Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle – How to Apply Calorie Cycling in Your Meal Plans

Calorie cycling or also known as zig-zagging is a method introduced by Tom Venuto through his well known weight loss guide Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle to counter your body self defense system to survive starvation. Many current weight loss program have adopt similar method because it is proven to prevent you gain back weight after you loss it and maintain your weight loss speed at steady level.   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 think that food will not available soon and it reacts by slowing body metabolism to keep you from starving to death; this will hinder your weight loss progress since no matter how low your calorie intake you will not lose significant weight anymore.   In the book, Tom will teach you how to deal with that by modify your usual meal plans into calorie cycling meal plans. There are a few steps to do when you want to apply the calorie cycling method:

1. Track your calories intake; if possible track your calories intake and your macronutrient breakdown too. You can do this by eating like usual for 3 days and record all the calories information, this way you will know your daily calorie intake.
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 lose 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.

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 make things easier.