Looking for any feedback on the Carb Nite diet. I'm looking to lose body fat (Who isn't, right?). From what I understand, Carb Nite starts off with 9 days of low carbs (30 grams or less) followed by "Carb Nite" where you ingest lots of carbs, including sugary crap, pasta, etc. Then you go right back to low carb days for 5 days followed by another "Carb Nite." Repeat until you achieve your fat loss goals.

They claim it strips the body of fat while maintaining muscle mass.

Carb cycling has always interested me and I read about this diet in Men's Fitness recent mag.

Something to try or something to point my finger and laugh at?

This is just another tweak on a ketogenic diet. Lyle McDonald’s UD 2.0 is another one, and it is discussed thoroughly here: ultimate diet 2.0 by lyle mcdonald

The bottom line is that such extreme diets can work, but not necessarily any better than regular carb-cycling. Their severity makes some people believe that they must be more effective, but this isn’t true. Instead, the carb deprivation makes those people feel more focused on their diets, which can be a benefit for them.

Regular carb-cycling is more adaptable and customized, because it uses your individual body composition to determine your macronutrient ratio. Cycled very-low-carb schemes (such as Carb Nite) use relatively arbitrary carb amounts that will not apply equally to everyone. When I’ve had clients run tests of each type of cycle, the end results were pretty much the same, in terms of the amount of lost fat.

My opinion of the author, John Kiefer, who minimally tweaked the standard keto diets to come up with Carb Nite, is that he has a tendency to repackage long-known bodybuilding practices and claim that his versions somehow have ‘special’ properties. He did this as well in his Carb Back-Loading plan, which basically amounts to concentrating carb intake around workout times, an idea that has been around bodybuilding for only a few decades or so. (He also claims in that plan that all people should lift weights for one hour between 3 and 5 pm if they want optimal results. ) He refers constantly to his degree in physics as some kind of indicator that his diet information is more valid, but this approach tends to impress only muscleheads. Those people who actually check out the dozens of reference links that he generously provides in the footnotes of some of his online articles have found that not a single one of them directly proves his specific contentions. I suspect that he’s used to gym-goers who don’t know how to read clinical research, and who think that college degrees are especially impressive.

Whenever there is a new program with such specificity and claims of superiority, I always ask how the author thinks all of the impressively muscular and lean physiques of years ago were built, since those people could not avail themselves of the author’s masterfully constructed details. This seems to stop the productive conversation cold.

You’ve tried regular carb-cycling before, haven’t you?