelon.

But in the end, it’s all worth it. The final product is a ripped, muscular physique that most people, even those who work out regularly, could only dream of. It takes enormous discipline and sacrifice, plus untold hours of grueling weight training and cardio sessions, to strip away as much bodyfat as humanly possible to reveal the sculpted masterpiece of rock-hard muscle and sinew below. If it were easy, everyone would have this look all the time. It’s anything but easy though, and few gym rats will ever have what it takes to follow a contest diet all the way through. If you’ve never done it, I urge you to do it at least once. The actual contest is great, but it pales in comparison to the journey of self-discovery and the reward of seeing the muscles you work so hard for in such spectacular detail. And really, you don’t even have to diet down for a contest. You can do it for photos, or just to look great at the beach. Just don’t go on the first sunny day of a rainy summer, or else you too might find yourself mired in horrendous traffic and being forced to pee into an empty water bottle. It’s bad enough for us guys, but I shudder to think at the mess you ladies would make!