It may go against your moral upbringing, but you have to
cheat to get lean. (We’re talking food here, not running around
behind your significant other’s back—although that does burn
calories.) If you don’t have a cheat day during the week, you can
sabotage your fat-loss eff o rts in a big way. That’s true from a
psychological standpoint (you will feel deprived, and you’re
more likely to binge) and from a physiological standpoint. It has
to do with a specific hormone called leptin.
Leptin is known as the antistarvation hormone. If you have
enough, your body doesn’t panic. If you don’t take precautions
as you reduce calories, however, your body can produce less
and less. When your leptin levels fall, the starvation mechanism
shifts into high gear, and your body halts fat burning and
triggers a voracious appetite (you start having dreams about
giant chocolate sundaes). Studies show that increasing calories,
primarily with carbs, only one day a week during a diet can help
n o rmalize leptin levels, keeping the starvation mechanism in
check and speeding the fat-burning process.
We verified that, inadvertently, through a miscalculation Steve
made during our last peaking phase (we just keep learning from
our mistakes!). Right up until the last few weeks before peak day
Steve thought he was carbing up one day during the weekend,
his cheat day, but he was actually carbing down—and it almost
stopped his fat burning cold.
H e re ’s how it happened: When Saturday rolled around, he
stayed on the same meal schedule he was using during the
week, upping his carbs slightly. So far, so good. What he forgot
was that since he wasn’t training on the weekends, he didn’t
include his postworkout drink in his calculations. Whoops!
RecoverX, our postworkout drink of choice, contains 60 grams
of carbs, which he wasn’t getting on the weekends. So while he
added 40 grams of carbs on Saturday, he already had a deficit
of 60 grams. He was actually taking in fewer carbs and calories
instead of more, which severely hampered his fat burning. In
fact, he didn’t know what was going wrong for weeks. He
thought that because he was approaching his 45th birthday, age
frankie
(Frankie)
#1