CARB Cycling Diet | Low Carb Diet

Check out my client David’s transformation where he put on a whole bunch of muscle

There are many people that say that reverse dieting is completely useless and others that take it to the extreme and have people reverse dieting for as long or longer than they were actually dieting for.

I think both of these approaches are wrong. And the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the two.

Just like we wouldn’t want to cut calories drastically, we don’t want to increase them drastically either.

So we do need some sort of reverse diet after prolonged calorie restriction. On the flip side of the coin, the metabolism is very adaptive

and does not take any more than a couple of weeks maybe a month and a half at the most to adapt to maintenance levels.

So really long reverse diets except maybe in very rare cases are completely unnecessary.

I want to start this video by talking about the problems associated with cutting calories too low for extended periods of time

The only way for our body to use more fat for energy is by not having its preferred source there all the time.

Eliminating carbs completely, however, can have many drawbacks on our health and well being.

Protein, carbs, and fats are all important and necessary for our body. So in comes the cyclical ketogenic diet aka carb cycling and also known originally as the Anabolic Diet.

There are many different approaches to carb cycling, but the general idea is that At some points of the week you’re going to have a high amount of carbohydrates,

and at other points of the week you’re going to have a low amount of carbohydrates.

Setting up the high carb and low carb splits will vary from one plan to the next. Some people may have very small changes in the number of carbs they have from day to day.

Another more advanced approach would be to do a High carb, low carb, and no carb day.

The way that I like to set this kind of split up is by having a high amount of carbs on my high carb day, which for me would be somewhere around 400 grams,

I would have one third or at the most half that amount for low carb day, and then try to get as close to 0 grams as possible on my no carb day and then repeat.

An even more advanced approach would be to just cycle between high and no carb days.

Or take it even a step further and do high, no, no. I don’t really recommend having any more than two no carb days in a row.

The less drastic high, medium, the low plan is ideal for beginners because it doesn’t require you to cut your carbs too low and gives you a feel for the diet.

If you’re an absolute beginner I would recommend that you just try to cut overall calories before trying carb cycling.

You could lose a bunch of fat just by doing that. Do not start with the most drastic carb cycling plan because if you do…once you plateau where do you go from there?

This is equivalent to doing an 800 calorie diet when you could lose weight and maintain a better body composition with a 1500 calorie diet.

Jumping to an extreme will not help you lose weight faster, in fact, it’ll probably backfire. Also in case you’re wondering what kind of food you can eat on your no carb day,

For carbs make sure you are eating good sources of carbs like oats, brown rice, and sweet potatoes and avoid the junk food carbs.

You can incorporate one cheat meal on one high carb day in the week, but that’s it one cheat meal.    

You may notice that your strength and energy levels may go down while dieting like this. In fact, you may feel like straight up garbage in the beginning.

Understand that a lot of people feel this way when creating any kind of a calorie deficit. Your body will take a little while to adapt to using fat for energy instead of carbs.

So the first 2 weeks can feel miserable. Give your body some time to adapt. A good idea is to plan your high carb days the day before a heavy lifting day,

because this way you have stored glycogen available for your heavy lifts the next day.

If you have no idea how many carbs to have on each day, try using a calorie calculator to find your maintenance macros and then add at least 50 grams of carbs to get the number for your high carb day.

I’ll include a calorie calculator in the description. Once you have your high carb number you should be able to figure out your low carb day.

No carb day is obviously no carbs. After doing a carb cycling plan you may need to do some reverse dieting before going back to a more relaxed eating plan.

Luckily for you guys, I will be making a reverse dieting video for next week. So make sure you check that out.