Zigzag Diet

What are you hoping to get from it? I've done it, but calorie cycling is one of those things that was born out of the fitness industry and trickled down to the diet industry. Calorie cycling is typically used by athletes and the like when they need to cut weight but don't want to hinder their performance, so they calorie cycle around training bouts to provide ample energy for performance and cut back on calories on rest days or lower level working days...that's where it was born from anyway.

I did it several years ago. I was into doing a lot of endurance cycling events for quite a few years and wanted to knock off about 6 Lbs or so to get to a better riding weight. I would eat around maintenance 4 days per week for training purposes and cut 1000 calories from my maintenance level of calories 3 days per week and on average lost 6 Lbs in about 2 months. I found it to be an easy way to go about a calorie deficit without hindering my performance much. I also played around with my carb intake and experimented with doing high carbs on my training days vs high carbs on non training days. I did better performance wise taking in a bulk of my calories as carbohydrates on my calorie cut days and eating moderate carbohydrates and high protein on my training days. I should also note that I found this to be a fairly painless approach while training because my maintenance calories with my training were quite high, so even a 1000 calorie deficit on non working days was still a substantial number of calories. As I recall, I was eating around 2500 calories per day on non training days and around 3500 on training days and was riding 100 - 120 miles per week or more, and also working in the weight room.

As a dietary approach only it can give you more flexibility having higher calorie days dispersed throughout the week so long as you are capable of consistently being able to drop your calories down after a maintenance day. I would caution against calorie cycling for people who have a tendency to binge or have have emotional eating issues, as higher calorie days may trigger episodes of overeating and lack of consistency in the approach.

ETA: if you have a low level of exercise or don't exercise regularly or at all, calorie cut days could potentially be painfully low to reach a weekly calorie deficit that would result in meaningful weight loss.

I did 5:2 to lose weight which you could call a form of calorie cycling, only having a deficit two days a week.

Advantages to me were easier adherence to a weekly goal (an everyday deficit bores and discourages me) and better dietary support to my extensive exercise routine as most of my training and recovery was at maintenance calories.

After a few years maintaining in my goal range when I want to drop a few pounds I mostly tend to use a scattergun approach with a deficit only on some sporadic days when it suits me. Advantage for me is that I don't feel like I'm dieting, disadvantage is that it's slow.

What are you trying to achieve?

CarolinaSweetheart93 wrote: »

My goal is to get through my plateau. Others have told me I'm not eating enough calories doing 1000-1200 and a lot of days I'm just not that hungry. I have a pretty sedentary job now that we are all working from home and I'm not going back and forth between desks. So I had looked at found the calorie cycling/zigzag diet can help as your body doesn't get used to only having a certain amount of calories. Honestly I'm pretty stupid about health and fitness. My main exercise is taking care of kids and house when I'm not working.

Unfortunately - though there are people who'll tell you otherwise - there isn't solid research evidence that rescheduling when we eat our calories has a major effect on our weight loss rate.

There are good questions in @sbelletti's and others' posts. Has your plateau lasted 4-6 weeks yet? How fast were you losing before the plateau? How long have you been eating this few calories? etc.

(IMO, that few calories is pretty low for most women, though maybe not for really petite, older and very inactive ones. Very often, moms would count as at least lightly active, even with a sedentary job, because of home chores and child care.)

If you've been eating that few calories for a long time, it's possible that you have some subtle fatigue in the picture, reducing your calorie expenditure. (Even fidgeting can burn up to a couple of hundred calories a day, and fidgeting less is a thing we may not notice, for example.) On top of that, things can happen like slowed hair/nails growth, slightly lower body temperature, etc., also reducing calorie burn.

There's potential, too, with long or extreme calorie restriction to experience a creeping-on of water retention (from cumulative stress) that hides ongoing fat loss on the scale.

More about those kinds of things in this thread:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1

That's really not relevant after a few weeks, though - more of a "after many months" kind of thing, although anecdotally it seems like some people are more sensitive to that sort of thing than others.

Comments above are correct, too, that a calorie counting routine that worked for us at first may not work as we get closer to goal, when the accuracy wiggle room is smaller.

If you can stick with this and answer various folks' questions, I think most of us really would like to help you if we can - for sure, I would.

I've just started a version of this. But mainly because I am trying to have an approach that will be sustainable for me.

So I eat at a deficit four days of the week, and at maintenance three days a week - overall it should balance out at about a 5000 calorie deficit over the course of the week, with the aim of losing 1lb (the reason I aim for 5000 rather than 3500 is simply to allow for any inaccuracies, or any lapses in physical activity).

It's only been going for a week but I really liked that over the weekend - on Friday, Saturday and Sunday - I didn't have to worry too much about what I could eat or not. I ate pretty much anything I wanted, but measured and logged. I allowed myself up to 3000 calories on these days, and I didn't reach 3000 on any of my three 'high' days.

The 'low' days, I allow myself 1750 calories. That's manageable, but can be tight. It just about leaves room for a treat in the evening like a chocolate bar, but I need discipline during the week. But that felt manageable because it's only four days. So I feel like this cycle might be sustainable for me.