by Joel Marion, BioTRUST Nutrition
You probably ate too many carbs over the weekend and probably not in a very strategic way. Well today, we’re going to show you how to turn those extra carbs into your fat-burning ally with a few simple steps.
To recap, we discussed your body’s #1 fat-burning hormone, leptin, and how it literally controls every other weight loss hormone in your body… and your ability to burn fat as a whole.
It is critically important that you keep leptin high and stable as you diet in order to avoid constant cravings, metabolic crashes, and those dreaded fat loss plateaus that stop your progress dead in its tracks even when you are seemingly doing everything right.
Unfortunately, as a starvation protection mechanism, research emphatically shows that leptin levels drop by as much as 50% after just 7 days of dieting. You eat less, leptin levels fall, and metabolism crashes. That’s just the way it works.
And even worse, you HAVE to reduce calories in order to lose weight — there’s no getting around that simple law of mathematics.
Seems like a Catch-22, and it is.
The truth is, unless you do something to “recharge” your leptin levels as you diet, you’ll be stuck at just 50% of your fat burning potential after just one week of dieting, and it will continue to get worse with each passing day.
And that’s why we’re here to teach you this simple leptin-boosting, carb-cycling strategy so that you can keep your metabolism high week after week while learning to shuttle the extra carbs you eat toward your fat loss efforts, instead pulling you off track.
This carb-cycling strategy is one that we refer to as Reverse Carbohydrate Tapering with our clients. You see, countless research papers have also concluded that of any nutrient, carbohydrates are capable of having the greatest net effect on leptin levels.
Here’s how to use it: after a few days of dieting, when leptin levels start to decline, add a small amount of additional carbohydrates — like 10 to 20 grams — to your diet each day over a 5-day period, and then drop your carbs back down.
Here’s an example:
Monday: Under 50g of carbs daily
Tuesday: Under 50g of carbs daily
Wednesday: 60 – 70g of carbs
Thursday: 70 – 90g of carbs
Friday: 90 – 110g of carbs
Saturday: 110 – 130g of carbs
Sunday: High carb day over 150g of carbs
Repeat the above cycle each week, starting with the low carbohydrate days.
This “reverse carbohydrate tapering” technique will assist in preventing leptin levels from falling off too rapidly; the only limitation lies in the amount of carbohydrates we’re able to use without negatively affecting fat loss. While eating even more carbohydrates daily would have an even greater impact on leptin, the extra carbs and calories would also negatively impact your waistline.
by Joel Marion, BioTRUST Nutrition
