The Diet “Trick” Professional Fitness Models (And Bodybuilders) Use To Get That Dream Body
Have you ever wondered what those models on the covers of fitness magazines do to get in such great shape? They eat right and exercise, that’s for sure. But there’s a secret dieting trick practically ALL of them use to get such great results. It’s a simple technique called carb-cycling. As the name implies, carb-cycling is when you vary your carb intake throughout the week. Now, before I go into more detail about HOW to cycle your carbs (for fabulous results!), it’s important you get a quick and basic understanding of WHY this works so well. It has to do with the hormone leptin.
Leptin is the “Starvation” hormone that was discovered around 1994. When your body is starving, leptin levels go down, and send signals to your brain to make you hungry and eat as much as you can to get back to your normal calorie and fat storage levels. During this time, leptin also tells your body it’s NOT okay to burn fat. Instead, it tells it to do whatever it can to store as MUCH FAT AS POSSIBLE!
Crazy, right?
Here’s what happens next… Once you eat enough calories, leptin levels rise, and tell your body it has enough. It also tells it things are “okay” once again, and that it’s now okay to start burning fat, since there’s no risk of starvation for the time being. Now, how does changing how many carbs you eat affect leptin and your metabolism’s ability to burn fat. Scientists have discovered a DIRECT link between leptin levels and carb intake. The more carbs you eat, the more leptin levels rise. The less carbs you eat, the less leptin you have floating around in your blood stream. So what these fitness models do is start out by dieting and restricting their calories. They start to lose fat. However, if they keep eating the same amount of carbs and calories week in and week out, they’ll hit a “wall” or plateau where their body doesn’t want to give up the fat (this is thanks to low leptin levels).
So to trick their bodies into burning more fat, they cycle their carbs. For example, maybe the first 4 days are spent eating low-carb foods… things like chicken breasts… small amounts of brown rice, broccoli (and all that other fun stuff). Then for two days, they’ll eat what they’ve been eating, but add pasta… or bread… plenty of fruits, or even chocolate and ice cream, for example, to increase their carb intake. After those two days of “high” carbs, they go back to eating the way they did the first 4 days. Changing up your carb intake like this keeps your leptin levels from dropping too low… and keeps your body’s metabolism in a “fat-burning” state, so you continually see progress, instead of hitting that dreaded plateau.
So here are the basic principles of carb cycling: These are just general guidelines – you’ll have to tweak these and experiment with them until you figure out what works best for your body and metabolism…
1. Eat your “normal” calorie-restricted diet.
2. Do this for 3-4 days.
3. Then for the next day or two, significantly up your carb intake. This can be done by having your cheat meal this day… and by increasing the amount of carbs such as fruits, rice, oatmeal, potatoes, etc.
4. Go back to “normal” eating
Try this out for the next three weeks and no doubt, you’ll be well on your way to looking AWESOME for summertime.
Ingredients (Serves Six)
