Better Nutrition January 2019

thewiseFATBURNER/STORIES OF TRANSFORMATION FROM NUTRITION & LEPTIN PIONEER KAT JAMES
The Carb-Cycling Trap
The plain truth about this questionable practice /// BY KAT JAMES
Readers have asked about a dietary
concept that fat-burner enthusiasts
refer to as “carb cycling”—occasionally
or periodically reintroducing carbs into
their diets. Achieving ketosis or leptin
sensitivity (two states where the body is
burning ketones, a byproduct of burning
fat as one’s primary fuel) involves lots of
individualization and trial and error. But
the idea of planning weekly carb eating
“cycles” is—at least from my decades of
personal and observational experience—
akin to a self-imposed slippery slope that
people consistently regret.
Of course, if you never achieve a
fat-burning state to begin with, carb-cycling
is painless, because you’re not switching
the body’s primary fuel, which always
involves a degree of discomfort. But,
for true insulin- and leptin-optimized
fat-burners, fat is their body’s primary
fuel. The minute a fat-burner starts
eating dozens of carbs (and it takes much
fewer carbs than most think to throw
you out of a fat-burner state, especially
if you’re metabolically challenged), the
body will default immediately to the
fat-storing, sugar-burning quagmire that
many of us worked so hard to escape.
That first spike in blood sugar signals the
brain that you’re suddenly experiencing
starvation as a default mechanism of
cutting off sensitivity to the hormone
leptin in the hypothalamus.
If you’re doing what I call a “close-butno-cigar”
version of “keto” or low-carb (or
Paleo, or “low-glycemic”), you won’t feel the
typical discomfort of “carb cycling” because
you never really achieved a metabolic and
hormonal fat-burning state to begin with.
Achieving a true fat-burning state takes
a minimum of a few transitional (and at
least one uncomfortable) days after just
one “carb day” (if you can ever get back to
a true fat-burning state at all, which some
never do). So, with both unwitting and
intentional carb experiences, one would
be lucky to experience even a day or two
of the miracles of true fat-burning and the
physical revelations it brings, including
unprecedented mental clarity, restful sleep,
soaring energy, and, of course, speedy,
struggle-free weight loss. It’s a state I
equate with being free of the ball and chain
that made a good part of my life purely
miserable. A state I’ve lived in gratefully for
27 amazing years.
26 • JANUARY 2019