Carb Cycling... Monday, June 29

With my trip to The Philippines just a couple of weeks away and my trip to Canada about a month away, I've been using these two trips as a means of motivation to fuel my clean eating and intense training.

Sticking to my clean eating has been doing wonders on me but because of my increase in exercise intensity and amount, I've been dropping too much weight. My metabolism is through the roof but I don't care for the number that pops up on the scale, I care about things like muscle definition, muscle strength, and body fat percentage.

My solution, carb-cycling.

Carb cycling is more of a short-term approach and is meant for fine tuning your physic as supposed to dropping a lot of weight. It's not meant as a weight-loss or maintance diet, instead it's meant for people like bodybuilders and others who already have an athletic healthy body but want to either cancel out a plateau or bring about more muscle definition.

I don't want to lose weight, if anything I want to put weight on. I weighted in today at 50.6kgs and that was before training. That's way too light for me and Junior Mint was quite shocked when he saw this number flash on the scale at boxing. Weighing in at game weight when I don't have a game yet schedule can really work against me. It'd make me the lighter fighter, meaning that my opponent would be easy to push me around and control me in the ring.

In addition to sticking to my clean eating, I'm using carb cycling to help bring out my muscle definition and to lower my body fat percentage. Today was my high-carb day, meaning that I got to indulge in some much needed carbs like rice, oatmeal, and sweet potatoes.

High-Carb Day: 3-4 of my 6 meals include a starchy carb
Low-Carb Day: 1-2 meals have a starchy carb included
No-Carb Day: pretty self-explainitory (no starchy carb with any meal)

I started my day off with my usual protein-packed pancake, cooked a couple small sweet potatoes in my rice cooker, and then I ate yuk-hae bibimbap (the carb being rice here) after boxing. Yuk-hae bibimbap is like the usual bimbimbap with veggies, rice, and red pepper paste but it also has raw beef in it -- a favorite of mine. Bibimbap usually ranges from 600-800 in calories and is high in the carb count and although today was my high-carb day I made sure not to include all the rice that accompanied my bibimbap and I went light on the red pepper paste.

Tomorrow will be my much-hated no-card day. I can’t stand no-carb days because I crave my protein-packed pancake and being denied it only results in mad cravings for other carbs. I use to crave bread like a pregnant woman craves whatever but Korean bread is more like a dessert.

Korean pastries are usually packed with some kind of cream filing, glazed over with way too much sugar, or is loaded with things like sausages, rice or whatnot. Koreans even go so far as to fry bread. Don’t get me wrong I’d love to eat my weight my in bread if I were able to but I feel like I put on weight just looking at it… hahaha. Okay so I’m eggaterating – a tad eggaterating—but Korean bread is definitely not like the whole wheat, multi grain bread I use to eat back in Canada. Finding such bread is like finding a needle in a haystack.

QUESTION OF THE DAY...
How bad do you want what you want?

QUOTE OF THE DAY...
Energy and persistence conquer all things.
-- Benjamin Franklin