Conscious About Your Carb Intake?
Carb cycling is a specifically advantageous dietary strategy because it allows you to eat carbs! This is very important; as a macronutrient, carbohydrates are essential to our overall health.
The Health Benefits of Carbohydrates
Whole carbohydrates contain soluble fiber necessary for cardiovascular and digestive health. Carbohydrates contain a balanced nutrient profile that helps us synthesize neurotransmitters vital to our brain functioning and emotional stability. Carbohydrates provide every muscle in our body with fuel and the ability to respond to energetic demands. Eating whole grains can actually help control the appetite because grains signal satiety to the body.
We run into the problems with carbohydrate consumption when we remove most of the fiber and nutrition from a grain and consume it in a highly processed form. The higher glycogen content of processed grains (with added sugar) jacks up our blood sugar and throws us into the unrelenting cycle of cravings, insulin resistance, and metabolic implications that we have mentioned many times already.
Carb Cycling
Carb cycling is just what the name indicates; it is a systematic carbohydrate consumption schedule. Carb cycling helps to shifts your body toward a fat burning metabolism while strategically implementing carbohydrate consumption into your diet on a specific schedule or on high-intensity days to provide your muscles with the glycogen they need.
The Meta Reset has a fairly restrictive carbohydrate schedule; each day’s consumption is between 50-100 grams per day. The schedule we are working with is aimed at moderate consistent weight loss and improvements in blood sugar and overall inflammation. As your body starts to ground itself in this new schedule, you can expect to experience a boost of energy and freedom in exchange for the inflammation, bloating, fatigue, and sluggishness you felt before.
Carb Cycling for the Long Term
As a lifestyle strategy, carb cycling can be a very satisfying and healthy approach to maintaining a healthy weight, losing weight, or meeting training and performance goals. Some of the main benefits of strategic carb cycling include:
– Prevents extreme hunger or fatigue
– Prevents hormone imbalance
– Allows for flexibility- this means you can line up social events with your high carb days and not feel excluded from the majority of the population!
Here are the recommendations for a long-term approach to carb cycling that you can stick with:
– High carb days generally line up with days of increased physical output. This restores your
– Low carb days are low output days where you might simply go for a walk or take a gentle yoga class. On these days you maximize your fat burning and stabilize your blood sugar by eating a fat and protein heavy diet.
– For weight loss, aim for one carb cycling day a week
– If you exercise a lot, you may want to build a higher carb day in every few days
In health (and enjoying days of cyclical carbohydrate indulgence),
The Meta Reset Team
