Do refeeds only work on a severely carb restircted diet or will they work on a calorie restricted diet that is ~40/40/20 (P/C/F), ~200g C/day? BTW, I am a triathlete putting out ~1000 cal per day in training (more on weekends) so need the carbs. Thanks.
astro
Will they work for what goal? Are you trying to lose bf? Are do you just need extra carbs for energy? I don’t think refeeds will hinder you if you’re looking for extra calories to effectively train during your sessions. Just depends what your purpose for using them is…
By refeeds i take it you are looking for supercompensation of your body’s glycogen stores thereby allowing up to triple normal glycogen levels to be stored in muscles. To do this you’d normally combine 3 days of exhaustive exercise with carb restriction, then 4 days of carb loading to reach potentially 16g carb/KG LBM.
To work out if your are making sufficient inroads into your bodies glycogen reserves you’d have to work out you’re total carb usage per day.
Just assuming that you’re around 70kg LBM, the normal amount of glycogen stored in the muscles is about 5g/Kg LBM so you’d have 350g of carb stored in your muscle. You’re probably pretty fit so assuming 40% of your energy requirements (~1000kCal) during you’re training comes from fat, the other 60% from carbs then you’d be only using 600kCal of carb ~ 150g. So you wouldn’t really be making a dent on your carb reserves unless the rest of the day you were using more than the remaining 50g of dietary supplied carbs.
All this is a guess work without knowing you’re calorific requirements, exercise intensity, and metabolic effiency. But i’d say you prob weren’t going to be able to deplete you’re reserves while taking on 200g carb a day.
If you didn’t want to supercompensate you could just carb load for 3-4 days instead at ~500g/day. Of course you wouldn’t have as much glycogen stored as supercompensation would achieve.
Hope this helps.
The idea behind a refeed is to replenish what is being restricted. I would say generally you are going to want to refeed on diets that are very carbohydrate restricted. The idea is to cause an anabolic effect using the insulin surge when insulin sensitivity is very high.
And example of my current refeed schedule is to have a maltodextrin/dextrose mix with hydrolyzed whey and then a 2nd food meal with clean protein and clean carbs about 2 hours later. This is only post-workout (lifting days, cardio doesn’t count in my program). Post workout is generally the only time I have any “meaningful” amount of carbs. The other days I have one meal that contains a very small amount of carbs.
Sorry i didn’t read your post carefully enough.
As you are on a calorie restricted diet i guess you must be trying to lose weight, obviously more fat than muscle. If you need the carbs and aren’t willing or able to restrict them, due to training considerations, then just make sure that you take them after you carb depleting workouts. That way you will maximise the benefits of you’re exercise induced insulin sensitivity and will be unlikely to deposit fat.