What is a Carb?
First off, let me clarify what a carb is for those of you that might be a little lost. A carbohydrate is one of the three macronutrients we consume each day, that being protein, fat and carbs. Carbs are the sugar and starches we so love to eat like pasta, fruit and desserts. Protein examples would be chicken, fish and beef. Fat would include butter and oils.
What is Carb Cycling?
Cycling carbs is a big buzz word (or phrase rather) in the dieting realm these days. Carb cycling is when you vary the amount of carbohydrates you consume day to day to help lose weight or bust through dieting plateaus. You could alternate between high and low carb days or high, medium and low carb days. Your carbohydrates could vary drastically or conservatively. There are a million combinations.
Carb cycling seems easy enough until you really get into planning and think about it. Questions arise like “how drastically should I cycle carbs?” “How many low, medium and high carb days should I have in a week?” “How do I adjust calories up or down properly?”
It can be confusing but let me clear a few things up for you.
The Set Up.
To set up your initial carb cycling plan, you will want to take your current macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat) and go from there.
Example 1: Say a person is currently eating the following daily intake:
Protein | Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
A good easy place to start is to create a low day, or a medium and a low day. Conservatively, you can vary these days by 30 grams of carbs, or more drastically at say, 50 or more grams of carbs.
Conservative example A:
Protein | High Carbs | Medium Carbs | Low Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 170 grams/day | 140 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
Conservative example B:
Protein | High Carbs | Low Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 170 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
Keep in mind, 1 gram of carbs yields 4 calories. When you carb cycle, much like example B above, the calorie difference between your high and medium carb days is 30 carbs which is a 120 calorie difference. (30g carbs x 4 calories /g = 120 calories)
In the following examples the caloric difference between days is more like 280 – 320 calories varying carbs with a gap from 70-80 carbs.
Drastic example A:
Protein | High Carbs | Rest day Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 120 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
Drastic example B:
Protein | High Carbs | Medium Carbs | Low Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 120 grams/day | 50 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
Drastic example C:
Lowering the fat and protein on a higher carb day is also a good idea to keep calories in check but still get in the carbs to refill depleted glycogen stores in the muscle and liver.
Protein | Medium Carbs | Low Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 120 grams/day | 50 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
Protein | High Carbs | Fat |
120 grams/day | 230 grams/day | 40 grams/ day |
Again, there are a million different ways to structure a carb cycling plan but, an important part is knowing how much you are dropping your dietary calories every time you add in another low day to the week or cycle carbs more drastically.
How Many High, Medium and Low Days Do I Do Each Week?
When planning and manipulating your diet, I like to look at weekly averages as opposed to the day to day fluctuations. I do this with body weight data as well as calorie intake. When changing your diet plan to cycling carbs, you will want to look at the average daily calories consumed.
In our example above, before carb cycling, this person was eating the same daily macros/calories:
Protein | Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
How many calories is this? Let’s calculate.
- 1 gram of protein = 4 calories
- 1 gram of carbohydrates = 4 calories
- 1 gram of fat = 9 calories
150 g protein x 4 = 600 calories
200 g carbs x 4 = 800 calories
50 g fat x 9 = 450 calories
Grand total = 1850 calories every day
Now what we need to do, as a general rule of thumb when cutting calories down, is cut 50-100 calories per day from your diet each week. And this is where it gets tricky with carb cycling.
Let’s take conservative example A.
We started with the above macros, created a high, medium and low carb day but now what? When do I have a low day or a high day.
Protein | High Carbs | Medium Carbs | Low Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 200 grams/day | 170 grams/day | 140 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
First, let’s calculate the calories for a high, medium and low carb day.
High carb day = 1850 total calories
Medium carb day = 1730 total calories
Low carb day = 1610 total calories
First you want to consider muscle groups that you need to build or even just place the high carb day on larger muscle groups like legs or back days or on days you have more cardio. I might start trouble shooting with high days on the legs and back days, put a low carb day on the rest day and fill in the rest as a medium day.
Muscle group worked | Carb cycling | |
Sunday | Legs | High |
Monday | Push | Medium |
Tuesday | Pull | High |
Wednesday | Legs | High |
Thursday | Push | Medium |
Friday | Pull | High |
Saturday | Rest | Low |
- Push: chest, shoulders, triceps
- Pull: back, biceps, triceps
That gives us 4 high days, 2 medium and 1 low day.
Lets get a daily average calorie calculation for this plan.
4 high days at 1850 calories + 2 medium days at 1730 calories + 1 low day at 1610 calories = 12,470 calories for the week.
Divide this number by 7. = 1,781 average calories per day.
This would work out to a 68 calorie drop per day for this week. Remembering our rule of thumb of dropping 50-100 calories at a time for the week puts us in the correct range.
It may take a few tries of troubleshooting how many high, low and medium days you work in for the week to get the calorie drop you are looking for.
Carb Depletion
There are methods of carb cycling where you can increase the capacity of your muscles to store and hold more glycogen which will make your muscle look fuller (great for the stage) as well as have more energy available to your muscle.
To do this, you would deplete carbs over several days followed by 1-2 days of high carbs.
Lets take drastic example C:
Protein | Medium Carbs | Low Carbs | Fat |
150 grams/day | 120 grams/day | 50 grams/day | 50 grams/ day |
Protein | High Carbs | Fat |
120 grams/day | 230 grams/day | 40 grams/ day |
To deplete carbs, you will have several low days all in a row followed by 1 or 2 high carb days.
Your week may look like this:
- Sunday: Low
- Monday: Low
- Tuesday: Low
- Wednesday: High
- Thursday: High
- Friday: Medium
- Saturday: Medium
Comment below and let me know of your experiences with carb cycling, if it worked for you, if you were able to stick to it and how it went.
Now check out Carb Cycling Part 2 in my article on Consumer Health Digest called “Carb Cycling: A break through for your linear diet” to see if carb cycling is really necessary.
What are your thoughts? Comment below.