If there’s one thing that we love and dread at the same time, it’s carbohydrates. Just about any tasty treat you can buy in a store has carbs in it. It’s in your breakfast bagel and fruit salad, your lunch croutons and vegetables, your snack cookies and triscuits, your bland, strictly oatmeal diet and much, much more. But of course, none of this is bad; carbs play the crucial role of supplying our body with the much needed energy that fuels it during the day and more importantly, our workouts.
Carb cycling is one of the most effective dieting routines anyone can engage in. Although the people who talk about this eating method are mainly advanced athletes, fitness models and bodybuilders, it is a great way to monitor our intake and help break down unwanted fat without having to walk to a gym. In short, carb cycling is rotating the amount of carbs eaten on a day-by-day basis from intake levels of none to low to high. This cycle not only avoids over-eating breads and pasta, but also slows down fat building and fat storage while at the same time speeding up metabolism and ultimately making you leaner.
Carbs usually contain high calories and when not used, they are stored as glycogen. Overdosing on carbs means they are not burned as fuel and spill into adipose tissue (fat) instead. By cutting the amount of carbs you eat through cycling, the process is reversed. The adipose tissue is ramped up in burning rather than depositing.
On a cellular level, the body breaks down carbs from glucose into smaller compounds, which are then oxidized to form water and release large amounts of energy. In fact, cellular respiration, the process carried out to break down glucose to form ATP (energy our cells can use) is often more than 60 percent efficient. Compare that to the 18 to 20 percent efficiency rate of internal combustion engines in cars and we see that our body is able to harness three times more energy from our intake than our most fuel-optimizing hybrids. This means that it is actually okay to cut carbs at the right times because the overall efficiency of our metabolism will have stored enough energy to go days without it.
Some diets suggest that when the body goes for extended periods of time without carbs, it goes into starvation mode and starts storing as much as it can and burning muscle to fuel body functions. This is a huge misconception. Carb-less diets drain energy and without proper food substitutions, it is hard to maintain any gains in the long term. During this starvation mode, the body is under the assumption that food is scarce. It will start storing and breaking down muscle and fat, but only to a certain degree before the fat loss plateaus and your muscle size shrinks. This goes for girls, too. If you want to be slimmer with a good figure, the goal is to lose fat, not decrease muscles that were never disproportionately big to begin with.
A sample week of cycling may look something like this:
Monday: none
Tuesday: low
Wednesday: high
Thursday: none
Friday: low
Saturday: low
Sunday: high
The idea is to reduce, not cut out, the carbs you eat. Professional fitness models, bodybuilders, trainers and even athletes measure out what they eat. For example, if the normal intake is 900 grams of carbs per day, a reduced intake would be 400-500 grams. However, these numbers may be just too much of a hassle for the average student. As amateurs of the fitness world, we can eyeball our portions and still maintain effective carb cycling. Cut portion sizes from one half to one third of their normal sizes on low carb intake days to allow for the body to turn to fat-burning for fuel. These cuts apply to breads, fruits, oatmeal, pasta, potatoes, rice and any grain-based soups.
Eliminating carbohydrates from a diet is just about the hardest thing to do; carbs are those things that magically make us feel satisfied from a meal. Cutting the intake of carbs is equally as hard because you not only have to correctly measure the reduced portion sizes, but also have to make sure not to consume a much larger portion afterwards. It may seem like much of these advanced dieting methods are strictly used by bodybuilders to hit that 3 percent body fat weeks before a competition, but the truth is, correct cycling can and will produce leaner bodies for any individual at any stage of fitness. With steadfast motivation, results can be seen in two to three weeks.
And since the point of carb cycling is to get leaner, if you’re getting leaner, keep up the good work and don’t just stop. Cycling for two weeks to get the initial results is good, but not good enough. Six to eight weeks of cycling combined with exercise and rest will produce optimal results and help you become a substantially leaner you. Once you hit the eight-week mark and see a sizable difference from week one, switch back to your normal eating levels. While this isn’t a diet that removes any food group, it is hard to follow and no room should be allowed for cheating. We are, in a sense, manipulating the way our body functions and metabolizes and as we all know, it is impossible to cheat our bodies.
