Cyclic diet question...

Cyclic diet question...

Is a cyclic diet pointless if you're not going to do "depletion" workouts and all that shit? My fat losss is stalling out so I need to change something up, but I'm happy with my lifting routine (more/less westside) as it is and would rather not fuck with it. From what I understand the whole goal of the cyclic diets is to amplify positive hormonal responses to food... so that even though you may be in a glycogen depleted, caloric deficit most of the time, the relatively brief windows when you are in a replenished, caloric surplus is sufficient to product the hormonal responses necessary to keep your metabolism chugging along... or am I missing the concept completely? Why can't you just manipulate the system through calorie intake and macro ratios? Why all the special workouts and shit? Is it oversimplifying it to just do a repetitive cycle of 2-3 no/low carb days followed by a high carb day? Any links to good cyclic plans that don't require special workouts? I've read a lot of stuff at bodyrecomposition.com since that seems to be the defacto reference for fat loss around here, but it seems most of the people there are doing the depletion workouts and cardio schedules.

Right...but what is the percieved positive benefit of the changes that make up the cycle, be it changing macros, total calories, whatever? I thought it was becuase the cyclic nature of it helped avoid the metabolism slump caused by extended periods of caloric deficit. Is that wrong?

Hmm... shit. Thanks for your help.

the positive benefit as i understand it from cycling is to avoid homeostasis (the survival mechanism). basically the body gets used to the changes and down-regulates any over-expressed enzymes it doesn't need. anytime that enzymes are downregulated due to a perceived surplus, your body is going to be in a catabolic state. that's the point of both carb and protein cycling - in carb cycling, your body figures out either that it's not getting carbs and stops producing so much amylase and in protein cycling, the body stops producing so much protease. if you keep eating a lot of carbs or protein when there are less enzymes to process the substrate, it just takes longer to process (which the body sees as an energy savings). if you vary your amounts of carbs and protein, the body never gets to set a point of energy savings since it cannot predict how much will come at once.

the depletion workouts are simply to lower glycogen levels (and keep them low) since that will be burned before any stored fat and the UD2 is for athletes looking to lose weight (and maybe add lbm) you need stored glycogen to be low to get the glucagon response and insulin is mutually exclusive so if there is sugar, you cannot activate the enzymes to burn fat

this is the point of bulking or cutting, because the success of one is the failure of the other due to the hormonal responses and enzymes involved

Cyclic diet question...