I've been reading through the forums for a while now about carb cycling. I'm going to go to the library and see if I can get any books on it, if you know of a good book to suggest I'd appreciate it.

My little brain has been ticking, I was thinking back to a time where my friend,who attends a weightloss group that I belong too, had eaten a huge carb meal after the meeting (chinese food, no holds barred, rice and everything, she follows atkins). Well, needless to say she put some major weight from that one meal. She was all nervous about weighin in at our next meeting and to everyones surprise she dropped 5 lbs in that week!

I'm thinking okay, that must have been a fluke. Well well, I had gone away for a weekend a few months later and I threw all caution to the wind, one of our friends is a bartender and she was making frozen mudslides, pina coladas all weekend long. I drank to my hearts content, lol. Well, after the weekend I weighed in on monday and I was up 8 pounds! I was sick about it. I had a clean week and the following monday I weighed in and I had dropped 11 pounds! A net loss of 3 lbs.

I know I'm rambling on here but I wanted to share my experience. I'd like to try the carb cycling but my problem is this: I don't want to be my heaviest weight on a Monday because that's when I weigh in. From all the different things I've read I've seen people who carb up for 36 hours on the weekend so they'll have the stores for the week ahead of lifting. Anyone have any ideas of how I can tweak this so I'm not my heaviest on monday? I work-out Mon-Fri.

Also, when you carb up, do you just eat whatever? or do you eat clean carbs? (damn those mudslides were good).

Any help appreciated, it takes so much time to try and plod through other peoples journals and search the internet for advice.

Thanks
Krista

one more thing, if it's not being too much of a pain I'd like see what a typical days menu of carbing up would be for you.

I alway carb up clean. extremely clean.
As far as the weighing in on Monday. You can carb load anytime.
I follow NHE By Rob Faigin. The difference is you eat two carb meals a week. I lift M W F and carb load Tuesday and Saturday. Carb meals consist of sweet potatoes, brown rice white potatoes, pasta All starchy carbs.
When I eat my carb meals Protein and fat <20g
I used to gain a few pounds from the carb meals (glycogen and water) but now I rarely go up a pound.
http://www.extique.com/index.htm
Here is Rob's web site.

Jag

thanks jag, you're a sweetheart. I found another thread in another forum also, on this site that I've been muddling through.

Krista, for a weightlifter, the amounts of carb for carbup will be different - significantly higher. So you have to be more careful with them.

I've been coordinating my carbup days by eating low-fat, high carb (150g carb) on my heaviest lifting days, low-carb on cardio days, and having a cheat meal every two weeks.

thanks built, from what I've read from others it's a tweaking process. I'll start out conservative with the carbs and see what happens. I'm going to have more veggies as my carb up because fruit makes me crave like crazy. I'm going to try and gag down a protein shake before going to the gym ( I go at 5am) I was reading that it's really bad not to have anything in your system when lifting, but it's what I've done for months, maybe I'll have faster progress, I'll keep everyone posted.

every day is an exciting adventure for me, truly.

okay, I have a plan of action. I will start my carb up on tuesday (next tues) and continue for 3 days, and then carb down for 4 days. I want to see how this pans out. From other people and sites that I've researched, you can carb up for 36 hours on the weekend to "feed" your body for the coming weeks lift schedule. Then I saw one plan where you carb up for a day, carb low for a day, carb down for a day and repeat. I'll just play around and see whats what.

That seems like an awful long time. Even when I did CDK I only went 36 hours.
I could only lose fat when I cut the carb load to 24 hours.

On NHE I only eat 2 carb meals a week.

.02 cents

Jag

One of the things about NHE is you eat carbs at night and sleep through the cravings. Also the relativly short carb up gets the carbs in but it isn't enough to switch your metabolism
back to a sugar burner.

Jag

You could simply cycle three days repeatedly - high, med, low (none), repeat.

Your carbups should be based on Glucose. Starchy foods are best. I use bagels, pasta, and oatmeal mostly.
You want to avoid anything more than 50g. of Fructose (Fruits, LC veggies) because it will be stored in your liver and the average liver can only store around 50g.
Glucose/Starch based carbs are stored mostly in muscle.
Sucrose (table sugar) is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. So it is not good to go overboard on it.

Yeah, krista, listen to mps. You want your carbs to be starchy - slow and glucose-producing.

dear god, a bagel and pasta. grins. thanks for the tips everyone

I know, it's scary at first, but if you have a plan to end the carbup, you'll be fine. I generally really crank the fats the next day and do a lot of exercise to get back into nice, comfortable ketosis. I find I don't need to do this as much now, but in the beginning, if I didn't get into ketosis right away, I'd be stuck with those old, nasty cravings.

Remember, for the day after, avocados are your friends.

That is so funny, I did my carb load last night.
a few baked sweet potatoes and a bowl of rice crispies.

My wife had made banana bread and I kept dreaming that I was eating the banana bread after I was suppose to be back on LC
I woke up and was relieved. I guess I was concerned about ending the carb up


Jag

I've had those dreams! I got them when I started Atkins! I think it's like how ex-smokers will dream that they smoked a cigarette.