No this isn’t a trick, and yes this is possible.
No this isn’t a smart a—answer that you’ll don’t have to skip out on the holidays or purge all of your food the day of, I actually did read that someone recommended this :-/
There is a way to eat stuff your face like a pig AND still lose body fat.
In fact this is a tactic that I have used multiple times with clients to help them drop body fat while still having a cheat days and meals on a frequent basis.
The Method.
Its pretty simple.
As soon as you can STOP eating carbs till Thanksgiving Day and let me explain why.
If you have read my blogs before you know I am a practitioner of IF (intermittent fasting) and having cheat days to get body fat down and stay lean. <=== Check out the previous blog post if you want to learn the physiological functions of a well timed cheat day.
With Thanksgiving it’s really no different than a cheat day. Well its more of a MEGA cheat day but it still can be beneficial with body fat loss.
When you pull out ALL carbs (I don’t count veggies and leafy greens due to their high nutrient and low carb content) your body begins divining into it glycogen stores, aka carbohydrate stores, for energy.
Depending on the person this can go on for over a 24 hour period before the body begins dipping into its body fat stores (early stages of ketosis).
What we are doing here is completely emptying majority of our glycogen stores so that we can fill them back up on Thanksgiving Day and some pretty cool things happen when you do this.
First though, there are a few rules that I want you to follow depending on where your body fat levels are currently on when to start carb depletion:
- Above 20% male or 30% female start your carb depletion FOUR days out
- Between 15-18% male or 25-28% female start carb depletion THREE days out
- Between 11-14% male or 21-24% female start carb depletion TWO days out
- Lower than 10% for male or 20% female carb deplete ONE day out
On Thanksgiving Day if you can I would recommend getting in a workout to further deplete any glycogen that you may have left over so when you DO eat all those yummy carbs they will go straight to the muscles.
All the extra carbs will be used in the forms of heat (energy), so you may notice that you feel hot all of sudden and even sweat a bit; its typical of a metabolic spike.
What will happen afterwards is when you go to bed you’ll sleep VERY hard and you’ll wake up feeling fine and look even big tighter even after your carb feast.
Side Note: Don’t be surprised that when you sleep you have some pretty crazy dreams, I have found this to happen to a lot of people that carb deplete then fest. Honestly I’m not entirely sure why this happens, could be all the additional glycogen flooding the body causing an increased cerebral activity in conjunction with metabolic spikes just sends the frontal cortex in overdrive… wow that was a nerd moment, sorry lol
Keeping the Fat Burn Going
I will say from personal and anecdotal experience that you’re body will have very full glycogen levels so to further help with the fat loss I would recommend postponing your first meal as long as you can, for some you may even need to a full 24 hr period without eating.
Depending on where your bodyfat levels are the longer the better.
If you continue your binge fest into the next morning you may experience what we in the fitness world call “spilling over”
Think of your body’s glycogen levels like a bucket of water. You can fill it to the brim and it’s ok but if you keep filling it and it breaks over the rim then water spills down and gets everything wet. So the “spilling” over that we talk about is when your muscles glycogen levels are so full that they spill over into the body fat and this gives you the smooth watered down appearance.
If you see that this happens and you want a quick detox method (trust me I just may as well) check out the FREE report below.
Starting NOW
So asses where you are at and determine when you need to start cutting out carbs, I can assure you that if you do this you CAN eat like a pig but not look like one afterwards. <=== Tweet that, dare you 😉
In Health and Awesomeness,
Travis Merritt, BS, CPT, CES, RBT is the owner of Fitness Revolution in Rowlett, TX.
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