The Cycle Diet

Introduction

30 Years of the Cycle Diet

The Cycle Diet is so named because it is all about cycling regular diet days of a relative caloric deficit (underfeeding) with well-timed calorie spikes of unlimited calorie intake within a specific time-frame (overfeeding). You cycle between underfeeding for most of the week, with well-timed, specific periods of overfeeding. In its most common form, usually this means six days of a relative caloric deficit on diet, then a full, single-day anything goes refeed or cheat day.

However, one of the things that makes the Cycle Diet different than other cheat day diets out there is that before you implement various kinds of spikes, you have to put your body into Supercompensation Mode, so that taking in huge amounts of calories will serve the body, and not just get stored as fat.

Overall, the Cycle Diet works to control weight, maintain leanness and optimize metabolism and create metabolic resiliency. It is a lifestyle diet. It is sustainable, durable, flexible, and adjustable—and it must be all these things in your own application of it in order for it to be successful for you.

The Cycle Diet is natural for me now and an ingrained part of my lifestyle, so much so that I often forget that other people don’t know a lot about it or understand it. In the past few years, there have been a plethora of cheat day type diets that distort what this kind of dieting is all about, and why and how it works so darn well.

I’ve been controlling my weight and staying lean with the Cycle Diet since the early 80s. I did an in-depth presentation on it at the SWIS Symposium back in 2005, and it’s hard to believe that was now more than a decade ago. And between when I first started doing the Cycle Diet all the way up to that 2005 presentation, and since then, there have been many tweaks to the Cycle Diet’s applications and strategies. I decided it was time to write a lot of it down, and provide an in-depth entry point for those who were curious about the diet.

I’m excited to bring it to you. Actually, writing this has got me to recall many stories and events that shaped the Cycle Diet… and correspondingly shaped my career as well. It wasn’t until I started going back over some of these events that I realized how closely my career and the Cycle Diet were intertwined, because the Cycle Diet was so closely wrapped up with my physique success, and the success of my clients.

To this day what I like best about the Cycle Diet is that it was born from real-world experience first and foremost, and then tweaked over time, based on that experience. Over the years, research started pouring in to back it up and at least partly explain why what I was doing worked so well. These days so many diets come and go which are the opposite—they are born in research of shoulds and coulds based on a few studies, taken out of context, but their real-world applicability leaves… well, a lot to be desired.

Any diet-undertaking must meet two essential criteria:

1) The diet must serve the body.

2) The diet must be sustainable.

The Cycle Diet meets both these criteria better than any other diet I’ve studied, and I’ve studied them all. Part of this is because the diet is flexible and adaptable: cheat meals and cheat days can be adjusted if there is some real-life event happening. How and when you include spikes can be tweaked as well. You can make the deficit on the diet days greater or lesser, depending on your goals and your own metabolism and where you’re at right now, and where you want to be.

The title of this book uses the word cheat day because that’s what people tend to understand. I much prefer the terms calorie spike, refeed, or overfeed. I prefer overfeed best, but I use all three throughout this book interchangeably. These terms all refer to one single meal, or a whole day, or even a whole week or two completely off diet where anything goes.

With clients I rarely use the word cheat nowadays because there are so many emotional negative connotations surrounding the word, and I don’t want people to think of it as breaking the rules of the diet. It’s not breaking the rules when the overfeeding is part of the greater overall diet strategy.

In fact, that’s an important part of the mindset going in: one of the reasons the Cheat Day is so enjoyable is because you are serving your body, and loading yourself up for the week to come.

There was a time when the only application of the Cycle Diet was a full refeed day or cheat day once per week, with a possible mid-week half-day spike as well. That’s a bit one-dimensional, though it might be useful to think of that as the original version, or the baseline from which you tweak and adjust it to your needs. I’ve used other approaches where there is just one overfeed meal per week, or one per every 10 days. You might have 12-hour overfeeds, whole day overfeeds, weekend overfeeds or anything in between. I’ve played with the size of the refeed window and the regularity of the window, and I still do.

I’ve also learned, more and more, that there are so many other things that can affect metabolism outside of diet application. Things I never considered before can positively or negatively contribute to the viability and sustainability the Cycle Diet, and whether it’s a good fit for you.

Something as simple as age can be a big factor. In the prime of my career I needed a whole day and a half of overfeeding to stoke and optimize my metabolism. That meant a full cheat day and a mid-week spike each and every week, all while staying sub 10% body fat. But now, at age 54 at the time of writing this, I only need one refeed day per week, no more. For me to eat off-diet outside of that once per week structure would just be for pure indulgence than it would be for any physiological need to spike metabolism.

The one reality of metabolism that hasn’t changed much in terms of applying the Cycle Diet is this: the leaner someone is staying because of calorie control or restriction, the more overfeeds and calorie spikes that person should get in order to keep their metabolism optimized and robust. Otherwise, metabolic down-regulation and damage are a risk. When that happens, hormones get out of balance, and the whole physiological system gets thrown out of whack.

Other factors, like unpredictable, unstructured days with lots of travel can impact anyone trying to stay on a diet. Lack of sleep can impact leptin sensitivity, hunger, appetite, and even the willpower needed to stick to the diet on your diet days. These are variables that can affect someone being consistent on any diet. Lifestyle has a huge influence on whether any diet will be successful. People need to stop reading only about the ins and outs of a diet, and start considering whether they have the essential lifestyle in place to make a diet work,  and to allow a diet to work for them.

Finally the overview of the Cycle Diet comes with a bit of warning.

People hear about the Cycle Diet with its meals and days of free eating and they focus on that and only that. That’s understandable: knowing you can eat a dozen donuts for breakfast and have it be a positive thing for metabolism sounds a little too good to be true.

Practicing what I preach this year in Aruba!

But the flip side of the fun overfeeding and calorie spikes is that the Cycle Diet is still a diet.

It requires strict adherence to the diet days in order for the overfeed free eating days to work as designed.

You also need to put your body into Supercompensation Mode first. You don’t necessarily add in a cheat day your first week on the diet; you do it when your body and your metabolism are ready. How long this takes can be different for everyone. But when it is ready… well, it’s a fun ride.

A whole section of this project will include people and clients of mine who have followed the Cycle Diet for a long time with great success. You will hear from them in their own words their experiences with the Cycle Diet, and how they’ve made it their own.

The Origins and Birth of the Cycle Diet

I’m not going to go on and on about the science behind the diet. I’ll mention the science here and there. There’s still plenty of research that hasn’t been done yet that I’d still like to see. There has been a lot of promising new research on leptin and overfeeding since I started doing this, but even with that the ins and outs of it are still being explored (e.g. the effects of periodic over-feeding over the long-term, especially in already-lean subjects). As I said, what I’ve found is that this kind of eating works extremely well for staying lean while optimizing your metabolism and your physique, but the research is still catching up to it.

Rather than focusing on the research, I would rather discuss the ins and outs of the Cycle Diet, and how to make it a sustainable part of your lifestyle that serves your body. I think any diet that has worked well for myself and for clients for 30 years speaks for itself.

When I first got into it, all that existed in the bodybuilding world back then was bulk up then spend weeks and weeks and months dieting down. Every year bodybuilders would bulk up in the off-season, then diet for months to get lean during contest season. Well, I did that at first, and it was exhausting. I never wanted to do it like that again. I wanted to stay lean year round while making improvements in my physique.

The Cycle Diet originated in the real-world of experience way before there was much research to support it. It was born of my own experiences in bodybuilding and observing what was going on around me. It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together during my younger years of competing, and my passion for fitness and activity. I’ll outline some of the key aha moments below.

1983

1983 was my very first bodybuilding competition. I was in my third year of undergraduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was my first experience with real dieting and I had no idea what I was doing. I was more or less following the magazines. I didn’t understand anything about my own biofeedback and how to read it and respond to it. I was a newbie, to say the least.

But something had stuck in my head before I started prep. Just as someone said I would never last four years at university, which I used as motivation to stay in school, when I told someone in my local gym back home that I was going to compete the following year in the London bodybuilding contest, this person in turn basically went around telling everyone I would never be able to get abs and so I wouldn’t do well. I used that as my motivation. I lost 50 lbs in 12 weeks for the show, focusing the whole time on getting abs. I weighed in as a light-weight, at under 154 lbs. I won the contest, and I won best abs.

I hadn’t been 154 lbs since Grade 9. I was emaciated. I’ll never forget what my dad said to me. He came up to me after the show and said, Now that the show is over, I can say I’m really happy for you that you won, but the next time I see you ever looking like that again you better be in a bloody coffin! People didn’t even recognize me when I returned home to compete in that contest. I’d gotten my abs, but I had over-dieted.

I also witnessed other things at that first contest that got my brain churning about the nature of dieting and metabolism.

As I said, I was very naïve. What I witnessed back stage confused me. Guys were eating chocolate, others were drinking liquid honey, some were drinking wine. It just stuck in my mind that all these foods that must be restricted during the contest diet in order to lean out were suddenly preferred in order to make the physique pop right before going on stage. These taboo foods were suddenly good for the physique, at least cosmetically. It seemed like a contradiction at the time, but I was fascinated by how the body used foods differently depending in what state it was in at the time.

What fascinated me even more was what transpired in the few weeks following the contest. In the first few days I could eat ravenously, and I was indeed doing just that. My appetite was insane. But for the first few days of eating my physique just looked… better and better. This was the first experience I had with Supercompensation Mode. My veins had veins and my skin looked like it was shrink-wrapped around my muscles! I was feeling better and better.

Then, of course, that stopped. What had begun as a fascination for how all this eating could make me look better, soon turned to concern. I gained back 50 lbs. in less than week. My muscles were cramping all over and seizing. The physique that was looking better by the hour very suddenly didn’t look so good. I began to feel terrible, too. There was obviously a limited window where the body could put up with such overfeeding without consequences… and in this case I had gone well beyond that window.

I knew I never wanted to go through that experience again, but I kept it in my head. For the next year or so, my body was in a sort of chaos, metabolically. The experience taught me about refeeds, and limited windows and the cosmetic effects (both positive and negative) of overfeeding in a specific metabolic context.

A younger me, just starting to enjoy the benefits of the Cycle Diet.

1985

By 1985 I had finished my bachelor’s degree, and my body had course-corrected itself. At the time I was also riding my bike everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I had a job in social work about 30 km outside of town, and I often rode my bike there and back when I had afternoon shifts. I also went on long bike rides with friends.

I started experimenting with low carb, low calorie days for the long Saturday bike rides, and then holding off eating until the next day, where I’d have a huge Sunday brunch as a kind of spike. This was not very smart. One low-carb Saturday I bonked out while riding my bike about 40 kms outside of town—I couldn’t control my leg muscles or the bike, and I was wobbling all over the road. I ended up getting a car ride back into town. I was learning firsthand about muscle depletion and what happens to the body when it is truly deprived of energy. These were valuable lessons, but they came from experimenting and making huge mistakes. I certainly didn’t have it all down from the get-go.

I was also continuing my bodybuilding training as well, and the big Sunday brunches became more of a routine and something I looked forward to each week. I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted at Sunday brunch and then dieted (more reasonably, without the low low-carb shenanigans) the rest of the week. This seemed to have positive effects as I went along, so I made a mental note of it, but didn’t really know what to do with the information.

1986

By 1986 I was ready to compete more seriously again. This time I did really well, and didn’t over-diet. I won the London show and the overall. The commentators actually made note that I was in a league of my own.

The secret this time was that I had continued doing the Sunday cheat days on my diet all the way up to the show.

People wanted to know what I was doing, but it hadn’t occurred to me yet that the Sunday cheat days were actually contributing to my success. To me they were more psychological—keeping me sane while dieting. Since no one else was doing such a thing back then and I just assumed I shouldn’t have either, I thought I was getting away with something. Yet in retrospect, knowing what I do now, it’s obvious that the Sunday cheat days were enhancing my physique by enhancing my