Most people know that to lose weight the last thing you want to do is starve yourself. In his popular weight loss book Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle Tom Venuto teaches you how to use calorie cycling as a way to keep your metabolism burning hot which will help you lose weight more quickly and keep it off.
Based on Tom’s explanation, fat cells have neurons and they transmit message to the rest of the body. When you start cutting calories and lose weight, the fat cells will send signal to the rest of your body to save it. Your body will thinks that food will not available soon and it reacts by slowing body metabolism to keep you from starving to death; this will hinders your weight loss progress since no matter how low your calorie intake you will not lose significant weight anymore.
Burn the Fat Feed The Muscle actually shows you how to modify your normal eating patterns into a cycling eating plan. Here are a few basic steps to follow:
1. For 3 days write down the calories and all nutritional information on everything you eat. Don’t alter your eating patterns, just keep track of everything.
2. Create your meal plans; your meal plans should be 5 meals per day for female and 6 meals per day for male. Each meal will centered around lean protein such as meat and fish so the macronutrient breakdown is 30% protein, 50% carbohydrates, and 20% fat. These meal plans should have 20%-30% calorie deficit for 3 days, followed by a maintenance day with 5-10% calorie surplus with all the calorie increase coming from carbohydrates.
The 20% calorie deficit means you have to cut 20% of your daily calorie intake. For instance; if your daily calorie intake is 2000, then you have to modify it to 1600 calories, the same applies when increasing calorie intake on the maintenance day. A maintenance day is required to assure your body that you are not starving, so your body metabolism will stay at steady high level and you will keep loses significant weight. It can also be used for special event such as birthday party or eating out where you need to eat more than your usual diet; the only thing you need to do is adjusting your maintenance day schedule to match the event day.
Calorie cycling is only one of the many ways to boost metabolism. Notice that the nearer you get to your goal weight or body fat percentage the harder it will get, so having a weight loss program which equipped with metabolism boost method will makes things easier.
