Food Cycling For Fat Loss – How Eating More (and Less) Effects Metabolism 
Your body has a definite reaction to the way that you fuel it. It is similar to a jet plane that if you put high quality food (fuel) it will respond wonderfully and your health will generally reflect that, but if you don’t have quality, you are going to see a crash. For a jet having just a slight amount of water in the fuel will cause it to malfunction and more than likely crash. You body isn’t quite that sensitive to change in diet, but it reacts nonetheless. One of the ways your body reacts to your food is that if you limit the amount of food you take your body can slow your metabolism way down. For anyone looking to lose body fat this is a disaster. It is a disaster for two reasons. The first is that if your body is burning less calories to make up for your limited diet, it is going to start robbing muscle instead of burning fat. It is a survival instinct that is genetic. Your body is basically putting your fat reserves as an emergency food supply. That is not good news for muscle mass. The second part of that equation (less food = lower metabolism) is that you are using less calories and you are going to see a decrease in your energy levels. This means your exercise can’t be as intense, and you lose that ability to increase your metabolism there. So the solution is to “trick” your body into thinking that the food supply is abundant without feeding it quite as much, and the best way to do that is to cycle your eating. By “cycling” I mean that you should not eat the same way every day. You can have a pattern to your eating, but it varies with the day. One day out of three is a low calorie day. This doesn’t necessarily mean you eat less, you can still satisfy your hunger on those days with food that doesn’t carry as much caloric load, and especially not as much carbohydrates. Don’t get me wrong, carbs are not “the enemy” like some gurus might tell you, but they have a definite impact by the way they are processed by your body. So we don’t want to just eat less of everything; we want to eat less carbs – like maybe take it down to around 50 to 100 grams of carbs on those low calorie days. Satisfy your hunger by ramping up on the amount of vegetables that you eat. Of course you are going to avoid the starchy veggies like potatoes, and stick to greener pastures, literally. By designating two days a week to this low calorie plan you can get the best of both worlds. Your body won’t lower its metabolic rate, and you will lower your caloric intake to help you to lose body fat.