Maintaining our health is a battle we fight all day, every day. In our modern, sedentary lifestyle, it’s all too easy to slob around the house, order everything we could ever need from Amazon, get no deposit codes Fair Go online, and find the most difficult struggle in our day-to-day activities is the walk to the refrigerator.
Of course, that’s a terrible way to live, since obesity has been probably related to all sorts of medical and mental health problems. You should not just lie back and become a couch potato- you should stand up and take care of yourself, and try to develop and sense of purpose and pride in your body.
Now, the internet has hundreds of thousands of articles recommending this or that diet combined with this or that exercise to ‘instantly lose forty pounds’ or some other lie. If you’re not careful, you could end up down a rabbit hole of bizarre diets and protein shakes.
So I want to talk about one dieting formula, in particular, called “Carb Cycling”. The question is, what is it, and does it work?
Dieting, In General
So let’s break down the purpose of dieting, because while the idea is simple, no one internet tabloids that usually cover this kind of thing are written by scientifically illiterate nincompoops that are just trying to generate ad-revenue, myself included. But hey, you’re already here, so why not stick around?
I would like to quote a YouTube channel named PictureFit, “Abs are made in the gym, but revealed in the kitchen.”
To me, that makes complete sense. Dieting is all about causing your body to use more energy than it takes in. That’s really it. You can either do that by increasing how much energy you use (via exercise), or by decreasing the amount of energy you take in from food. The best approach is to do a bit of both.
Carb Cycling
So you’ve probably heard about the Ketogenic diet, where you eat little to no carbs and high amounts of fat. There are hundreds of thousands of articles that go into detail about the exact science of it, so I won’t cover that too much here. The fact is, it works… if you can stick to it.
The problem is giving up all those delicious, succulent carbs, without going completely insane. If you can or have done this, then congrats to you because you’re awesome. I am not one of those people, and that’s why Carb Cycling caught my eye.
You see, changing your diet has to be a lifetime commitment. You can’t just do some kind of crazy diet and then stop. You’ll just end up gaining all the weight back. No, if you want to be healthier, you have to live healthier. That’s why I’ve been trying Carb Cycling.
The idea is pretty interesting. You go into a period of low carbs for a couple of days, then offset it with a few medium to high carb days. Ideally, you can synchronize your high-carb days with your workouts to produce better results. One of the more fascinating things about this diet is how it affects your metabolism.
You see, when your metabolism starts running low on fuel (AKA: All those delicious, sweet succulent carbs you crave while on this diet), your metabolism starts affecting your hormones in order to prevent itself from starving. So when you start, your weight will spike down, and then level out. However, by cycling you reintroduce carbs to your system and reset your hormones back to normal, allowing you to spike again once you go back into a low carb period.
Now, this could all be internet pseudo-science for all I know, but anecdotally it seems to be true to some extent. I’ve been cycling for about three weeks now and combined with fifteen-minute exercise every day, I’ve lost fourteen pounds.
Is that healthy? I dunno. But I’ll tell you one thing- it’s the only diet that has produced results overnight. Okay, it actually took a week, but you get what I mean!
Working Out
It’s always good to do regular exercise, regardless of your weight loss plans. It’s not just good for your overall health, but also for your mental health. Some studies show exercise actually boosting brain activity. So I guess those football jocks are secretly running the world or something.
Exercise doesn’t have to be a chore. It is possible to make it fun. You can play a sport, take walks, go swimming, even for just ten minutes a day. There are workouts like HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) that are designed to get the maximum caloric output in as small of a timeframe as possible. Just remember to warm-up before and stretch afterward.