Caloric limitation will take you a long way.
However it will still only get you so far. Once you get to a certain point, your body starts taking actions to halt fat loss and encourage fat storage since this is exactly what it believes will help you stay alive. Your body can’t really distinguish the difference between a calorie restrained diet plan and starvation except that the former is simply a milder form of the latter. This is the reason why the thinner you get, the more challenging it will become to get rid of fat. You can create a substantial caloric deficit when you eat very low-calorie and low-carb for several days, but go any longer than that and you are going to run into a fat loss brick wall. Your system will trump all your attempts by reducing amounts of fat reducing hormones and increasing levels of fat storing hormones. On the other hand, a zig zag diet can keep your fat burning hormones running strong.
The primary hormone that controls all of the other ones is leptin.
Higher leptin levels are connected to higher body fat amounts and a higher calorie intake, which allow you to burn up fat more easily. Low leptin levels are associated with lower body fat levels and calorie restriction making it harder for you to shed fat. That’s pretty much all you have to know without getting too scientific. If you wish to get ultra lean and shed fat more rapidly than just a typical person dieting, you have to outsmart your body and improve its fat burning potential, even when it doesn’t want to do so.
This is where a zig zag diet regime (also referred to as calorie cycling) comes into play.
So we understand that in order to lose fat, we must produce a caloric deficit, which suggests eating less. But at the same time, as we do this, it will make it harder to burn fat because the body is taking measures against it. So what’s the answer? Restrict calories for several days to get rid of as much fat as possible while your leptin amounts are adequate. Then, after they start to decrease, have a cheat day and reset your leptin amounts. This works like a dream as it takes several days of calorie limitation for leptin amounts to lower significantly, but only a day of overindulging to reset them.
So let’s get this straight… pigging out once every several days is in fact suitable for fat burning?
Certainly. The truth is, the best foods to cheat with are also the worst foods for you: higher carb and higher fat meals raise leptin amounts more than any other kinds of food. But you must do it correctly. Don’t play the leptin card and use it as an excuse to have numerous cheat days a week. This will certainly blow up in your face and also in your belly. A cheat day every few days is fine and can actually work in your favor if you’re putting in the effort during the non-cheat days and doing what you’re supposed to. I’ve known about the secret of cheating for a while and I’ve been employing cheat days on a regular basis, but I was making a couple of major mistakes.
The first error was having back-to-back cheat days.
I used to do this often on either Friday and Saturday or Saturday and Sunday. I figured I was good almost all week, so I could enjoy all weekend. The trouble with this was that after my first cheat day, my glycogen stores were maxed from my carbohydrate binge. So when I had my second cheat day shortly after, the next carb binge would go straight to fat storage. I was still losing enough fat during my non cheat days to produce a net fat loss for the week, but I might have dropped even more fat by deliberately spreading out my cheat days. Now, I have a medium cheat day mid-week and a full out cheat day on the weekend break. The added advantage of following a cheat day with a fasting day or extremely low-calorie day is that your body burns more fat on the low-calorie day because leptin amounts are refurbished.
The next mistake was inactive cheat days.
Obviously, when you are consuming more food energy than you’re burning up, you’re guaranteed to store some of it as fat. You might gain a little body fat during these cheat days. But on your non-cheat days, there’s a high probability you’ll lose more fat for a weekly net fat loss. This is really what you are aiming for. But what if there was a way to prevent fat gain altogether during cheat days improving your results even further? Well there is and it’s called intense exercise. When you undergo rigorous weight training or intense cardio exercise like HIIT, it depletes the glycogen stores in your muscles. Then when you eat lots of pizza or pasta, the first thing your body wants to do is replenish those stores… meaning the cheat foods are going to your muscles and not your fat stores. Boom!
Intense workouts during cheat days is money for preventing excess fat gain. Intense is the important word here. Walking around the neighborhood is fine, but it won’t work nicely for this. You want something that’s going to knock you out and provide your muscles a severe beating. Once I began incorporating intense exercise on my cheat days, I experienced a pump like never before during my workouts. Further, and I realize this seems silly but it’s true, I felt less of a full, heavy sensation in my stomach after consuming junk food because it wasn’t going to my gut. Just trust me on this one.
I learned all of this from the cheat day expert, Joel Marion.
His latest program called Xtreme Fat Loss Diet teaches all of this in depth plus much more. There are other topics such as supplementation that I haven’t even brought up in this post. Joel has modified this program after a period of experimentation to create a five-day cycle which could be the best zig zag diet for fat loss. In reality, it’s so Xtreme, that Joel himself stresses it’s not meant to be a long-term plan. But the concepts you learn from the course ensure it is completely worth it because you can easily tailor them to your regimen. The most impressive thing about XFLD is that it’s the first program I’ve seen that creates a synergistic outcome from fasting, cheating, and training so that when you blend all three in the proper fashion, the results you obtain completely blow away anything you might accomplish from doing each one of these individually. I’ll just leave it at that. Go check it out for yourself!