CKD or TKD diets (aka Ketogenic diets)

For those of you not familiar with a CKD (Cyclical Ketosis Diet) there is an excellent link here: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=36497

TKD (Targeted Ketogenic Diet) is essentially a no carb diet with the exception of pre/post workout carbs. These are meant strictly to fill muscle glycogen stores and do not kick the body out of ketosis.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had ever had any luck with a diet like this along side of gymnastics training. I know that in my former experience as a weights/cardio guy I had a lot of fun on a high fat/no carb diet. The biggest difference was that workouts had to be short and intense. The capacity to workout hard with a lot of weights was severely diminished towards the end of the week before the carb up. That being said I felt like I could run forever when my body becomes fat adapted...no sprints though Essentially this diet is supposed to be 65%fat 35%protein 5%carbs...carbs under 20g-30g a day and should be all trace carbs/leafy green high fiber veggies (I eat a ton of asparagus and spinach)

Now that I am ring training I have to say that my initial reaction to this diet is that I am suddenly 10lbs lighter (almost all water weight initially) and everything seems to be slightly easier. Energy levels are pretty consistent (my favorite thing about this diet because I am often practicing drums/preparing to tour for 4-8 hours a day, and can do just fine without eating for prolonged periods of time) My intention with this diet is to cut a lot of the excess weight that I have been carrying around. Trying to "put on size" in the weight room has always seemed to be an empty goal and I now regret most of the work I've put in trying to do that. I'm trying to become more efficient, and increase my strength/weight ratio. I feel that a CKD would be a good way to do it as I find it easy to keep or even increase strength even when "cutting" (albeit slowly) on a CKD along side of shedding the extra stuff.

I was wondering if anyone else on this forum had toyed around with a ketogenic diet. I haven't seemed to see anything about it on the boards here. Any thoughts, or feedback?? negative or positive

I also wanted to mention that for all you Paleo fanatics out there: I know some people who, after being in ketosis for so long that they were totally "fat adapted", could actually bump up their carb ratio to around 75g a day without affecting their "ketosis". This would allow them to include nuts/berries/veggies in abundance while still being a ketogenic diet...though the initial few weeks would have to be conservative in carb consumption

Ketogenic diets are not good for athletes, but if you are not elite why not.

I am currently toying around with a keto diet. I am not sure if I am accurate, but I believe I have dropped 1-2% bf (13.5% to 10.5-11%) within the last month. I haven't had the time/energy to start measuring my foods (on top of which I am not sure if it would screw with my recovery) but this is very frustrating. I end up reading all day and just coming back to the same literature (i.e. "good calories, bad calories"). I can see why Gregor said what he did.

Please keep this post going, I am very curious.

I sort of tried a TKD for a while in the past, and gravitated towards performing some sort of interval workout almost every day so that I had a half-decent excuse to eat loads of readily available carbs. Ha ha.

I'm in the middle of ckd/anabolic diet at the moment and I'm loving it. Energy is constant now, I dont get big highs and lows like I do when eating loads of carbs and my strength is still increasing. Had my refeed day yesterday, my muscles swelled up and I was 9lbs heavier by the end of the day(as is normal with muscle "supersaturation").

I think the anabolic diet is great because there is really no limit to what you can eat. During the week you can eat loads of red meat, chicken,bacon,sausages(if you like them,I h8 them), cheese,eggs,nuts,leafy green veg etc and at the weekend you can load up on carbs and junk food(again if you want junk,I prefer clean carbs, eating junk after no carbs all week sends me straight to sleep )

Personally I think this diet would be great for anyone that doesn't tolerate carbs well but as gregor said it would not be suitable for elite athletes with many training hours per week.

cill said:

I'm in the middle of ckd/anabolic diet at the moment and I'm loving it. Energy is constant now, I dont get big highs and lows like I do when eating loads of carbs and my strength is still increasing. Had my refeed day yesterday, my muscles swelled up and I was 9lbs heavier by the end of the day(as is normal with muscle "supersaturation").

I think the anabolic diet is great because there is really no limit to what you can eat. During the week you can eat loads of red meat, chicken,bacon,sausages(if you like them,I h8 them), cheese,eggs,nuts,leafy green veg etc and at the weekend you can load up on carbs and junk food(again if you want junk,I prefer clean carbs, eating junk after no carbs all week sends me straight to sleep )

Personally I think this diet would be great for anyone that doesn't tolerate carbs well but as gregor said it would not be suitable for elite athletes with many training hours per week.

How big are you cill? (if you don't mind my asking) And, are you looking for size or just strength?

My personal experience with the anabolic diet wasn't very good but I think it would be different if I weighed and measured.