High Carb days and Low Carb Days

Written by Yasar Shahzad Thursday, 01 July 2010 17:05

High Carb days and Low Carb Days

Carbohydrate cycling is based on the concept of rotating low carbohydrate days with high carbohydrate days instead of keeping carbohydrates low all the time. Every fourth day your glycogen levels are restored with a “carb load” or “high carb day” also known as “high day”. Your energy stays up, your muscles fill out and tighten and your metabolic rate gets a boost as if you squirted lighter fluid on a dwindling fire.

The high day also makes your entire diet easier to stick with because no matter how difficult it is to get through those three low days, you have a “high day” to look forward to (Believe me, eating all those yummy carbs after three days without them is like getting a “high!”). The “high day” also bypasses all the side effects. You get noticeably leaner with every three-day low carbohydrate cycle as your body dips deeply into stored body fat without the carbohydrates readily available for fuel. Surprisingly, you may even continue to get leaner even on the high carbohydrate days because of the boost in metabolic rate.

Carbohydrate cycling also prevents your body from becoming inefficient at using carbohydrates for energy. When you cut your carbohydrates out for a long time, your body begins depending on fat for fuel and it learns how to use fat for fuel more efficiently. You often hear low carbohydrate diet proponents say that the low carbohydrate diet turns you into a “fat burner” while a high carbohydrate dieter turns you into a “sugar burner.” This may be true, but there’s a huge downside to staying on low carbohydrates all the time and becoming an exclusive “fat burner:” Your body becomes lazy and inefficient at burning carbohydrates. When you eat them again after a long absence, your body doesn’t know what to do with them. This is one of the reasons you will simply blow up overnight and gain weight back the minute you re-introduce carbohydrates after a long absence. Unless you plan on never eating a carbohydrate ever again, you’d better think twice about long-term carbohydrate restriction. Low carbohydrate diets are NOT “lifestyle” programs.

What’s the alternative? Carbohydrate load every fourth day. When you carbohydrate load a depleted muscle, the carbohydrates are quickly soaked up by the muscle on that fourth day because the muscles are “hungry” for carbohydrates. By repeated cycles of depletion and re-loading, your muscles become extremely efficient at storing carbohydrates as muscle glycogen rather than partitioning them to body fat.