Hi lads,I hope I’m posting this in the right place.
In the last week I crashed off a low carb diet. I’m talking about a pretty bad crash now, striking right into Ben and Jerrys and chips(I’m Irish so chips here would be like steakhouse cut french fries, ya?), burgers, chinese etc.
After two days of eating ice cream by the tub and hordes of fast food I started to freak with myself, naturally enough, because I was being an absolute idiot, throwing away what had been a very successful dieting period. I took waist measurements and skin fold. Now it would make sense to me that I should be a little bloated outside of fat gain on account of carbing up all of a sudden.
For some reason my waist had actually gone down by the best part of a half inch. skin fold indicated a slight drop, maybe, nothing certain.
My reaction to this was “cool, lets keep going this going!”
That brings us today, six days after the crash and I’ve continued to eat like an idiot and lost another half inch from my waist!! That’s six days of really excessive eating. Now I kept my protein up above 1g per lb and my weight hasn’t noticeably changed, maybe down a couple ounces. Weight training 5 days out of the last 6 with at least some cardio every day.
Now, I’ve stopped the 6 day binge and gone back to my usual diet, moderate carb, fat and protein. I know at some point this strange event will have to reverse and kick me in the ass.
What I want to know is this; has anyone else ever experienced this? It seems like a pretty strange phenomenon to me! One I’d like to be able to recreate
For the record my low carb diet, not terribly low, was pretty much the Get Shredded diet, with a little (very little) bit of starchy carb like oats in the morning. I have to add a few carbs like that because I tend to get digestive problems and bowel distension when I go extreme with carb controlling.
This has nothing to do with fibre, I keep that element of my diet high no matter what I’m doing.
And again, for what it’s worth, this diet was not intended to get me completely shredded, I was just very eager to kick some pounds in hurry. From 215lbs to 196lbs in six weeks.
I did the Get Shredded Diet to the T last summer, the re-feeds are a crucial part imo ( I didn’t re-feed for a week, but it isn’t unheard of).
Basically you reset your leptin levels and hormones back to normal to where they are ready to begin burning fat normally. Depending on how long you were low carb, the metabolism stalls (usually), so eating high carb/not diet food, is productive in the long run.
I had kind of considered it as a partial explanation, but I never saw any reference in his work to being able to continually eat like a horse with a deathwish for 6 days straight and continuing to lose weight.
To be it would make sense to me if the day after a binge I might experience something like that due to a leptin spike, but after pretty much a whole week?
correct me though, because I’m really curious. If I thought I could go on another 6 day binge in a few months time I’d look forward to it like Christmas. as far as I remember Cheat to Lose was always geared towards much shorter feeding periods.
“Basically you reset your leptin levels and hormones back to normal to where they are ready to begin burning fat normally. Depending on how long you were low carb, the metabolism stalls (usually), so eating high carb/not diet food, is productive in the long run.”
And you don’t think the period of the refeed/crash should have been so excessive as to break that?
It makes sense, I just felt that with Dr Berardi being so specific about cycling carbs on the way off the Get Shredded diet that leptin levels couldn’t really account for the response.
but hey, if it is that simple then it should be easy enough to manipulate a repeat.
“Basically you reset your leptin levels and hormones back to normal to where they are ready to begin burning fat normally. Depending on how long you were low carb, the metabolism stalls (usually), so eating high carb/not diet food, is productive in the long run.”
And you don’t think the period of the refeed/crash should have been so excessive as to break that?
It makes sense, I just felt that with Dr Berardi being so specific about cycling carbs on the way off the Get Shredded diet that leptin levels couldn’t really account for the response.
but hey, if it is that simple then it should be easy enough to manipulate a repeat.
I wouldn’t advice doing another week like that. Most diets that include a “cheat” are just 24 hours, because according to Joel Marion (author for “Cheat to Lose”) it only takes 24 hours to reset your leptin to full strength.
There was another thread a while back that talked about this exact same subject:
I’m only joking (kinda) about repeating the event.
Its just that if it only takes 24 hours to reset leptin to full strength how is it possible to have continually made losses over such a long period of time.
similarly in the thread you referenced the consensus is again that feed-up periods be kept short.
If you take the water retention and changes to insulin sensitivity that should be associated with low-carb diets then it stands to reason that waist size should have expanded after (defo not dropped) after a week of shoveling down the shit.
I’m not complaining, I’m glad I got away with doing something so stupid, I just want to understand it.
I believe that right after you come off of a huge cut, your body is starved for carbs. It transfers all of the excess carbs to your muscles and uses it accordingly.
But as for the week binge, I think you go lucky, wish I could pull that off.
To be honest I really didn’t deserve to get away with it. It was such a stupid thing to do and probably even dumber to keep running with it when I discovered it hadn’t done any harm.
I feel like I’m starving on 3,000 cals of whole food a day. to think I could’ve thrown away all that hard work!
[quote]TheJWC wrote:
To be honest I really didn’t deserve to get away with it. It was such a stupid thing to do and probably even dumber to keep running with it when I discovered it hadn’t done any harm.
I feel like I’m starving on 3,000 cals of whole food a day. to think I could’ve thrown away all that hard work![/quote]
I do this every weekend. Its called the Anabolic Diet. Maybe you should look into it.
