As an amateur bodybuilder, I’m often asked by friends, family, and coworkers (other Software Development Engineers) what I do for dieting. I’m writing this so that I can refer people to it in the future since the process is a little hard to explain in detail on the spot. Also, I don’t think there are many (if any) that diet like I do and I’d like to share it. I think the diet can be used by anyone with weight goals and its different enough that it might just be what someone needed after trying other methods without success.

For reference, below is a before/after of the diet for my last bodybuilding show in 2016, as well as a full album to the show to establish creds.

Migrated from previous blog, beware formatting

There is no shortage of diet philosophies in bodybuilding. Ketogenic, Carb Cycling and Intermittent Fasting are some of the more popular ones at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that anyone of them is right for everyone. In this post, I am going to discuss the approaches that I have used in my prep so far, why they worked to the degree they did, and what I liked about them. I will also show side by side comparisons in most mandatory bodybuilding poses to compare the effectiveness of different dieting methods.

For those who are unfamiliar, this reading is supplementary to the Google Docs spreadsheet that I use to track the my diet. You can find the spreadsheet here, and I’ll reference it throughout the post. It should also be linked to on the right side bar of this blog.

The Standard Approach

Right now, a lot of competitors are doing some variation of Carb Cycling. You can do a quick Google search on it to learn more, but the basic idea is that you have some series of low carb days followed by some series of high carb days, repeating until you lose enough weight. The idea here being that you will go through periods of fat burning, and then replenish your glycogen stores so you have enough energy to do cardio and workouts. The length of a each series and the amount of macro nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats) varies greatly on an individual basis. This is the cycle I was following:

Migrated from previous blog, beware formatting

I have always had a great appreciation for people who value teaching. For years, I have been learning from the private thoughts of people publicized through videos and blogs. Without knowing it, Joel Spolsky has taught me how to apply for jobs as a software developer, Sam Harris has taught me how to explain complex topics without complicated vocabulary, and Tyler Durden has taught me the influence our minds can have on our goals. Now, I think I finally have something that someone else can benefit from: my experience prepping for my first bodybuilding show, The Emerald Cup.

My name is Anthony Naddeo. I am a 24 year old Computer Science graduate currently working at Amazon and I finally have the time and money to start recognizing my goals in bodybuilding. Over the next 9 weeks I’ll be sharing my progress in the form of photos and data, as well as my subjective experiences with the process of contest prep and hopefully answering some questions along the way.. First, a little history.