Sorry one more question...is this diet ok for mainly weight loss and toning? I don't want to bulk up. Would I still have to do all the weight training?

You won't bulk up on a CKD if your calories are below maintenance. But yes of course you'll have to do the weight training - it's part of the diet.

Check out http://ksteveh.tripod.com/ckd_table.html

:::reading and reading:::

Thanks for the thread-lots to read here...

appreciated

Bulking isn't a bad thing. A lot of people think "bulking" means that you will look like some monster. All it really means is gaining muscle mass. Some of the most toned looking beautiful women out there that model "bulk". What they do it they lift weights like a guy would (but less often than a guy would) and push themselves and eat more carbs and get more protein around those hard workouts and gain just a little muscle. It's not a lot of muscle and it's usually only noticeable to them but noone else (you don't just uncontrollably sprout giant muscles overnight or even in a week!). Then these women go low carb or even into ketosis. When in ketosis or on low carb, they lose that muscle that they gained, but they also loose fat. So now the net result is that they actually didn't bulk at all or gain muscle at all--they lost it all back--and they only really lose fat! Hence, they look incredibly toned. On top of this, the extra muscle they carry around for a little while (again, it's not very noticeable to anyone other than themselves) helps boost their metabolism. Of course when you "bulk", you might gain a litle bit of fat, but it doesn't come close to outweighing the benefits of something like this. For instance, a woman might "bulk" and gain 1 lbs of muscle and 0.3 lbs of fat, then go into the low carb phase and lose that 1 lbs of muscle back but lose 3 lbs of fat, so the net effect might be no muscle gained or lost, but 2.7 lbs of fat lost. This is nice because if you had lost muscle (net), your metabolism would slow moreso.

They basically do a variation on the traditional CKD but they are in keto/low carb phase for a longer period of time than 5 days, and they do hard "guy-like" weightlifting workouts around carb-ups less often, and do a litle bit more cardio during the low carb/keto phase (longer than those standard 10 minute sessions since they don't mind burning/losing that muscle mass as much).

I don't know a whole lot of women who do this, because most of them think that lifting weights really hard will turn them into the incredible hulk overnight, but the 3 people I know who adopted this look amazing and you'd never think that they lifted heavy weights--they just look toned.

CKD For People who Can't Make it to the Gym Regularly

I'm sure many people use this approach, but I just developed it on my own. My variation on CKD that has been working well (body fat % is dropping, abs starting to pop out, but very little weight loss at all!) is tailored to the fact that sometimes I will go a whole week or week and a half and have no time to hit the weights hard. It's a VERY simple variation... all I do is stay in keto/low carb until I notice that my lifts in the gym are starting to suffer... That might happen 5 days after going low carb, or I might stay low carb for 14 days. Then I plan sometime in the near future to have a grueling full body session (try to still keep it as close to an hour as possible and i usually superset), followed by the normal carb up and post carb up workout a day or so after. I usually stick to a 1 day carb load to make sure I don't spillover, but if I won't be able to do my post carb up workout for another few days, I'll carb load for at least 1.5 days, if not 2, and I haven't had problems (again, standard carb loading techniques).

It makes for a very flexible schedule if I either can't or don't feel like working out much for a little while.

Has anyone here who has used CKD for a while also tried TKD or carb cycling? I'd love to hear people who have tried all three approaches give an unbiased review of the benefits and drawbacks of each. I plan on trying them all in due time.

Any updates here? Been on it long term. Very good thread. My current progress.

http://imgur.com/a/AeHsh