Losing weight seems to be the easiest when you are just starting out on a fat loss program. During the early stage, you are likely to achieve great results pretty quickly. Then, your fat loss comes to an abrupt halt.
What can you do about it?
Try using ’carb cycling’ to help you break the plateau.
Tom Venuto, author of Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle, has written a great article on carb cycling for fat loss here.
What is carb cycling?
Carb cycling involves rotating low carb days with high carb days.
When should carb cycling be used?
Carb cycling works well to prevent plateaus so you can continue to lose fat. This is true especially for those who are quite lean and still want to lose the last bit of stubborn fat.
How carb cycling works?
1. It’s not always good to be in a calorie deficit. Prolonged and severe deficits slow down metabolism as your body adapts to caloric restriction and have adverse effects on various hormones. This may increase your appetite so you end up eating more.
Carb cycling helps to restore the hormones that regulate metabolism, appetite and hunger to their normal levels.
2. On low carb days, your body uses stored body fat as fuel since carbs are severely limited. So when you load up carbs on high carb days, they are converted and stored as glycogen, instead of fat, by depleted muscles. You will have a leaner body as carb fuel is used to gain lean mass and you lose fat.
Carb cycling plans
Tom recommends 3 consecutive days on low carbs, then high carb on day 4. If you go beyond 3 days on low carbs, you’d experience low energy levels and reduced training intensity. The high carb day prevents metabolic slow down and negative hormonal effects.
This is not the only definitive carb cycling plan. He discusses other carb cyling plans in Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (here), based on how quickly you are losing weight or muscle mass.
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