First of all, calorie cycling isn’t going to present you to the guaranteed land. Furthermore, if you’re a novice or average weightlifter, all you’re going to get from the deal is a complex meal planning.

However, if you’re an upper-level weightlifter, calorie cycling justifies a spot in your toolbox. When used well, it can help you decrease fat accumulation while lean bulking and easily maintain low levels of body fat for a long time.

But What Is Calorie Cycling?

Calorie cycling is a diet that includes organized raises and declines in calorie consumption during the week, typically by consuming more or less carbohydrate.

There are several distinct calorie cycling rules to pick from, but most include shifting between high-, low-, and medium-calorie days during the week.

On the high-calorie days, you’ll typically eat more calories than you burn.
On low-calorie days, you’ll typically eat fewer calories than you burn.
On medium-calorie days, you’ll typically eat as many calories as you burn.

The exact mix and design of your high-, low-, and medium-calorie days depend on your purposes and choices.

For instance, if you need to lose fat you could keep a calorie deficit for five days per week and consume at maintenance on the remaining two days to give your body a pause. As an upper-level weightlifter, this can additionally help with muscle preservation as you get leaner, and particularly if you’re dieting to very low levels of body fat.

If you need to gain muscle and strength while reducing fat gain, you keep a slight calorie excess five days per week and consume at maintenance or even a deficit on the remaining two days of the week.

Why Use Calorie Cycling?

The main purpose of using calorie cycling is because it’s notably better to traditional bodybuilding diets that have you support calorie excesses and deficiencies for extended periods of time.

With calorie cycling, people normally expect to achieve one of three things:

Drastically improve fat loss by increasing your metabolism, reducing appetite, and enhancing your workouts

Build muscle and lose fat at the equivalent time by maximizing muscle gain for several days and then the fat loss, with the fat loss outpacing the fat accumulation over time

Gain constant muscle and strength increases while staying very lean

Sadly, there is more to it than it meets the eye. While not completely off-base, such guarantees exceed facts, which is that calorie cycling is an insignificant improvement. It is not a breakthrough discovery of diet and nutrition.

Is Calorie Cycling Reliable for Weight Loss?

Long story short, yes, it is.

That stated a diet that has you keep a calorie deficit over an expansive period of time will end in weight loss, regardless of when and how you consume those calories. So, as long as you consume fewer calories than you burn over time, you’ll lose weight.

However, calorie cycling increases those calorie deficiencies by increasing the metabolism and fat burning, permitting you to significantly increase fat loss over time.

First, you need to understand what occurs to your body at a cellular level when you lose weight.

When you reduce your calories for fat loss, a number of chemical, hormonal, and metabolic transformations take place in your body.

The main hormone that is reduced is leptin which is responsible for side effects connected with dieting commonly known as metabolic adaptation.

Leptin plays an essential part in many bodily uses, but its central role is to keep the brain notified as to how much energy is prepared for survival. Particularly, it pays close attention to the connection between the calories burned during basic metabolic function and activity and the calories gained from food and body fat.

When leptin levels get low and persist so for many days, as they do when dieting, this transmits a powerful signal to the brain that inanition is near, and it should take all possible actions to enhance food consumption and maintain energy.

At the beginning of a well-programmed calorie restriction the scale keeps going down, your waist keeps shrinking inside, you’re rarely craving, and you mostly feel like normal.

At about the two-to-three-month your energy levels, urge to train, metabolic rate, and weight loss all fall, and your hunger, cravings, and irritability increase.

Unfortunately, this is simply a fact of dieting and so long as you’re in a calorie deficit, it is something you can only manage, not cure.

But there are also good parts to this story.

When you start eating more, leptin levels increase, and you instantly feel good. Your body is paying you for shrinking or killing the calorie deficit.

When you will finish dieting, your leptin levels will be commonly lower than they were when your body fat levels were higher, but they’ll still be high enough.

However, you don’t need calorie cycling to pull this off. Keep a constant and offensive but not rash calorie deficit, eat plenty protein and nutritious meals, do lots of heavy, complex weightlifting, and minimal cardio, and you should get a lean, strong body.

Once your body fat reaches these levels, leptin generation becomes low. This inescapably points to a period of firm hunger, apathy, and irritation. Most of the leptin in your body is fabricated by fat cells so the leaner you are, the less leptin you’ll have in your blood.

There’s something simple weightlifters can do to reduce the pain of low-leptin living and that takes us back to calorie cycling.

By regularly increasing your calorie intake you can boost your leptin levels for a few hours or days, and this can relieve some of the negative side effects of calorie limitation.

Calorie cycling can aid when you’re keeping low body fat levels as well, but it’s an of limited use because no matter how much food you consume, your body cannot produce too much leptin with so little body fat.

Either way, to calorie cycle rightly, you need to understand two rules:

1. You must take most of your extra calories from carbs.

Studies show that consuming plenty of fat has no impact on leptin levels, whereas significantly boosting carbohydrate consumption makes a substantial spike in leptin generation that persists for as long as you keep your higher-carb consumption.

It’s not clear what impact protein has on leptin levels, but it’s likely unimportant compared to carbs.

By taking most of your extra calories from carbs, you also supply your muscle glycogen reserves, which has a positive influence on practice performance and muscle building.

So, when you’re working to increase leptin levels, calorie cycling literally means “carb cycling,” as this is the primary macronutrient you improve to raise leptin.

2. You must consume calories at maintenance calories for two to three days.

If carbs increase leptin levels, couldn’t you simply consume lots of them every day to permanently support leptin production?

Sadly, that won’t do because the leptin-enhancing outcomes of carbs are short-lived. Therefore, over time, your normal leptin levels will be more or less the same despite how much or little carbs you’re eating every day.

It takes at least a couple of days for your brain to accept the rise of leptin and answer positively.

Hence, by increasing your calories to maintenance two-three days a week and living in a deficit otherwise, you can make getting ripped significantly more endurable.

Is Calorie Cycling Good for Muscle Building?

Well, yes and no.

If you’re new to weightlifting and attending to build muscle, calorie cycling isn’t for you. So long as you regularly eat sufficient calories and protein, you’re going to make a fast development and calorie cycling will just divert from that.

Even as an average lifter, you’re probably better off keeping it simple when lean bulking.

As far as muscle building goes, calorie cycling is most beneficial for high-level weightlifters who desire to make gradual, constant muscle and strength gains while staying lean.

The reason calorie cycling works well for them because is once you’ve achieved most of the muscle and strength possible to you genetically, advancement slows down to a lazy crawl.

This method is metabolically expensive, demanding a fair amount of energy and raw materials to do its job, and the more tissue it’s going to build, the more food is demanded. So, when you’re new to weightlifting, your body is capable to use excess calories more efficiently than when you’re more endured.

Clearly the fewer errors you make, the greater your outcomes will be in the long term, but as long as you get things essentially correct most of the time, you can profit considerably from calorie cycling.

How to Make a Calorie Cycling Meal Plan

There are many diverse approaches to go about it, but I suggest you alternate between three levels of calorie intake, depending on your intentions:

A high-calorie day of about 10% above maintenance calories
A low-calorie day of about 20% below maintenance calories
A medium-calorie day of about maintenance calories

There are extreme variants of calorie cycling out there that involve shifting between very-low and very-high calorie days, but they are not recommended.

Calorie Cycling Meal Plan for Losing Weight

Before practicing calorie cycling on a cut, the greatest point to acknowledge is your body fat percentage.

If you exercise in the morning or in the afternoon, schedule your medium-calorie days so they precede practice days, and if you practice in the evenings, program them on training days.

Monday (Press Day): Medium-calorie day
Tuesday (Lower Body Day): Low-calorie day
Wednesday (Shoulder Day): Medium-calorie day
Thursday (Pull Day): Low-calorie day
Friday (Upper Body Day): Low-calorie day
Saturday (Rest): Low-calorie day
Sunday (Rest): Low-calorie day

Doing so, you provide your body with sufficient time to maximize muscle glycogen levels, which will have a good influence on your performance.

Monday (Press Day): Low-calorie day
Tuesday (Lower Body Day): Medium-calorie day
Wednesday (Shoulder Day): Low-calorie day
Thursday (Pull Day): Medium-calorie day
Friday (Upper Body Day): Low-calorie day
Saturday (Rest): Low-calorie day
Sunday (Rest): Low-calorie day

Regarding macros:

Your protein consumption should remain at 1 gram per pound of body weight.
Your fat consumption should remain at 30% of calories.
Your carb consumption should comprise the remainder of your calories.

Low-calorie day

195 grams of protein (780 calories)
55 grams of fat (495 calories)
280 grams carbs (1,120 calories)
About 2,400 calories

Medium-calorie day:

195 grams of protein (780 calories)
65 grams of fat (585 calories)
410 grams of carbs (1,640 calories)
About 3,000 calories

While some of these methods can work, they’re far more problematic than they’re deserving and usually offer worse long-term outcomes.

Calorie Cycling Meal Plan for Building Muscle

When you’re calorie cycling on a lean bulk, you should consider the following:

Four or five training days per week: Five high-calorie days and two low-calorie days per week

Two or three training days per week: Four high-calorie days and three low-calorie days per week

If the surplus on high-calorie days will be shorter than the size of the debt on low-calorie days, the total weekly calorie consumption will more or less even out to maintenance.

How you place your high-calorie days doesn’t matter much but you should place them on the same days when you train.

If you’re exercising less than five days per week, I advise you still start with five high-calorie and two low-calorie days per week, then modify as required.

Regarding macronutrients:

Your protein consumption should remain at 1 gram per pound of body weight.
Your fat consumption should remain at 20% of calories.
Your carb consumption should be the remainder of your calories.

A high-calorie day:

195 grams of protein (780 calories)
75 grams of fat (675 calories)
460 grams of carbs (1,840)
About 3,300 calories

A low-calorie day:

195 grams of protein (780 calories)
55 grams of fat (495 calories)
280 grams of carbs (1,120 calories)
About 2,400 calories

Calorie Cycling Meal Plan for Maintaining

When you’re calorie cycling for maintenance, you should:

Four or five practice days per week: Five high-calorie days and two low-calorie days per week.

Two or three practice days per week: Four high-calorie days and three low-calorie days per week.

As for your macros, you can establish them in the same method as when lean bulking.

The bottom line is that calorie cycling is not recommended to everyone, but it’s up to you to decide.

Calorie Cycling for Building Muscle and Losing Fat