Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle – How to Apply Calorie Cycling in Your Meal Plans
Calorie cycling or also known as zig-zagging is a method introduced by Tom Venuto through his well known weight loss guide Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle to counter your body self defense system to survive starvation. Many current weight loss program have adopted similar method because it is proven to prevent you gain back weight after you loss it and maintain your weight loss speed at steady level.
You have to provide your body with enough food at regular intervals otherwise your fat cells will send out a warning to the rest of your body telling it to slow down and conserve resources. In order to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you take in, but if your body is burning virtually no calories because it’s in ‘starvation mode’ you will still not be able to get your caloric intakes low enough to lose weight.
Burn the Fat Feed The Muscle actually shows you how to modify your normal eating patterns into a cycling eating plan. Here are a few basic steps to follow:
1. Track your calories intake; if possible track your calories intake and your macronutrient breakdown too. You can do this by eating like usual for 3 days and record all the calories information, this way you will know your daily calorie intake.
2. Now you can create your ‘new’ meal plans. Have 5 meals a day for women and 6 meals a day for men. Center each meal around a lean protein sources like fish or meat. You want to achieve a breakdown like this: 30% protein, 50% carbohydrates and 20% fat. You want your meal plans to have between 20%-30% calorie deficit for 3 days. Then you follow up with a maintenance day with a 5%-10% calorie surplus. Make sure all the caloric increase is coming from carbohydrates.
The 20% calorie deficit means you have to cut 20% of your daily calorie intake. For instance; if your daily calorie intake is 2000, then you have to modify it to 1600 calories, the same applies when increasing calorie intake on the maintenance day. A maintenance day is required to assure your body that you are not starving, so your body metabolism will stay at steady high level and you will keep loses significant weight. It can also be used for special event such as birthday party or eating out where you need to eat more than your usual diet; the only thing you need to do is adjusting your maintenance day schedule to match the event day.
Keeping your metabolism boosted is one of the best ways to help you lose weight more quickly and calorie cycling is the best way to do that. The closer you get to your goal weight the more likely you are to ‘plateau’, the best way to get past your plateau is with this eating technique.
