This is your year! With this easy to follow weight loss meal plan, you’ll be able to get the body you’ve always wanted!
It’s that time of year again when we take stock of our failures and shortcomings and resolve to do better in the New Year.
It’s hard not to get caught up in the spirit of fresh starts and renewed motivation! As far as your diet is concerned, it’s a great time to get refocused on getting lean – fast, safely and effectively. And, we have all the tips to maximize your chances of success.
Losing the first few pounds of fat can be achieved fairly easily. How? Simple, by cutting out the bad foods and adding in a few sessions of cardio from time to time. But what about the stubborn fat that just doesn’t seem to shift no matter how much cardio you do, and how strict you are with your nutrition?
Maybe you’ve lost all that you can with conventional methods and are struggling with the last few pounds. If so, then following carb cycling meal plan program may be just what you need to crank your fat burning furnace up to the next level.
Speed Up Your Fat Loss With This Meal Plan.
The New Year is a great time to start what I call accelerated fat loss. One of the single biggest changes people say they want to make in the New Year is to drop body fat. Once the desire to lose that fat is there, many make the mistake of making drastic changes to achieve quick results. But quick results usually don’t come; frustration does instead.
No matter how hard they train, or how many hours of performing cardio they get in, the unwanted fat remains.
The truth is that when your body goes through drastic changes in either diet or training, it goes into a state of alert. This is when the body holds onto its fat stores, the body’s survival energy bank, and instead breaks down energy stored in muscle to become its fuel. This isn’t the kind of weight you want to be losing!
There’s no quick fix approach that will help you lose 15 pounds of fat in as many days. If you did manage to lose that amount of weight in those days, most of it would be water, some would be muscle and a very small amount would be fat. If you do this, you’d be sacrificing muscle to drop a few pounds. In all likelihood, you’d then put those pounds back on in a few weeks. But the pounds wouldn’t return as muscle, as your body would retain more water due to the water lost, and you’d have a slower metabolism.
This Meal Plan Is About Losing Fat And Keeping It Off.
So what’s the answer?
Well, there’s a very effective method of cardio and dieting that will allow you to lose the fat, but keep all your hard-earned muscle. It’s also a realistic timescale, but still faster than the majority of diets out there in the New Year fad diet craze.
Just think how long it took to build up your new muscle. It also took time to put on all that fat. And, it’s going to take a little time to shed that fat too. This way, it will be manageable and you’ll be able to keep it off!
Very often, many of us when starting a new plan get a little overexcited and change too many things at once in the hope that it will speed up fat loss. I’ll repeat it: You can’t force fat loss!
It’s One Step At A Time.
Change one variable at a time. The first step is to cut your calories from carbohydrates by no more than 25%. Dropping your carbs from foods such as oats, yams, pasta and potatoes by too much will leave you feeling weak and unable to train with the intensity that your body needs to hold onto muscle.
A drop in total calories greater than 15% would also lower testosterone levels in men, which would mean muscle loss. Keep the reduction in calories from carbohydrates to no more than 25%. The reduction in calories should only come from carbs, not protein or fats. You should still be eating from 1 to 1.5 grams of complete proteins per pound of lean body mass every day. The easiest way to do this is just to cut ¼ of your carbs from each meal. Expect to lose between ½ to 1 pound of fat a week.
The next step is to do some cardio work, but only when you see the loss of fat each week start to slow down. Once you’ve built up to performing up to five cardio sessions in a week, you can begin the next step and bring everything together by rotating your carb intake, where the calories are low for three days and higher on the fourth day.
Depending on the amount of body fat that you wanted to lose, you can reduce your daily intake of calories from carbohydrates by a further 25% before starting the rotational cycle. But, remember, that not getting enough carbs will leave you feeling weak and unable to recover from the weight workouts.
Carb Cycling Meal Plans Work!
The advantage of carbohydrate cycling is that you are able to burn more fat and hold on to more muscle than if you were to just stay on a low calorie diet. This is because of the muscle energy (glycogen) decreasing over the three day lower carb period, changing your metabolism to burn more fatty acids for fuel. Also, by eating fewer carbs, you have less of an insulin response.
Combining this with your intense workouts, interval training aerobic work and your reduced caloric intake provides your body with the ideal stimulus for fat loss. However, it’s not as simple as it may sound and this is where so many people hit a plateau and are unable to break past it, often becoming so frustrated with the lack of results that they simply give up.
The key to being able to continue beyond this plateau is in the diet method: Three consecutive lower carbohydrate days, during which more body fat will be burned as fuel. It’s important to keep to those three days. No more! Staying on a low carb diet for much more than three days will result in glycogen stores becoming too low, resulting in muscle being burned as fuel in addition to fat.
A higher carbohydrate day every fourth day will refuel glycogen stored in muscle cells and stop muscle being used as fuel. Adding some more protein on the three low carb days will safeguard the body against muscle loss.
But, too much protein could reduce the fat burning potential from this rotational strategy, as protein can be converted into glucose in the liver and be used as fuel instead of fat. Therefore, on lower carb days, you should add between 40 to 60 grams of extra protein throughout the day, and drop back to your usual intake on the fourth (high carb) day.
This Is A Carb Cycling Meal Plan.
Below is an example of a three-day low, one-day high carb cycling diet. For ease of reference, this is for a person between 100 to 150 pounds who normally eats six times a day, takes in 2,400 calories a day and has already reduced their carbohydrate intake by 25% along with building up to performing interval aerobics five times a week for 45 minutes. They are also currently taking 1.4 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Be sure to adjust the numbers accordingly to.
Day 1, 2 and 3 Day 4
Meal 1 53 grams of carbs 70 grams of carbs
46 grams of protein 38 grams of protein
Meals 2-4 26 grams of carbs 34 grams of carbs
46 grams of protein 38 grams of protein
Meal 5* 53 grams of carbs 70 grams of carbs
46 grams of protein 38 grams of protein
Meal 6 26 grams of carbs 34 grams of carbs
46 grams of protein 38 grams of protein
Total Carbs 210 grams 276 grams
Total Protein 276 grams 228 grams
What follows is an example of a typical weekly meal plan on a diet like this. It may not be exciting, but it is effective!
Day 1 Low Carbs
Meal 1 is 1 whole wheat bagel, 2 eggs and 3 whites.
Meal 2 is 2 scoops of whey protein.
Meal 3 is chicken breast fillet veg and olive oil.
Meal 4 is 1 tin of turkey and 1 grapefruit.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose.
Meal 6 is any white fish of your choice and mixed vegetables.
Day 2 Low Carbs
Meal 1 is 1 whole wheat bagel, 2 eggs and 3 whites.
Meal 2 is 2 scoops of whey protein.
Meal 3 is chicken breast fillet veg and olive oil.
Meal 4 is 1 tin of turkey and 1 grapefruit.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose.
Meal 6 is any white fish of your choice and mixed vegetables.
Day 3 Low Carbs
Meal 1 is 1 whole wheat bagel, 2 eggs and 3 whites.
Meal 2 is 2 scoops of whey protein.
Meal 3 is chicken breast fillet veg and olive oil.
Meal 4 is 1 tin of turkey and 1 grapefruit.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose.
Meal 6 is any white fish of your choice and mixed vegetables.
Day 4 High Carbs
Meal 1 is 100g oats, 300ml milk, 25g whey, 15g flaxseed and cup of raisins.
Meal 2 is 3 rice cakes and 40g of cottage cheese.
Meal 3 is 1 tin of turkey, 80g pasta and salad.
Meal 4 is 3 rice cakes and 40g of cottage cheese.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose, as well as a large banana.
Meal 6 is 1 to 2 scoops of casein protein and a small glass of orange juice.
Day 5 Low Carbs
Meal 1 is 1 whole wheat bagel, 2 eggs and 3 whites.
Meal 2 is 2 scoops of whey protein.
Meal 3 is chicken breast fillet veg and olive oil.
Meal 4 is 1 tin of turkey and 1 grapefruit.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose.
Meal 6 is any white fish of your choice and mixed vegetables.
Day 6 Low Carbs
Meal 1 is 1 whole wheat bagel, 2 eggs and 3 whites.
Meal 2 is 2 scoops of whey protein.
Meal 3 is chicken breast fillet veg and olive oil.
Meal 4 is 1 tin of turkey and 1 grapefruit.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose.
Meal 6 is any white fish of your choice and mixed vegetables.
Day 7 High Carbs
Meal 1 is 100g oats, 300ml milk, 25g whey, 15g flaxseed and 6 prunes.
Meal 2 is 3 rice cakes and 40g of cottage cheese.
Meal 3 is 1 tin of turkey, 100g rice and salad.
Meal 4 is 3 rice cakes and 40g of cottage cheese.
Meal 5* is 2 scoops of whey and 1 scoop of dextrose, as well as a handful of figs/dates.
Meal 6 is 1 to 2 scoops of casein protein and a small glass of orange juice.
*Post-workout meal.
On low carb days, you should add salt to your meals and drink 50% more water. On high carb days, you should reduce your salt intake and decrease water.
For the best, and fastest results to get lean this New Year, I recommend following the carb cycling diet for four consecutive cycles, about two to six weeks. You should then take a more relaxed approach to the same method. This should increase fat burning and make sure you keep your lean muscle mass.
If, after trying everything you’re still struggling to shed the fat, then you can skip the fat intake on the lower carb days. This means you consume only fat-free protein sources to eliminate any extra calories that may be preventing you from getting leaner.
On the lower carb days, you can include some vegetables with your meals. On the high carb days, you should stay away from these vegetables and have complex carbs like rice, pasta, yams, oats and potatoes. These will help refill your muscle cells with glycogen and help speed up your metabolism, halting any muscle loss that results from eating fewer carbs over the previous three days.
Conclusion
Remember to cut your carbs by 25% from your normal day-to-day intake. Build your morning cardio sessions to five lengthy sessions per week. Reduce carb intake by a further 25% for three days. On lower carb days, increase protein intake by an extra 40 to 60 grams. Eat low-fat, lean protein and fibrous veggies on lower carb days. On high carb days, eat complex carbs and no vegetables. The first two meals on high carb days should include simple sugars.
Losing weight in the New Year is a goal shared by many. With this weight loss meal plan you have a way to get it done using a cardio and carbohydrate cycling plan for accelerated fat loss.
-By Keith Cormican, RD
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