How you can use calorie cycling to build muscle and lose fat
Overview
- Calorie cycling is a nutritional method that involves planned increases and decreases in calorie intake throughout the week, typically through a change in carbohydrate intake.
- Calorie cycling can make it easier for you to get and stay extremely lean while building muscle and strength with minimal increase in body fat. However, this dietary method has no specific fat-burning or muscle-building benefits.
- For calorie cycling to work, you need to set and control your calorie intake correctly and follow an appropriate cyclical meal plan (more details in this article).
Calorie cycling
If you're an avid gym-goer who is justifiably skeptical about what you hear, see and read about fitness, then this nutrition strategy may sound like just another pointless hype designed to get people to buy useless pills, powders and PDFs.
And you might even be right, at least in part.
Many self-proclaimed gurus want to sell you calorie cycling as a magic silver bullet or a way to hack your metabolism and turbo charge your fat burning while protecting your body from the consequences of "starvation mode".
Others want to sell you calorie cycling as a smart and effective application of traditional bodybuilding mass-building principles - as a way to build lean muscle mass while staying defined - and maybe even as the "secret" to building muscle while losing fat.
And none of this is true.
Calorie cycling is not a road to the promised land and if you are a beginner or only a slightly advanced exerciser (up to 4 years of proper nutrition and training), then all you will get is more complex meal planning and preparation.
However, if you are a more advanced exerciser, then calorie cycling deserves a place in your toolbox. Used intelligently, it can help you minimize your body fat gain while building muscle mass and maintaining a low body fat percentage over a longer period of time.
Read on if you want to find out how this works.
What is calorie cycling?
Calorie cycling is a nutritional method that involves planned increases and decreases in calorie intake throughout the week, typically through a change in carbohydrate intake.
There are many different calorie cycling protocols to choose from, but most involve cycling between high, medium and low calorie days throughout the week.
- On the high calorie days, you typically consume more calories than you expend (positive energy balance).
- On the low-calorie days, you typically consume fewer calories than you expend (negative energy balance).
- On days with a medium calorie intake, you typically consume as many calories as you expend (neutral energy balance).
The exact mix and structure of high, low and medium calorie days will depend on your goals and preferences.
For example, if you want to lose fat, you could maintain a calorie deficit five days a week and eat as many calories as you consume on the remaining days to give your body a break.
As a more advanced exerciser, this can help you maintain your muscle mass while getting leaner, especially if you are trying to achieve a low body fat percentage.
If you want to build muscle and strength while minimizing your body fat gain, then you can reverse the ratio of low-calorie and high-calorie days and maintain a slight calorie surplus five days a week, while only eating your maintenance calories or even maintaining a calorie deficit on the remaining two days.
At least that's the theory, but how well does it all work in practice? Let's find out.
Why do people use calorie cycling?
The primary reason that people use calorie cycling is because they have heard that it is vastly superior to a conventional bodybuilding diet with its long periods of calorie surplus and long periods of dieting.
With calorie cycling, users usually hope to achieve one of three things:
- A drastic increase in fat loss by stimulating the metabolism, a reduction in hunger and an improvement in their workouts.
- Simultaneously build muscle mass and lose fat by maximizing muscle gains for several days and then losing fat for several days, with fat loss outpacing fat gain over time.
- Achieve continuous muscle gains while remaining very lean.
Unfortunately, this is not exactly the case in reality. Although they are not entirely wrong, such promises exaggerate the reality that calorie cycling may have minor benefits for some people in certain circumstances. Calorie cycling is not a groundbreaking innovation that upends the status quo of diet and nutrition.
Let's start by looking at how calorie cycling affects weight loss, which is its most powerful effect.
Is calorie cycling good for weight loss?
Yes, calorie cycling is effective for weight loss. However, it is still true that any diet that makes you maintain a calorie deficit over an extended period of time, regardless of when and how you consume those calories, will result in weight loss. In other words, if you consume less energy than you burn over time, you will lose weight.
However, according to some calorie cycling advocates, it is supposed to increase the calorie deficit by stimulating metabolism and fat burning, which should allow a significant increase in fat loss over time.
However, such statements are nonsense.
To understand why, you first need to understand what happens in your body at a more cellular level when you lose weight.
When you reduce your calorie intake for fat loss, a number of chemical, hormonal and metabolic changes take place in your body.
The most significant of these changes is a drop in the levels of a hormone called leptin, which is primarily produced by the body's fat cells. This drop in leptin levels is one of the causes of the side effects associated with dieting, commonly known as "metabolic adaptation" or, inaccurately, "metabolic damage". Leptin plays an important role in many bodily functions, but its main role is to keep the brain informed about energy availability. More specifically, leptin "pays close attention" to the relationship between calories burned through basic metabolic functions and calories obtained from food and body fat.
In the short term (hours, days), leptin levels rise and fall based on your daily calorie intake. Leptin levels rise after you have eaten a meal and have plenty of energy available to signal your brain to reduce hunger, increase activity levels and maintain a normal, healthy metabolic rate.
Over the long term (weeks, months, years), leptin levels rise and fall based on your body fat percentage. When your body fat percentage is high, leptin levels are also high and your brain responds by increasing satiety after meals and regulating how active you are during the day and how much your metabolic rate increases.
In other words, your average long-term leptin levels are determined by your body fat percentage, while short-term increases and decreases in your leptin levels are determined by your calorie intake (and especially your carbohydrate intake).
Once leptin levels drop and remain low for several days, as is the case with dieting, this sends a strong signal to the brain that starvation is imminent and that it should take all necessary measures to increase food intake and reduce energy expenditure.
If you are reading this article, you will probably have experienced this yourself. In the first stages of a well-planned calorie restriction - for most people the first eight weeks - everything is a breeze: your weight on the scales goes down, your waistline shrinks, you are rarely hungry and you feel much the same as you always have.
After about two to three months, however, you experience that your energy levels drop and your exercise motivation, metabolic rate and weight loss all leave something to be desired, while hunger, cravings and irritability increase significantly.
As far as your body is concerned, you are starving and it has to fight with all its might to survive. Its primary goal now is to eliminate the calorie deficit you are trying so diligently to maintain.
Sadly, this is one of the truths of dieting and as long as you are in a calorie deficit, this is something you can only control, not "cure". But now for the good news:
When you start eating more, your leptin levels will rise and you'll immediately feel more energized. In a way, your body is "rewarding" you for reducing or eliminating your calorie deficit, which it sees as necessary for its survival.
After you finally finish your diet, your leptin levels will be lower than when your body fat percentage was higher, but they should still be high enough (and your body will be sufficiently sensitive to leptin) that you will feel healthy and vital again.
This also applies to the lower body fat percentages that people aim for for "aesthetic" reasons - 10 to 15% for men and 20 to 25% for women. At such body fat levels, leptin levels stabilize and generate a new so-called set point and as long as you continue to eat plenty of nutritious foods and maintain a reasonable calorie intake, you can maintain such body development with ease.
You don't have to use specialty calorie cycling to achieve this. Maintain a steady and aggressive but not excessive calorie deficit, eat enough protein and nutritious foods, do enough training with heavy basic exercises and some cardio, and you should have no problem developing a lean and athletic body.
But what if you're aiming for a lower body fat percentage? What if you really want to get defined? You know, under 10% body fat for men and under 20% for women.
This is a different and more difficult terrain - the terrain of low leptin nightmares. Once your body fat reaches (or approaches) these ranges, leptin production becomes vanishingly low.
For many, this inevitably leads to periods of unbearable hunger, lethargy and irritability, and all too often ends in an uncontrolled binge that results in a rebuilding of some of the lost fat.
There is not much you can do about this. If you are a man with a body fat percentage below 8% and a woman with a body fat percentage below 18%, you will probably have to choose between an extremely defined body and feeling like a normal person.
Remember that most of the leptin in your body is produced by your fat cells, so the leaner you get, the less leptin you will have in your body. Aside from synthetic leptin, which would cost 1000 dollars a day, there is nothing you can do to counteract the leptin-mediated side effects of low body fat
I've experienced this myself several times on my own body. It's fun to be ready for a photo shoot...
...but it's not so much fun having to deal with the side effects of this, which were as follows:
- I had lost about 5% of my strength on all the big basic exercises like squats, bench presses, deadlifts, shoulder presses and pull-ups and wasn't getting any stronger despite desperate efforts.
- I didn't have much drive, energy or enthusiasm for my workouts.
- I was quite limited in my food choices, which made going to restaurants and meeting friends less enjoyable.
- I never felt fully satisfied after eating. I started to feel hungrier before meals and I felt like I had to eat significantly more to feel satisfied.
On top of that, I was doing 5.5 hours of weights and an hour of HIIT cardio per week, so I couldn't just drastically increase my workout to burn more calories.
Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't get hard and defined - in fact, I believe that most people should experience this process at least once. It's a matter of discipline, perseverance and delayed gratification and these skills can be valuable in many situations.
But anyone who says you can maintain this kind of body development 365 days a year without sacrificing at least some aspects of your health is lying. And anyone who seems to be able to do this without effort is either faking it or using banned substances.
However, there is something that natural exercisers can do to alleviate the suffering of low leptin levels and that brings us back to calorie cycling.
Let's remember that there are two factors on the basis of which our leptin levels rise and fall:
- In the short term, your calorie intake
- In the long term, your body fat percentage
If you're dieting to get lean, there's nothing you can do about number two, but you can use number one to temporarily increase your body's leptin production.
By periodically increasing your calorie intake - calorie cycling - you can increase your leptin levels for a few hours or even days and this can alleviate some of the unwanted side effects of calorie restriction.
Calorie cycling can also help you if you are trying to maintain a low body fat percentage, although the benefits are limited as no matter how much you eat, your body can only produce a limited amount of leptin with so little body fat.
No matter what purpose you use calorie cycling for, you must follow two rules:
1. most of your extra calories must come from carbohydrates.
Scientific research shows that dietary fats have no effect on leptin levels, while a significant increase in carbohydrate intake stimulates a substantial increase in leptin production that lasts as long as your carbohydrate intake is elevated (1). It is unclear what effects protein has on leptin levels, but compared to carbohydrates these effects are likely to be insignificant. However, some research suggests that a high-protein diet may improve leptin sensitivity, so it's a good idea to keep your protein intake high if you're trying to boost your leptin production.
By consuming most of your extra calories in the form of carbohydrates, you will also replenish your glycogen stores, which will have positive effects on your training performance and muscle building.
In other words, if you want to increase your leptin levels, calorie cycling is nothing more than carbohydrate loading, as this is the primary nutrient that increases leptin production.
2. you need to eat your maintenance calorie intake for two or three days
Why can't you just use a high carbohydrate diet if you want to get defined or maintain a low body fat percentage? If carbohydrates increase leptin levels, couldn't you just eat plenty of them every day to permanently increase your leptin production?
Unfortunately, this wouldn't work because the boosting effects of carbohydrates on leptin levels are short-lived. Thus, your average leptin levels will remain more or less the same regardless of how many carbohydrates you eat. A single high-carb meal or a single high-carb day won't make much difference either, as it won't raise leptin levels enough to make a significant difference to your physiology.
It takes at least a few days (and in some cases up to a week or two) for your brain to recognize, trust and respond positively to the increase in leptin levels, which includes an increase in metabolic rate, a reduction in hunger and the flipping of other switches that make dieting less unbearable (2).
Therefore, you can make getting defined much more tolerable by increasing your calories to maintenance levels for two or three days.
Calorie cycling also works well when it comes to maintaining your hard-earned visible abs after reaching your desired body fat percentage.
In this case, you maintain a slight calorie surplus on your training days (up to 5 days per week). In turn, on your non-training days, you maintain a slight to moderate calorie deficit - both should be in the range of 10 to 20%, with the goal being to keep your average weekly calorie intake in the maintenance calorie range.
Although ideally you would only increase and decrease your carbohydrate intake to achieve this, it is sufficient and reasonable to aim for at least 80% increases and decreases through carbohydrates.
I am currently using calorie cycling to maintain my muscle mass and here is what I am doing: my calorie consumption is currently around 2,900 kcal on training days and 2,500 on non-training days (2 days per week) which adds up to a total calorie consumption of 19,500 kcal and I am eating around 3,100 kcal on my training days and 2,000 kcal on my non-training days which brings my calorie intake per week to 19,500 kcal.
These numbers are of course "moving targets", but I am able to maintain a defined body development while continuing to make progress in my workouts and feeling satisfied, energized and focused after meals. Some people can achieve the same without calorie cycling, but most find it easier if they can spend several days of the week in a calorie surplus rather than continuously staying more or less at their maintenance calorie amount.
Regardless of what you do with your calorie and carbohydrate intake when you are very lean, remember that you are merely controlling the symptoms and delaying the inevitable.
Your average leptin levels will be quite low and this will negatively affect your body to some degree and the only cure will be to get your body fat percentage into a healthier, more maintainable range.
The bottom line is that calorie cycling in the fat loss phase is unnecessary and often even counterproductive as long as your body fat percentage is above 15% for men and above 25% for women. However, if you are leaner than this and are looking to get or stay really lean, then calorie cycling can make this process more enjoyable.
In the next part of this article, we'll look at how you can use calorie cycling during mass gain and go into more detail about creating a calorie cycling nutrition plan.
References:
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336?ordinalpos=47&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7714088