What are Free Meals, Refeeds, and Carb Cycling?

Confused about free meals, refeeds, or carb cycling?
Want to know if they will work for you?

I got a question the other day from a reader who wanted to know what free meals and refeeds are all about.

Every now and then, the topic of refeeds, free meals, carb cycling, and diet breaks pop up in the low-carb forums, and these terms are not always defined very well. This is due to the conflict, struggle, and resistance you'll see from those who don't want to accept these methods as viable carbohydrate-restriction alternatives.

So today, I'm going to define them for you and share when each method is appropriate to use and when they are not. I'll also be sharing my own personal experience with refeeds, free meals, cycling, and diet breaks.

My First Introduction to Free Meals and Refeeds

I first ran into the concept of refeeds and cycling when I became aware of a low-carb recipe blog run by Big Daddy D. Every other weekend, he took time off from the Atkins Diet, and for that weekend, he increased his carb count significantly.

Basically, he gave himself the freedom to eat whatever he wanted. This gave him the space to go out to dinner with his wife and enjoy the time spent with her without having to worry about how many carbs he was eating.

It also gave him the freedom to eat more freely if he was out of town on business.

The practice worked very well for him.

He was just as successful in losing weight as he was when sticking strictly to Atkins, weekend after weekend. He didn't see much difference on the scale in how easily the body fat came off by allowing himself those refeeds.

Mentally, it helped quite a bit, so he continued doing free meals and refeeds throughout his weight-loss journey because the free meals helped him stay compliant to the Atkins Diet during the days of strict restriction.

Intrigued by his experience, I started researching free meals, refeeds, and cycling to better understand their purpose, advantages, and disadvantages.

Big Daddy D isn't severely insulin resistant. He's neutral. He does well on low-carb diets, but does just as well on higher-carb diets, too. He is one of the chosen few who can actually choose his lifestyle.

The rest of us?

Most of us do best on low carb, moderate carb, or alternative low or moderate-carb diets, so here's how to figure it all out.

What are Free Meals?

A free meal is exactly what it sounds like. It's a SINGLE meal that breaks your diet. This break is done with a deliberate purpose in mind.

Many within the low-carb community still practice this today, especially around the holidays, a special occasion, or night out. Sometimes called a planned cheat, you follow your low-carb diet of choice throughout the day, and then for that one meal, have anything you really want.

Some people make it a free-for-all, eating pizza and ice cream or a burger and fries.

Others confine their choice to one single item that they've been craving for awhile, and limit their daily total to a maximum of 60 carbs or so.

Some people limit themselves to a single hour, since that would enable only one insulin spike, while others turn it into a lengthy, leisurely meal. Some include dessert and some don't.

There is no right or wrong way to have a free meal.

Purpose of Free Meals

Free meals help you stay compliant to low carb.
They do not bump up Leptin.

The purpose of a free meal is psychological.

It helps with dietary compliance and makes the periods where you drastically restrict carbs and calories more tolerable for some people.

For those who can't see themselves giving up their favorite food for the rest of their life, a free meal now and then, or a 60-carb maintenance day, offers a way to include the foods you love on a restricted basis.

Some people have reported that as time went on and their tastes changed, the desire for free meals fades. Others have continued the practice into maintenance and plan on keeping them for the rest of their life.

Within the low-carb community there are some misconceptions about free meals.

A single meal has no effect on Leptin levels, even though many believe that it does.

To increase Leptin, Lyle McDonald has stated on his forum that it would take a couple of days eating at a very high-carb level to bump up Leptin production.

Provided you don't use your trigger foods during this time off, free meals will only set you back a day or so.

Initially, you'll gain a pound or two of water and glycogen, depending on what and how much you eat for that free meal, but the glycogen and water will come right back off again when you go back to carb restriction.

The liver can only hold about 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrate, and the body begins to produce ketones when your liver glycogen drops to about half-full.

Those 50 grams of glycogen are about 200 calories, so you can be back in ketosis within 24 hours if you severely limit your carbs the day after you cheat.

See How Long Does it Take to Get Back Into Ketosis for more information.

To learn about the consequences that can come from taking a free meal, you'll want to check out the following post: Before You Reach for that Thanksgiving Roll."

The point where extra ketones start spilling into the urine might take longer than 24 hours. However, by the time you see the urine testing strips turning at least pink, ketosis is well underway.

My Own Experience with Free Meals

It was awhile before I tried this.

I had thick-crust pizza at a local pizza place on my birthday. I drank Splenda-sweetened tea instead of a corn-syrup based soda. It tasted so good, I ate three large slices instead of two.

I was shocked at just how good it made me feel.

And I was even more shocked at just how much energy I had after eating that pizza.

After eating three slices of thick crusted pizza
I had more energy than I knew what to do with.

I honestly hadn't felt that energetic or good since I had started doing very low carb.

This unexpected reaction to eating carbs indicates that I am not a fat-burner, and that I am not as insulin resistant as I thought.

For some reason, the low-carb community has grabbed onto the idea that everyone who is fat is insulin resistant.

Nope. Not true.

I do have an upper limit for carbohydrate. I'm not saying that I don't. The amount of carbohydrate you can eat is often limited to your lifestyle. Those who are more active can eat more carbs, and those who are sedentary like me need less.

But since my insulin resistance isn't that severe, my upper limit for carbohydrate is much higher than I realized back then.

Once I learned how good those extra carbs made me feel, I added free meals to my weight loss efforts. In general, I took them on Sundays when we went to our friends' house for dinner.

I didn't track my macros on those days, so eventually, I found it more important to lose the weight, than it was to have that little bit of extra pasta or a slice of garlic bread, so I stopped doing free meals, and my weight loss picked up speed.

Notice that the carbs I added were pasta and bread. They were high-gluten items.

Later on, after going gluten free, free meals no longer affected my rate of weight loss as much as they did when I was eating wheat bread and pasta.

Discovering your personal food sensitivities is essential to your success with this method.

[Free meals come with serious cautions. I put the cautions for free meals and refeeds together in a single section because they are the same for both. If you want to skip ahead to those cautions, scroll down below the following sections on refeeds.]

What are Refeeds?

Refeeds are MULTIPLE HIGH-CARB MEALS and can last anywhere from a few hours to a weekend, or even more. How long you refeed and how often you refeed depends on the amount of body fat you have and why you're doing it.

Some people use refeeds as a free-for-all and eat whatever they want to eat during that time, without tracking their macros.

Officially, however, refeeds use a strict high-carb protocol that restricts dietary fat and fructose. Since fat is always stored and then redrawn from your fat cells, as needed, especially in the presence of carbohydrate, dietary fat is kept to a minimum during refeeds to avoid as much fat storage as possible.

Fructose is processed by the liver and turned into body fat if your glycogen stores are full.

Since you eat a massive amount of carbohydrate within a short period on a refeed, this overfeeding will refill glycogen stores, so pure fructose is generally limited to 50 grams, or less.

Refeeds are generally done on a weekly basis, but they can be done more often or less frequently, depending on your goals and how lean you are.

What are the Purpose for Refeeds?

Refeeds bump up Leptin.

Leptin is a hormone that communicates with the brain. When it's able to get past the blood brain barrier, Leptin notifies the hypothalamus about the availability of stored energy. The more Leptin that is able to bind to the Leptin-receptors in the brain, the less hungry you'll be and the more body fat you'll burn.

When you restrict calories, Leptin levels drop, notifying the brain that energy is in short supply.

This occurs even if you're obese and on any energy-restricted diet. The drop in Leptin is a safety mechanism by the body. Leptin drops to about half of what it normally is within a mere 7 days, and then it continues to drop even more as your diet progresses.

In those dieting long-term, Leptin levels can go so low that hunger is turned on like flipping a switch. Out of no where, you'll suddenly lose the non-hunger advantage of doing low carb. You'll feel:

• starving
• tired
• irritable
• and start thinking about cheating or completely chucking your diet

This is not psychological. It's physical. And its a very real state of being.

Resisting this phenomenon can build self-discipline and will, but most dieters don't understand what's going on mentally and emotionally, so they ignorantly cave into the mental pressure and cheat or leave low carb completely.

The idea behind Refeeds is to keep your Leptin levels high, so the body will continue to burn body fat at an accelerated pace and won't make as many diet adaptions because it won't know that you're dieting. 

The incoming carbs keep Leptin at normal levels, so they never fall like they do with typical dieting.

In those who have been doing low carb long-term, calculated refeeds can help break through equilibrium (long plateaus) or reverse the extensive hunger that occurs the closer you get to target weight.

Refeeds are essential if you start to experience the symptoms of starvation.

My Own Experience with Refeeds

When I did refeeds, I went back to using free meals, as well, because I was following Lyle McDonald's Rapid Fat Loss Diet. Several other people at Low Carb Friends forum were doing the same protocol, back then, so it was helpful to see how the water fluctuations affected each one of us in exactly the same way.

Before entering into the plan, I took a full month off and ate at maintenance calories. This is called a complete diet break.

Since the idea behind a diet break is to correct your super low Leptin levels, which can severely crash doing low carb, I didn't eat low carb during the diet break. 

I ate anything I wanted to.

At this time, I weighed 180 pounds, and still worked full-time as a culinary specialist for a boys home, so maintenance for me was 2,100 to 2,300 calories a day.

I did regain 8 pounds of glycogen and water, as the glycogen stores refilled, but after they filled up, my weight stayed stable throughout that entire month, no matter what I ate.

This was the first clue I had that the Insulin Hypothesis wasn't true. If it was, I should have gained weight like crazy, due to the amount of carbs I was eating.

But I didn't.

All I had to do to maintain that 180 pounds was stay below 2,300 calories a day.

The Rapid Fat Loss Plan is a low-fat low-carb diet.

I ate 950 calories a day and 20 carbs, mostly non-starchy vegetables and a few low-carb condiments during my sweet-spot weight-loss phase.

The only thing I was doing different from my own low-carb plan was the refeeds. To refeed, I ate 300 carbs within a 5 hour window.

The body didn't handle the refeeds well, but not for the reason you might think.

I still wasn't gluten free yet, and the sudden introduction of high amounts of gluten during refeeds made the whole body go wacky, just as it did when I tried to use high-gluten, low-carb baking ingredients.

After 30 days, I moved back to a 60-carb maintenance diet and everything calmed down for me.

If the problem was carbs, those problems would have followed me into that moderate-carb diet, but they didn't. They actually corrected themselves.

Warnings About Free Meals and Refeeds

Free meals and refeeds are NOT appropriate for those who are pre-diabetic, diabetic, or have severe insulin resistance. 

The insulin spike you get with a free meal or refeed will be more pronounced than you'll get if you were eating a moderate-carb diet (60 to 120 carbs) because you won't have enough of the enzymes you need to break down that dose of carbohydrates.

When you restrict carbs long term, the body won't need to make as many carbohydrate enzymes, so they will be down regulated.

The body always adapts to what you do, so it takes about two days for those enzymes to come back up to a normal level.

This is why you're instructed to eat carbs for three days before taking a glucose intolerance test. Those enzymes need to be reset before a glucose test will be accurate.

For that reason, a free meal could also cause an upset stomach.

If you have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and don't know it, using a food that contains gluten during a free meal or refeed can give you a violent reaction.

Some people on low-carb forums report feeling bloated, tired, or they suffer with a bit of indigestion, but you can also become violently ill like I did.

Celiac disease symptoms are rampant among low-carb dieters who cheat or choose to have higher carb days.

This isn't due to the carbs.

It's due to the gluten.

So if you decide to use either of these techniques, I recommend that you try gluten-free sources of carbs on your first try. Even later on, if you do well using free meals and refeeds, don't overdose yourself on pizza like I did.

When I did the pizza thing again a few months later, I did have a violent reaction -- due to the gluten. I quickly learned that keeping the free meals and refeeds gluten free were essential for me.

Another problem with free meals and refeeds is trigger foods. If you choose to eat the foods you crave, you can actually trigger binge behaviors.

In a small group of people, carby foods can cause you to desire and want more carby foods.

In general, this is more likely to happen if you are closer to goal weight, and the carbs trigger a desire for fat storage, but it can also happen if you're obese.

Low-carb diets cut major sources of wheat and sugar out of your diet, so the pleasure sensors in the brain are not going to get their daily stimulant anymore. When you give them that stimulant, during a free meal or refeed, the urges can be stronger than you can withstand.

Since a diet is concluded to be a famine by the brain, all was well and good when you were in total abstinence, but if the brain finds out that wheat, sugar, or some other pleasurable food is available, it can start cravings.

It takes a very strong sense of will to resist these urges, and can often result in you quitting low carb completely.

Quitting Low Carb Isn't Bad

If experimenting with free meals and refeeds teaches you that you are not severely insulin resistant, and you want to add additional carbs to your diet on a regular basis, please don't put yourself on a guilt trip.

Quitting your low-carb diet isn't bad.

What causes you to regain after leaving low carb is returning to how you were eating before. That lifestyle made you fat. That lifestyle will make you fat again.

Moving from low carb to moderate carbs can be done, for those with mild to moderate insulin resistance, but you do have to watch and restrict your food intake to pull it off. You'll never be able to eat all you want, whenever you want to, unconsciously, and get thin.

What is Carb and Calorie Cycling?

I first ran into the concept of cycling over at Low Carb Friends when a forum member started talking about how she was cycling between Atkins and Kimkins.

The Atkins Diet that was popular at that time had stopped working for her, but the Kimkins approach only worked for about a week, after which the fat loss stopped.

Seven days is the length of time it takes your Leptin levels to fall by 50 percent, so today, this experience makes sense to me. She'd do Kimkins and lose as much body fat as her body wanted to lose for that week, then once her Leptin level fell, she would move over to the Atkins Diet to maintain the loss.

When she was mentally ready to do another round of low-fat Kimkins, she would go back onto Kimkins for a week, and then move back to Atkins Induction.

On Atkins, she took the time to move up the carb ladder, as if she were in pre-maintenance, so this is why her system worked so well.

To reset Leptin, you have to up your carbohydrates.

Just eating more at low carb levels or stretching out the length of time between meals won't reset Leptin.

However, other adaptions can be reset, such as a slow down in metabolism due to not enough calories.

This is why what you're trying to do matters.

Since she didn't just switch back and forth between the two diets every few days, she gave her body an honest diet break, which is why she was able to reset her Leptin levels so well. It also corrected any slow down due to the amount of food she was eating on Kimkins.

This cycling diet worked for her, and she even reached her goal weight doing it that way

This method of carb cycling was particularly popular after Jimmy Moore dropped his support of the Kimkins Diet and returned to Atkins. Those who had stalled on Atkins before they tried Kimkins had the exact same problems on Atkins again. They either couldn't drop the weight or they started to regain.

Amid all of the Kimkins controversy, a new thread at Low Carb Friends popped up ("Doing Kimkins -- Keeping it Healthy and Sane"), which no longer exists, but it was basically a group of low carbers who were using the cycling approach to switch between Atkins and Kimkins.

Many got excellent results.

What is the Purpose of Carb Cycling

The body adapts to whatever you're doing. There's no way to get around that, but there are ways to slow down the adaptions and even reverse some of them.

Cycling shakes up any patterns that the body might catch onto.

For example, while I was doing refeeds, the body knew when it was Saturday and carbs were supposed to be coming in.

If those carbs didn't show up because I decided to refeed on Sunday instead, by Saturday afternoon, hunger would go sky high and the mind would start screaming for carbs. 

The refeeds I did were cyclical, so that's what the body had gotten used to and what it expected to happen.

The purpose of carb cycling is to prevent that expectation and keep the body guessing as to what's going on. The theory is that adaptions can be slowed or reversed when you shake things up and don't eat ritualistically.

In other words, if you're now eating at 35 carbs a day, one day you might eat at 20 and the next day at 60, then at 35. Calories can be staggered the same way to keep the body from slowing down metabolism because it won't know exactly how many carbs and/or calories it's going to have on any given day

This is why the JUDD diet works so well.

My Own Experience with Cycling

What I did when I tried cycling was to stick to my own altered Atkins Diet that was lower in fat and calories.

This diet was higher in fat and calories than what Kimkins evolved into, as it was based on the original guidelines posted at Low Carb Friends. In that post, we were instructed to use as much fat as it took to make the diet tolerable for us.

On some days, I did what I called Atkins days because it wasn't practical to always count macros. Plus, on some days, we were up north where I wasn't able to get low-fat low-carb food.

On those days, it was easier to grab a burger and toss the bun or order a grilled pork chop or chicken breast with a salad on the side.

[Please note, I'm talking about my pre-gluten-free days still. If you have celiac disease and/or are gluten free, please don't just toss away the bun. That will not work out well for you if you have gluten sensitivity.]

I didn't cycle between the lower calorie version and Atkins in an organized manner. I did it haphazardly, as each version fit into my lifestyle.

If I didn't have anywhere to go on a particular day, I ate lower fat and calories. If I wasn't at home to eat, I ate a higher fat, higher carb Atkins.

That worked well for me and kept the body guessing, but it didn't speed up weight loss. The speed at which the pounds were coming off slowed down.

Faster weight loss isn't the point in cycling.

Cycling keeps the body from adapting to the amount of fat and calories you're feeding it on any particular day, so you don't go into a lengthy stall.

Why You Might Need a Diet Break from Low Carb

This is a touchy subject within the low-carb community because it has always believed that low carb is a lifestyle change.

You can't go back.

And for those with severe insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, or diabetes, low carb IS a lifestyle change. You'll have to stick to a low-carb or very low-carb diet, with no cheating, free meals, or refeeds, for the rest of your life.

However, there are some individuals who start out with over 100 pounds to lose, who are not severely insulin resistant and find their Leptin levels crashing long before they get close to their target weight.

If you fit into that category, if your hunger has suddenly gone mad and you can't keep your mind off food, if you're tired and still don't feel well even although you've been eating low carb for months or even years, a complete diet break can do wonders for your metabolism, hormone levels, and mental attitude.

Upping carbs is the only way to bump up your Leptin levels, so you can continue your weight-loss diet and make it to a healthy weight. Granted, not everyone finds themselves in this condition, but it happens more often than you might realize.

A diet break is simple, but it can't be LOW carb. It must take you out of the state of ketosis to be effective. That means you need a minimum of 120 carbs a day for a solid two weeks to reset all of your hormones to their proper level.

You also need to eat your maintenance number of calories for your current weight, so you don't regain, which is the tricky part.

When I was working outside the home, my maintenance calories were 12 to 13 calories per pound. Today, I write online, so my maintenance level has dropped to 10 calories per pound. Maybe 11.

If you're younger and far more active than me, 15 is often used as a nice medium level to start with. Just multiply your current weight by 15, and use that number for your calories.

Yes, counting calories can be a pain.

It means you have to actually weigh and measure your food. You can't just guess. But when the choice is between counting calories for two weeks or risking a binge, due to the upswing in hunger, most people decide to do the counting.

Conclusion

Diet breaks, free meals, refeeds, and cycling carbs or calories are sometimes necessary to get you to your goal, but they do have to be implemented wisely and carefully.

You also have to be sincere and honest with yourself when determining your degree of insulin sensitivity.

Wishing you were something else won't get it. You have to see yourself for what you are and embrace that to make these alternative low-carb lifestyles work best.