How Cheating on Your Diet Can
SPEED UP Fat Loss!


-By Mark Woodgate

You exercise regularly, periodically change your workouts and you watch what you eat - yet the scales just won’t budge!  

Thankfully there’s a very simple (and relatively unknown) strategy you can use immediately to break through your weight loss plateau and start burning body fat fast.   

But before we get to that, why do weight loss plateaus occur in the first place?  

Why Weight Loss Plateau’s Occur 

Having worked with hundreds of body transformers over the years, it’s not uncommon for clients to reach a weight loss plateau after only a few short weeks. What’s more, this can occur despite sticking to their workouts and nutrition plans religiously.   

The reason this happens is that the longer you’ve been dieting and the leaner you get, the more energy efficient your body becomes. In other words, your body quickly adapts to lower calorie levels and responds by conserving energy and slowing your fat burning metabolism.

Therefore in order to continue losing weight you would need to continue restricting calories and / or burning more calories. However, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that not only is this approach impractical, it’s also completely unsustainable!

Unfortunately this is a trap that many fitness enthusiasts succumb to. In an effort to lose more weight they diet even more strictly and add more exercise to their already busy schedules. 

This ‘more is better’ philosophy usually results in a loss of lean muscle tissue, flabby looking muscles, a slowed metabolism, fatigue and weight gain. (When you lose muscle you also lose your ability to burn body fat)

Introducing Carbohydrate Cycling for Maximum Fat Loss

One of the best ways to lose fat while maintaining (or even gaining) lean muscle is to cycle your levels of carbohydrate.  

Carbohydrate cycling enables you to burn more body fat on lower carbohydrate days and to replenish your glycogen reserves on higher carbohydrate days.

Since lower carbohydrate and glycogen levels are associated with increased fat burning, low carb days are best utilised on cardio only days. And since your muscles require adequate levels of glycogen for resistance training workouts, we eat more carbohydrates. Makes sense right?

(Nb: Carbohydrates are broken down and stored in your muscles as glycogen)

For example, if you do resistance training on Mon, Wed and Fri and do some form of cardio on the days in between, here’s how you could implement carbohydrate cycling. 

Ultimately this strategy keeps your body guessing and always primed for fat loss.

Why ‘Cheating’ Means MORE Fat Loss  

Although it may seem counterintuitive, a high carbohydrate day once per week tricks your body into burning MORE body fat by increasing levels of the hormone, leptin. After several days of low to medium carbs, leptin levels decline as much as 50% which results in a slowed metabolism.  

However, with the addition of a cheat day, (and subsequent increase in calories, carb & fat intake) leptin levels markedly increase and this in turn kick starts your body’s metabolism - thereby creating an environment conducive to burning more body fat.

Therefore, unbeknown to many, eating very strictly all the time can actually be counterproductive to your fat loss goals.  

Cheating has Physiological & Psychological Benefits

Physiological:

After only 6 or 7 days of adhering to a low to moderate carbohydrate nutrition plan, leptin levels drops by as much as 50%. When this happens the ‘fat storage’ hormone cortisol is switched on. The result? Stored body fat! 

 To prevent this from happening it becomes imperative to restore leptin levels. The best way to achieve this? To eat foods high in fat and carbohydrate over a period of 8-12 hours.

Psychological:

Most diets are very restrictive and allow little, if any, room to indulge. Unrealistic constraints leave the participant feeling deprived of their favourite foods. Inevitably old habits emerge and the dieter returns to their former eating patterns.

Let’s face it. The prospect of going without your favourite foods is not a pleasant one!

With carbohydrate cycling your nutrition plan becomes sustainable (unlike the majority of diets on the market today) as you can still indulge in your favourite foods once per week. Best of all, you can do this 100% guilt free for the reasons listed above.  

Conclusion:

If you’ve tried everything to lose weight and nothing seems to work, or you’d just like to just burn body fat a whole lot faster, try carbohydrate cycling.

Click here to receive your very own carbohydrate cycling nutrition plan for MAXIMUM fat Loss!