Kelsey Marksteiner: So, yeah, I find carb cycling useful in some patients. And it depends on the intensity of the exercise, what their goals are, etc. If I know someone who maybe has some blood sugar issues, they’re trying to lose weight, and they’re exercising pretty significantly, that’s a candidate in my mind for carb cycling, which to me typically looks like a person eating low carb a lot of the time, and then surrounding the workout period getting some carbs in. So either before or after or both having some carbohydrates you feel the activity and refeed glycogen stores. Yes, I find that to be very useful in certain circumstances. That would be my ultimate in circumstance that I would use that in because you want a person to have some carbs for their exercise and too, you basically, if you’re strength training or endurance training, most athletes are going to get better results with some carbohydrates in their diet. That’s not universally true, but I’ve found that to be mostly, generally true for a lot of people. So if they want to do low carb outside of that, they certainly can. And especially if they’re trying to lose weight or if they have blood sugar issues, that’s probably a good idea. Otherwise, though, athletes, if they’re at a healthy weight and they find that carbs help them in their activities, they don’t need to do cycling. They can just eat a higher-carbohydrate diet and that’s perfectly fine.
So this is something that you have to play around with, you have to assess whether someone has a need or potentially would do well on a low-carb diet outside of their activities. If that’s true, then carb-cycling may be a good option for them. But if they just tend to do better on a higher-carb diet, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either. And I think the low-carb cycling kind of came out of the idea that low-carb is the way to eat, but athletes also need carbs. So how can we reconcile those two things? There’s definitely a time and a place for it. But I would also say that don’t be afraid of doing a higher- or high-carbohydrate diet for athletes.