When Should You Increase Calories?

Cutting back calories to hit a deficit is the most straightforward way to lose body fat.

It works, but over time your body's metabolism slows a bit.

So...

The same amount of calories = slower weight loss.

Why does this happen?

When calories are cut drastically, it lowers the body's leptin levels.

You want your leptin levels to be HIGH if weight loss is your goal.

When leptin is high, hunger is reduced (and some studies suggest leptin boosts the metabolism).

Carbs are better for boosting Leptin than protein or fats.

A lot of people use "carb cycling" to get lean because of this.

Here's a sample carb cycling schedule.

Leptin slowly drops on the low carb and low calorie days, so the high carb low fat days give leptin a boost.

This gets the metabolism revving again and reduces hunger.

People who carb cycle are able to eat massive amounts of calories on their High Carb LOW Fat days... and still lose body fat.

This is because the body rarely stores carbs as body fat.

Carbs get stored as glycogen in the muscles first. They only get converted to fat if the glycogen levels are full.

It takes massive sustained overfeeding of carbs before the body begins to convert carbs to fat.

There is a study which covers how participants tried to get carbs to get converted and stored as body fat.

It was nearly IMPOSSIBLE for them to get carbs to be stored as fat...

Because every time they increased carbs, their metabolism increased and hunger decreased (caused by a massive boost in leptin levels).

Carbs can make the fat you eat to get stored as body fat, but this is a non-issue if you limit fat in your diet.

So when should you increase calories?

Any time that you feel like your metabolism has slowed substantially and you are experiencing excessive hunger.

If you do want to increase leptin levels without gaining fat?

Make sure you eat high calorie days that are very high in carbs, but very low in fat.

Hope this helps,

P.S.

I prefer to keep leptin levels as high as possible every day.

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