Lose Fat and Gain Muscle at the Same Time

Everybody want to lose fat and gain muscle to get that shredded look of your body. But it is not that easy. People usually lose fat and gain muscle at once, only when they are beginners. When you have been lifting and working out for a couple of years, burning fat and gaining muscle mass at the same time seems impossible to be achieved. However, recently there has been discovered a way on how it is possible not only to preserve muscle, while burning fat, but also to even build muscle, while your fat is being shredded off.

Have you ever heard of carb cycling before? Carb cycling is a way of eating carbohydrates to manipulate your insulin spikes, what leads to possible muscle growth, while shedding the fat off. The idea behind is that you should have three different days: high carbs, medium carbs, and low carbs days in your diet. That way you would keep your body shocked at all times and it would not know what to expect.

Why would it work?

Let's take an example of a bodybuilder's bulking diet. When bodybuilders diet for bulking, or gaining muscle mass, they eat high protein, high carbs, and generally high calories, because they do not care about gaining any of the body fat, as their primary concern is muscle and strength growths. Although protein is what makes muscle and what muscle is made of, without any help, eating plain protein would not get you anywhere. Why? Your body needs hormones to grow, such as testosterone, growth hormone, etc. That's when carbs come in handy. By eating high carbohydrate diet, your body experiences insulin spikes, and insulin causes your body to gain weight. Usually, it is fat weight, but why cannot it be muscle weight? Yes, it can. In particularly, bodybuilders manipulate insulin spikes to grow muscle after a workout - they have a high carbohydrate, high protein shake to restore the body's glycogen sources, which have been depleted when working out, and give an insulin spike for your body to store food you ate in your body. But then, your body stores it not in your adipose, the fat layer under the skin, but in your muscles, because after a workout your body's goal is to restore the muscles. Therefore, eating high carb and high protein would eventually lead you to muscle gain. In addition, eating high carbohydrate, your body keeps your metabolic rate going at a very fast rate.

Now, let's take a look at a diet when somebody is trying to lose weight, the low carb approach. When you are trying to lose fat, you will be eating low carb. When you eat low carb, your body does not experience the insulin spikes. Without insulin spikes, technically, your body will not gain any fat, because it will have no need to gain fat, as the growth hormone will not be activated by the insulin spike. What is worth noticing that, while eating low carb, your metabolism will gradually keep slowing down.

Finally, it's time to combine both of the different approaches to different things to get one things most of the people hope for - lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. Hopefully, after my brief introduction into two different approaches you now see how you can gain muscle and lose fat at once. In addition, as I mentioned before low carb diet will eventually slow down your metabolism. Adding high carb days will keep your body guessing and your metabolism will not slow down.

First, in order to keep your body guessing, you need to have the days where you eat different amount of carbs every day. I recommend having high carbs, low carbs, and zero carbs days, zero being between 0-20 grams of carbs a day, while other people say that you should have high carbs, medium carbs, and low carbs days. In my opinion, that medium carb day does nothing to make you lose fat and gain muscle. I feel like it makes you more likely to gain fat.

OK, so how to do the carb cyling?

Well, suppose you have 7 days a week, and 3 different meals plans (high carbs, low carbs, no carbs). Sample eating plan would look like this:

• Monday: no carb day
• Tuesday: high carb day
• Wednesday: low carb day
• Thursday: low carb day
• Friday: high carb day
• Saturday: no carb day
• Sunday: low carb day
• Next Monday: high carb day

However, this is just a sample plan. You can always make a plan that appeals to you more than this one. However, there are some guidelines, when designing your own carb cycling plan.

Guidelines:

1. You cannot have two high carbs days back to back
2. You should not have two no carbs days back to back, as it can start burning your muscles.
3. You should have somewhat equal ratio of all the days throught the week. For example, in my sample week you have 3 low carbs, 2 no carbs, and 2 high carbs days. The next week would be 2 low carbs, 2 no carbs, and 3 high carbs days, and the week after 2 low carbs, 3 no carbs, and 2 high carbs days, to keep the ratio equal.
4. Your high carb days should be on your hardest workout days. For example, if you workout your legs on Wednesdays, make your high carb days Wednesdays. Certainly, do not make your high carb days, on your days when you don't even workout.

Another important question you might ask is what's the difference between high carb, low carb, and no carb days?

High carb days are the days when you eat 200-300 grams of carbs a day. You might eat complex carbs, fibrous carbs and simple carbs. However, most of your simple carbs should be after a workout, to get that insulin spike to gain muscle. Do not eat too much carbs in the evening, try to consume most of them before the dinner time.

Low carb days are the days when you eat about 50 grams of carbs, possibly up to 100 grams of carbs. However, the amount of carbs you eat is not the only difference between low carbs and high carbs days. You cannot eat simple carbs on low carbs days. Both complex and fibrous carbs are allowed.

No carb days speak for itself. On those days you eat no carbs. And if you eat any (up to 20 grams), they should strictly be fibrous carbs, such as broccoli or other vegetables.

For more information about the types of carbohydrates, visit my article Nutrition for Weight Loss.

When cycling the carbs, other macro nutrients, besides the carbohydrates, matter as well. You want to have your protein intake steady all the time, to provide muscle with enough protein to grow on the high carbs days, and to preserve them from being used on a low carbs days. Therefore, it does not matter what day you are on, you protein intake should be around 1 to 1.5 grams of protein per body weight.

I have talked about manipulating the carbs in the previous paragraphs, so by now you should know how much carbs you should eat. However, what should you not eat then, when you go high carb? When you are doing a high carb day, you should prevent yourself from eating fats. If you, on a low carb day eat 30 grams of fat, on a high carb day, you should eat 10 grams of fat that particular day. However, that is just an example, it can vary.

What is more, you need to know that you need to keep your caloric balance weekly, not daily as you used to do on a regular fat loss diet. This pretty much means, that if you wanted to lose a pound a day, you would have eaten 3,500 calories a week less than your body required to maintain it's weight. For example, if you need 2,000 calories a day to maintain the weight, you would eat 1,500 calories a day to lose a pound a week, adding up to 10,500 calories a week. While doing carb cycling, you would still be doing 10,500 calories a week, but on a no carbs and low carbs days you would be eating 1,300 calories, and 2,200 calories on a high carb days to keep losing weight while gaining muscle.