I did a few posts about CBL a while back but have been reluctant to say anything too definitive/conclusive until I ran it for a few more months. I've been doing it since early September. The key concepts are -
- eat carbs at night after heavy weight training to stimulate muscle growth
- fast during the morning to stay in a fat-burning state, eat ultra low carb prior to training
- on non-training days, fast in the morning, eat ultra low carb the rest of the way
- proactively use supplements like coffee, whey protein isolate, coconut oil, creatine, leucine etc to optimize the various hormonal effects triggered by the above
Once you get it all figured out, it's almost magical, especially combined with what I already consider a healthy diet (using Paleo-friendly ingredients; hopefully no need to rehash that for this thread).
It actually leverages the morning shot of cortisol your body produces on waking to positive effect, as well as the insulin spike produced by eating carbs (to prevent catabolysis of muscle). This alone would have some fairly significant positive effects, but when you combine it with heavy weights, you get some serious leverage thanks to the glut-4 transport mechanism. This is where you get into the realms of the previously-unthinkable. Even though you may have released a bunch of insulin post-carb consumption, the insulin-mediated transport does not occur in the post-workout interval. Instead glut-4 whisks the resulting glycogen off to the muscles, bypassing fat storage mechanisms. <insert choir of angels singing in rapturous joy>. So yes, you eat like a pig, charge up your metabolism (preventing the thyroid downregulation that occurs after days of ultra low carb...), sleep like a baby and wake up recovered and more ripped than you were the night before (although you will take on a bunch of water along with the carbs, that disappears again when you go ULC again).
In practice, this is crazily easy for someone like me to implement. I know how to eat ultra low carb, although i don't like to do it for long - no-one really does. I like to lift heavy weights. I like to eat potatoes and rice and ice cream sometimes too! So when I workout, i backload. When I don't workout, i continue to eat ultra low carb. Either way you are working towards one of your goals - either gaining lean mass, or stripping off body fat. I'd imagine if you did something like this in your teens or 20s, you'd see some amazingly fast results. Even for an old fart though, it still works amazingly well, and appears to be something you can just do indefinitely. (With the proviso that it's a cutting edge protocol so nobody much has actually been on it longer than a year or two, and they're all bodybuilders on 'roids who don't eat for health or longevity, only performance).
There are some little 'gotchas' that can derail this however.
- you should avoid fat in the first backload meal. I was eating normal meals for a while, with carbs. Didn't work so well. Now I eat a couple of ripe bananas (overripe is better as they are sweeter) then a full meal an hour or two later (i.e. rice and beef stew or curry, meat and potatoes), then a snack with fat and carbs before bed (ice cream/yoghurt, banana and cinnamon work well here). These all have separate purposes designed to stimulate sharp spikes of insulin for growth/prevention of catabolysis and to avoid fat storage. My advice is do it as written
- it works better with a few sprint/Crossfit/HIIT-style workouts throughout the week for glycogen-depletion. You will enter the fat-burning state faster and for longer with a few of these in your schedule. I use kettlebells for this.
- don't fast too long. I try to put something in my piehole every hour or so while fasting - coffee, shake w/WPI, coconut milk and creatine, more coffee, more shake til i get to noon-2pm when i have a light meal. Usually an omelette or bacon and eggs. I got better results when I stopped treating this as my main meal of the day. Calories should be later in the day, all the time.
- also, depending on how you eat normally, an extended intro ULC period definitely helps. I put this off for the first month or so but after I did, things really seemed to click. A friend of mine lost 5kg - plus in this week.
If you want to do this without the weightlifting, just do a single night per week of carb binging, and stay ULC the rest of the way. The morning fasting / shifting calories to the evening as much as possible still applies.
