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By carb cycling—eating a lot of
beneficial
carbs on alternating days—youcan set your metabolism to “high” on high-carb days and keep it from slowing down too much on low-carb days. Alongside high-quality carbs, you’ll eat the valuable vegetables, proteins, and good fats that will enhance the benefits of carb cycling to maximize both fat loss and muscle development.
    My carb-cycling program gets another boost from a technique that I call
calorie cycling
. Basically, you eat more calories on your high-carb days and fewer on your low-carb days. Why? Because your body burns calories, not carbs! Carbs
contain
the calories that fuel your body. When a lot of calories—whether fat, protein, or carb—come in, your metabolism quickly rises to turn them into lots of energy for your cells. When fewer calories come in, it slowly begins to fall, trying to eventually preserve as much energy as it can. That’s why I’ve designed my carb cycles to increase your calorie intake on high-carb days and decrease it on low-carb days. More carbs + more calories = metabolic boost and fat burning; fewer carbs + fewer calories = slow metabolic drop and faster fat burning. Cycling calories along with carbs maximizes their combined impact on your metabolism. It prolongs the metabolic boost you get on high-carb days to create the largest calorie deficit possible on low-carb days. It’s successful metabolic manipulation—the ultimate one-two punch for fat loss!
How to Work It
    By now you know that carb cycling consists of alternating high-carb and low-carb eating days. Cycling carbs keeps your metabolism—your body’s inner furnace—stoked to its hottest every hour of every day, even on low-carb days when you’re not feeding it much fuel. There are a lot of ways to modify the pattern and the details to meet your specific needs, but the basic method—my Classic Carb Cycle—is a great place to begin.
    The Classic Carb Cycle
    Sunday—Free Day/High-Carb Day
    Monday—Low-Carb Day
    Tuesday—High-Carb Day
    Wednesday—Low-Carb Day
    Thursday—High-Carb Day
    Friday—Low-Carb Day
    Saturday—High-Carb Day and Weekly Weigh-In
    When to Eat: Each day, whether it’s a high-carb, low-carb, or reward day, eat five meals, no more and no less. Start your day at about the same time every day (any time is fine, as long as it’s consistent) and
eat within 30 minutes of getting up
to crank up your metabolic furnace for the day. Then eat another meal every three hours for a total of five meals in the day. It’s
essential
to time your meals on this schedule to keep your metabolism blazing away at its hottest and using up what you eat when you eat it.
    Eating at three-hour intervals fuels your inner furnace to burn super-hot between meals, melting your body fat. If you go longer than three hours without food, your furnace cools down. The calories you take in won’t go up in flames. They’ll just sit there until your body turns them into more fat! What if you’re not hungry and don’t feel like eating every three hours?
Eat anyway—no matter what
.

    What to Expect: Five Meals a Day?!
    Anytime you try to change your body’s habitual patterns, your body will resist and for a while you’ll feel uncomfortable—or downright lousy. Every organ in your body, from your brain and your adrenal glands to your stomach and your pancreas, will have to get used to your new ways, and until each of them does, you might not be happy about the changes! So don’t be worried if switching over to the carb-cycle meal schedule feels awkward at first:
It’s only natural
.
    When you start eating five meals a day, what you’ll notice most is that you will probably feel too full. Real, whole foods like the ones on this program tend to have a lot of volume, not a lot of calories! Three hours between meals won’t seem like enough, and you won’t always want to eat every meal. I know, it’ll probably always sound weird, but to lose weight
you must eat a lot
. You have