CARB CYCLING: HOW IT WILL HELP YOU BURN FAT

Many people think that losing weight means going without a lot of foods, and the foods that you're not supposed to eat. In many people's minds, are those that provide a lot of carbohydrates. This seems to be a reaction to the "carbo loading" and exercising craze of about 15 years ago. The problem with this thinking is that it's just wrong.

We need to get caloric intake from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates; if we get out of balance with these, we could jeopardize our health. But, there's still the problem of losing weight--and yes, many people truly do need to lose weight. One great solution to this problem is to use carb cycling.

Carb cycling has been successfully used by athletes and physical fitness trainers. It involves discipline with eating, but you don't starve, you eat tasty foods, you get plenty of nutrition, you have lots of energy, and--you lose unwanted weight and keep it off, and lose it faster than you will with the usual "diets".

And, since you'll be getting plenty of carbs with carb cycling, you'll have plenty of mental energy: see, the brain is fueled by glucose, which comes from carbs; and the brain takes its energy before every other part of the body does.

The typical carb cycling regimen extends over a six-day period. It gets repeated over and over every week until you hit your target weight. It involves first eating just carbs that are very fibrous--foods like asparagus, squash, zucchini, peppers, and cucumbers--and then, after three days, switching off and loading up just on carbs that are rich in starch for the next three days--foods like red beans, corn, pasta, potatoes, tomatoes, and yams.

When you're doing carb cycling, you do NOT eat NOTHING BUT carbs. Your daily meals--and there are five or six medium sized ones, not just three large ones--also almost always contain protein, and you also get plenty of water. What matters with carb cycling is the KIND of carbs you eat at certain times.

You see, for the first three days, you are deliberately depleting your body of nearly all of its carbs (you're feeding on them, yes, but the fiber and the water flush out your body rather than being stored, so by the end of the three day cycle you've burned off more carbs than you've take in); then, just when you are at the brink of catabolism (your body beginning burn off muscle tissue for fuel), you start in on the three-day carbo-loading cycle.

By eating five or six times per day, you keep your body's metabolism going, and it speeds up; this is the beginning of how you lose weight with carb cycling.

Carb cycling also requires that you be on an exercise regimen, and not a light one. During the three days when you're eating the fibrous carbs only, you will be involved in aerobic exercising: you'll be jogging, distance running, biking, playing racquetball, or something like that.

The three days after that, you can still do some of those workouts (if you choose), but you tone them down--you only jog or run two miles instead of six to 10, for instance. You should also include some anaerobic training in at least two of those starch-carb days. Anaerobic workouts only need to be done for about 12 minutes per day and they greatly strengthen the heart and lungs, which also enhances your metabolism.

Carb cycling will keep fit and strong even as you're losing weight (one to three pounds) every week.