Calorie cycling is used to help disguise the calorie deficit.
You must disguise the deficit so that your body does not send the distress signal and hold onto body fat.
Disguising the calorie deficit is easy when using the WLC System.
You can easily disguise the calorie deficit by eating larger amounts of food one day.
And then smaller amounts of food the next day. That's all you really have to do. We'll explain everything to you and how to make this work for you.
The diet and nutrition section provides greater detail on WLC calorie cycling. I'm going to use this page to help further your understanding of calorie cycling…
The Best Time To Increase Calories
During periods of calorie cycling, you will have higher calorie days, lower calorie days, and possibly some in between.
The higher calorie days are strategically placed to coincide with your weight lifting workouts. Why?
You should take advantage of your weight lifting workouts by giving your body more calories for its muscle building efforts. By doing so, you will be able to build muscle during a fat loss cycle.
Wouldn't it be great to build muscle and lose fat during the same program cycle? Well, calorie cycling makes all of that possible.
By giving your body an increased amount of calories for a period of time after your workout, you will help your body recover from each workout. You will build more muscle and more strength. You will feed your body the extra nutrients it needs to build muscle.
And at the same time…
You will be telling your body that it is not under attack. You will be sending your body a message saying that it's fine to burn some more fat when there's a calorie deficit the next day or next few days. After the period of decreased calories, you'll increase them again. Your body will never catch on.
The fat will simply melt away. Bye, bye fat.
A Few Examples of Weekly Calorie Cycling
Just to give you a better picture of how calorie cycling works, I want to go through a few examples. There are an infinite number of ways to cycle calories, but I only want to go over a few here. You will learn exactly how to cycle calories in the diet and nutrition section.
Example #1
In this example, calories are cycled on a day to day basis according to your workout days.
Let's say that your maintenance calorie level is 3000 calories. Your maintenance level of calories is the calorie level that will keep you at the same body weight. And let's also say that your goal is to lose fat.
So, you need to create an overall calorie deficit slightly below your maintenance calorie level of 3000 calories…
Let's aim for an average calorie intake of 2800 to put you 200 calories below your maintenance level. You'll use cardio to burn more calories…
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 |
Workout | Cardio | Workout | Cardio | Workout | Cardio | Rest |
3200 | 2400 | 3200 | 2400 | 3200 | 2800 | 2400 |
If you add up the total number of calories and divide by 7, you will find that the average calorie intake is 2800 calories per day. So, you've created a calorie deficit but you've disguised it by raising the calories during your workout days.
You can choose higher and lower calorie differences between workout days and other days. You can go to even higher calorie levels on some days and even lower calorie levels on other days.
As long as create a calorie deficit and have some high calorie days mixed in, you will do great. For now, though, let's look at a totally different method of cycling calories…
Example #2
In this example, you will see that calorie intake is heightened for several consecutive days and then lowered for several consecutive days. This type of calorie cycling works great too.
Actually, any form of calorie cycling works much better for fat loss than the same calorie intake every day of the week.
You are simply trying to disguise the calorie deficit, and any form of calorie cycling does a great job at disguising the deficit.
Let's again say that your maintenance calorie level is 3000 calories. Let's also aim for an average calorie intake of 2800 calories.
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 |
Workout | Cardio | Workout | Cardio | Workout | Cardio | Rest |
2400 | 2400 | 2400 | 3200 | 3200 | 3200 | 2800 |
You can now clearly see the difference in the two examples. Which method is better?
I prefer the method in the first example because it allows you to increase calories following your weight lifting workouts. This will give your body more chances to build muscle while you are also losing fat.
The period of time post workout is very important, and the first example takes advantage of the post workout period.
The diet and nutrition section contains the strategy you should follow.
I just wanted you to be aware of calorie cycling and its use for fat loss. Each of our step-by-step programs employs different calorie cycling methods. The ones discussed here are just examples.
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