A couple of week ago I told you about how my basement flooded due to a freak thaw we had in Ontario. Well, I’m still dealing with the repercussions of that little flood.
Mostly, it has forced me to clean out my basement (which is no small task). I’m almost done now, but on Friday I was still going through some of my old boxes.
After throwing out a couple kilograms of Leucine and BCAA’s, and about 3 years worth of Muscle and Fitness Magazines, I stumbled across some of my old training journals.
Now, normally, reviewing my old workouts isn’t something I would consider ‘blog worthy’, but these particular journals were from back when I was working in the supplement industry, and outlined some of the crazier experiments I have performed on myself over the years.
Of course, If I could send a message back in time and tell my 8 year younger self that I would be advocating flexible and brief periods of intermittent fasting for weight loss, I’d probably think future me was crazy…However now that I am looking at some of the things I did ‘back in the day’, all I can say is “wow”.
For instance, have you ever taken glutamine? I have. But I didn’t just “take” glutamine, I mega-dosed with it.
Back in 2003, when most people were dosing their creatine with upwards of 75 grams of sugar I was thinking about a different approach. At the time I was experimenting with a low carb, super high protein diet, so I really did not want to be taking an extra 150 grams of pure sugar if I could some how avoid it. Somehow, I cam up with the idea of:
‘What if I dosed 10 grams of creatine twice a day, but instead of using a mega dose of dextrose, I took a mega dose of glutamine?’
A simple enough question, and an even simpler experiment to conduct (especially when you have an unlimited supply of glutamine).
For 14 days I took 10 grams of creatine with 80 grams of glutamine once in the morning, then again after my workout in the evening.
From my notes I can see that I didn’t have any weird GI problems, or any other unwanted effects. However my weight only increased marginally (3 pounds) which was typically of a creatine load for me, so the experiment ended with the notes
“160 grams of glutamine per day not any better than 20 grams of creatine.”
Keep in mind that this was an experiment that only had one subject (me) and was definitely not blinded, so really it is just a review of my own personal experiences, but fun nonetheless.
This was probably one of the tamer experiments I tried. I’ve also uncovered the notes for a couple of different over-feeding experiments, as well as some crazy fat burning experiments that I will share later in the week.
BP
PS- Sara over at the Sanaworld Blog wrote a very interesting review of Eat Stop Eat that touches on the psychological effects of fasting and some of her own experiences with fasting and obsessive compulsive eating. You can check out part 1 of Sara’s post HERE.
