UrbanUpdate

If Thomas Lyman is being honest, he didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a bodybuilder. Really, he just wanted to grow a little taller. So much, in fact, that by the time he was in high school, he asked a trainer at the local gym whether or not hanging from a pull-up bar could stretch his frame out a bit. “He just looked at me and said, ‘No, that’s ridiculous. Why would you ever think that?’” But that trainer instilled a new mentality into Lyman. “He asked me, ‘Why would you want to be taller anyways? You’re perfect for bodybuilding.’” And though you may not be looking to pack on as much muscle as our buddy Tom here, who better to teach us all the secrets on how to make our bodies look their very best for those days at the beach, the Coachella Sahara tent, nights in a stranger’s bed, etc.? Turns out, chocolate cake is involved.

GQ: The very first time I met you, it was the night before an actual competition and you were purchasing a chocolate cake you intended to eat all of. What the hell was that all about, because it makes absolutely no sense to me?

Thomas Lyman: [Laughs] Well, here’s the thing. I was talking with my coach and he said, “You’re flat. Your muscles don’t pop because there’s no water, there’s no glycogen in your system.” So to fill my muscles out, he’s like, “If you eat a lot of dirty food and as long as you're leaning your fluids, your muscles are going to pull the glycogen in. Because there’s not going to be water in your system, you’re just going to pop more.” So that was the idea behind the cake. It could have been anything dirty, like burgers or pizza. He just picked a dessert.

Is this a common thing that everyone does to look better on-stage? I never would have guessed that after training for months before a competition that you would stuff your face with cake and pizza the night before you’re set to compete.

There’s usually some sort of bad food that you would eat. Some people might do bagels and muffins. Some people do candy bars.

I’m beginning to realize that I know almost nothing at all about what goes into preparing for a bodybuilding competition. I think my entire perception of what it actually entails was formed by a 10-year-old episode of MTV’s True Life where this dude was just eating heads of lettuce sometime before a competition.

I saw that one.

And the dude asked his dad to shave his butt. Those are my two impressions of a bodybuilding competition: hair removal and dropping insane amounts of weight by only eating heads of lettuce.

I actually stayed relatively close all year to my competing weight, which worked out well. I’m a welterweight, so that is 154 to 165 pounds. If I had been 10 or 20 pounds heavier, I probably would have been eating more greens and less carbs earlier on in my diet.

Well, let's backtrack a little bit, because I’m assuming your diet changes depending on how far out you are from the competition itself. For the majority of your training, what are you eating?

My diet leading up to a competition stayed relatively the same until this year. I started with a new coach this year. Before, every meal would be chicken and rice or beef and rice, all day for eight meals. And you get used to it, but you get tired of it real fast. This year, my new coach had me doing the whole pyramid. You know, potatoes and then cream of wheat with fish and eggs. My protein intake was still pretty high—around 200 to 350 grams a day—but everything just felt so much better. I felt more alive all the time.

And as you get closer and closer to the competition, you start making adjustments to your diet?

Exactly. So I started training for my last competition in November back in February. By August, we started the pre-contest prep. So the food started to disappear, the carbs were dropped down a little bit, but I was still getting a lot of variety. And as we moved closer and closer from there, the beef would disappear and there’d be more fish instead. Then there were just lower-calorie foods. Instead of a cup and a half of rice, it might be half a cup of rice and half a cup of broccoli.

Basically you’re making those adjustments to lean down before the competition itself?

Yeah. So instead of using your food as energy to train and function today, you’re still getting energy from your food, but you’re also tapping into the energies you have stored in your body.

So when you’re coming into the week and days beforehand, is that the biggest shift with our diet? I imagine there is a really drastic cut-off at some point.

The drastic change was with my fluids. Up until about a week before the competition, I was drinking a gallon of fluids a day. Maybe even a gallon and a half. And then about four days out, I’d drink at least two gallons. The next day I dropped down to 32 ounces of fluids. And so the idea with that is, you consume all those fluids and your body is like, “What’s all this? I’ve got to get rid of this.” So when you go down to only 32 ounces of fluids, it takes your body a little bit to adjust, so it will continue pushing out water, thinking that more water is coming in when there isn’t. That’s how you’re able to pull some of the water-weight.

It sounds like a very scientific way of tricking your body into looking a very specific way.

Yeah. And then with carbs—a lot of people, the week before, will do no carbs. Because your muscles, they’re going to pull the glycogen from the carbohydrates in, and the glycogen attracts water. So if you want to release all that, you can’t have the carbs in there. That’s when you get miserable.

I’m assuming the actual day of the competition that you’re basically eating and drinking nothing then?

This last competition I was continuing to stay full with rice cakes and a couple bites of apple, that way I was getting very little bits of fluid. So I would do that three hours before pre-judging, and then about an hour before my coach had me do another dirty meal of burgers and fries.

Excuse me?

Well, it’s a meal with a lot more sodium in it, so any water that I might have had floating around, the sodium’s going to soak it up and just pull in more.

Post-competition then, do you even want to celebrate with a crazy meal since you’re eating burgers and cakes in the lead up?

The second I’m done, I’m like, “Give me something to drink.” Water, Gatorade, a soda—it doesn’t matter. Just give me anything.

Honestly, the water stuff sounds more difficult to deal with than the food.

It is. There’s always some sort of water load, so you’re drinking and you’re pissing every five minutes. It sucks. It’s miserable. And then the next day, you’ve got nothing. There’s no happy medium.

Related Stories for GQReal Life Diet