Abel - The cycle diet : when, why, and how to use refeeds and cheat days to optimize metabolism and stay lean year-round

About the Author

For over 30 years Scott Abel has been using the Cycle Diet with himself and with clients to stay lean, enjoy their diets, and make improvements to their physiques and metabolisms.

Scott has been involved in the diet, fitness, and bodybuilding industries for over four decades. He has written for, or been featured in magazines like Muscle &Fitness, Flex, Muscle Mag, T-Nation, and many more.

His online coaching (visit scottabelfitness.com) specializes in fat loss, saying lean year round, metabolism, and long term, sustainable solutions for permanent physique transformation.

Your Free Gift(s)!

Thank you for getting this book. As a free gift, you can download the Abel Starter Set, including The Mindset of Achievement and Intro to Metabolic Enhancement Training(MET) (yes, the entire books) completely free.

The Mindset of Achievement is about reaching goals and sustaining them and building on them. If youve ever achieved something (e.g. weight loss) only to find you couldnt sustain the success, this book is for you. It has chapters on habits & routines, motivation, getting out of ruts, fear of failure, mastery and much more. Intro to Metabolic Enhancement Training (MET) explains the methodology behind this unique metabolic training program, and includes two full 4-day programs.

Just go to scottabelfitness.com to get your copies.

Table of Contents

Overview of the Cycle Diet

Getting into Supercomp

The Overfeed

Sample Diet Day Menus

Hear From Actual Cycle Dieters!

Sample Cheat Days!

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 adjustableand 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 dont 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.

Ive 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 its 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 Diets 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.

Im 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 wasnt 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 oppositethey 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 Ive studied, and Ive 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 youre at right now, and where you want to be.

The title of this book uses the word cheat day because thats 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 dont want people to think of it as breaking the rules of the diet. Its not breaking the rules when the overfeeding is part of the greater overall diet strategy.

In fact, thats 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. Thats 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. Ive 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. Ive played with the size of the refeed window and the regularity of the window, and I still do.

Ive 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 its 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.