The Perfect Zig Zag Diet for Weight Loss

Calorie limitation will take you a long way.

However it will only take you so far. Once you get to a certain stage, the body begins taking steps to avoid fat reduction and encourage fat storage as this is what it really thinks will enable you to survive. Your body can’t really know the difference between a calorie restricted diet and starvation other than the former is simply a milder variety of the latter. This is the reason why the slimmer you get, the more difficult it becomes to get rid of fat. You can create a significant calorie deficit by eating very low-calorie and low-carb for a few days, but go any further than that and you are going to come to a fat burning brick wall. Your system will trump all of your work by bringing down levels of fat loss hormones and increasing levels of fat storing hormones. On the other hand, a zig zag diet plan helps keep your fat burning hormones running sound.

The key hormone that controls all of the others is leptin.

Excessive leptin levels are linked to excessive body fat amounts and a higher calorie consumption, which allow you to burn fat more readily. Low leptin amounts are connected with lower body fat amounts and calorie restriction which makes it more challenging for you to burn fat. That’s pretty much all you have to understand without getting too scientific. If you wish to get ultra lean and shed fat faster than an average person on a diet, you must outsmart your body and make best use of its fat burning potential, even when it doesn’t want to do so.

That’s where a zig zag diet regime (often called calorie cycling) is important.

So we recognize that in order to shed fat, we must produce a calorie deficit, which implies consuming less. But simultaneously, as we make this happen, it makes it harder to lose fat because the body is taking measures against it. So what’s the remedy? Restrict calories for several days to burn as much fat as possible while your leptin amounts are ample. And then, after they start to decrease, employ a cheat day and reset your leptin amounts. This works like a dream because it will take several days of calorie restriction for your leptin amounts to lower substantially, but only a day of overeating to reset them.

So let’s get this straight… gorging once every several days is actually beneficial for fat burning?

Absolutely. In fact, the most effective foods to cheat with are also the worst foods for you: high carb and high fat foods lift leptin levels more than all other types of food. But you must do it properly. Don’t play the leptin card and employ it as an excuse to have numerous cheat days weekly. This will blow up in your face and also in your gut. A cheat day every few days is okay and will actually work in your favor if you’re putting in the work on the non-cheat days and doing what you’re supposed to. I’ve known about the wonder of cheating for a while and I’ve been employing cheat days routinely, but I was making a couple of major blunders.

The first error was enjoying back-to-back cheat days.

I used to do this often on either Friday and Saturday or Saturday and Sunday. I thought I had been sensible almost all week, so I could enjoy all weekend. The problem with this was that after my first cheat day, my glycogen stores were maxed from my carb binge. So when I had my next cheat day shortly after, the subsequent carb binge would go instantly to fat storage. I was still dropping enough fat on my non cheat days to generate a net fat loss for the week, but I would’ve dropped more fat by deliberately spreading out my cheat days. Now, I have a mild cheat day mid-week and a full out cheat day on the weekend. The added advantage of following a cheat day with a fasting day or extremely low-calorie day is that your body burns more fat on the low-calorie day since leptin amounts are restored.

The second mistake was less active cheat days.

Obviously, when you are taking in more food energy than you’re getting rid of, you’re bound to store some of it as fat. You might gain a little bit of fat over these cheat days. But on your non-cheat days, there’s a high probability you’ll lose more fat for a weekly net fat loss. This is exactly what you’re shooting for. But suppose there was a means to avoid fat gain completely during cheat days enhancing your results even more? Well there is and it’s called intense exercise. When you endure strenuous weight training or intense cardio exercise like HIIT, it reduces the glycogen stores in your muscles. Then when you eat lots of pizza or pasta, the very first thing your body wants to do is fill up those stores… meaning the cheat foods are going to your muscles instead of your fat stores. Boom!

Intense physical exercise on cheat days is money for preventing excess fat gain. Intense is the important word here. Walking around the neighborhood is okay, but it won’t work well for this. You need something that’s going to knock you out and provide your muscles a serious beating. Once I began including intense exercise on my cheat days, I felt a pump like never before during my workouts. Additionally, and I know this seems silly but it’s true, I experienced less of a full, overweight feeling in my stomach after consuming junk food because it wasn’t traveling to my gut. Just trust me on this one.

I learned all this from the cheat day expert, Joel Marion.

His latest system called Xtreme Fat Loss Diet teaches all of this in detail plus much more. There are other topics such as using supplements that I haven’t even brought up in this post. Joel has improved this system after a period of experimentation to develop a five-day cycle which may be the perfect zig zag diet for fat burning. In reality, it’s so Xtreme, that Joel himself stresses it’s not meant to be a long-term solution. But the concepts you learn from the course make it completely worth it since you can tailor them to your routine. The most impressive thing about XFLD is that it’s the first program I’ve seen that establishes a synergistic effect from fasting, cheating, and training so that when you combine all three in the correct manner, the results you obtain completely blow away anything you might accomplish from doing each one of these individually. I’ll just leave it at this. Go check it out for yourself!