Carb Cycling Diet
[ssba] Published 21 August 2015
Looking to lose some fat? If so, it’s vital you choose your diet plan correctly because the wrong choice could leave you very disappointed in the results you see. Most people, when dieting, run into one of two problems.
- They reach a weight loss plateau shortly after starting, failing to lose any further weight and giving up entirely.
- They lose primarily lean muscle mass, causing them to look worse than when they first began.
One particular diet approach, the carb cycling approach, helps you avoid both of these problems.
Let me explain.
What Is Carb Cycling Diet
Carbohydrate cycling is a diet plan where instead of keeping your food intake exactly the same seven days a week, you implement high and low carbohydrate days.
Typically your protein and dietary fat intake will remain quite constant, so it’s just this one change in your carbohydrate intake taking place.
Why do this?
A few reasons.
The Metabolic Issues Associated With Dieting
First, whenever you put yourself on one of those traditional low calorie diets, you’ll start to experience a slowing of your metabolic rate – which is the number of calories you burn daily. The slower your metabolic rate becomes, the slower fat loss will take place. It may, in fact, slow down so much, fat loss stops entirely, which is known as the fat loss plateau. Most people simply give up at this point, stating they aren’t cut out to be lean.
That said, if you don’t take your calorie level low enough, you simply won’t burn fat – period. So you need to find a way around this problem.
When you add these high carbohydrate days to a normal low calorie, low carb diet, you take your calorie intake temporarily up much higher, which tricks the body into thinking it’s no longer dieting. As such, it speeds up your metabolic rate so that you can begin using energy faster again.
Then, when you move back to your low carb days, your body is now primed for superior fat burning as your metabolism is high and your food intake is lower. This helps you avoid the dreaded plateau entirely, burning fat optimally during those low carb days.
Preserving Lean Muscle Mass
Second, these high carbohydrate days also go a long way towards restoring muscle glycogen levels, which is the storage form of energy in the muscle tissues. As this takes place, this then gives you energy to maintain your intense workout sessions.
When on a lower calorie diet plan, those intense workout sessions are the most important factor helping you maintain your lean muscle mass. So by nature of keeping those up, you then ensure that while on that diet, you lose fat mass, not lean muscle.
It’s a win-win for your results.
Combating The Hunger Daemon
One last way in which carbohydrate cycling works is that it helps to normalize a particular hormone in the body called leptin, which is produced by the body fat cells. When your calorie and carbohydrate intake drops too low for too long, leptin levels will also begin to decline.
As this takes place, extreme hunger sets in. Not just normal hunger that makes your stomach rumble a little, we’re talking hunger so strong food is all you can think about.
This then makes sticking to your diet nearly impossible. When you add those high carbohydrate days however, this ‘resets’ that hormone leptin so this intense hunger can be avoided.
The end result is you can more easily stick with that diet – and enjoy yourself as you do so.
So hopefully you can now see why carbohydrate cycling is so powerful. If you want to get lean, feel strong, and avoid feeling miserable while going about your weight loss, carbohydrate cycling is the route to take.