Dietary cycling with your workouts

[SuperBig]

D_,

I have read several articles scattered about and would like to get your thoughts. My specific question is how should you cycle your diet along with your training goals? For example, if you move from a "fat loss/cutting" phase, into a hypertrophy phase how should your dietary intake shift as well? I have briefly covered this with you but my diet is more along the line of TKD, where I get about 35g of carbs with my morning smoothie (CHO sources are bananas, blueberries, almond butter) and then a little bit from vegetables (broccoli, green beans, kale, for example) at lunch, then I get about 27g of carbs pre and post workout (from oats and/or banana and/or wheat germ), on workout days. On non-workout days I cut out the pre and post workout carbs and just have vegetables with dinner.

I am not so much looking at it from a caloric perspective but more from a metabolism/endocrine system perspective. I have seen multiple authors claim that staying in a caloric restriction actually slows down metabolism and hence thyroid. So it makes sense that you want to up your intake periodically, so your body never adjusts, right? But then I read about some people staying on Keto for long periods of time, ie greater than 1 year.

So, if you do up your dietary intake, I thinkmost people consider bulking some kind of food free for all. But I still see this as a challenge in eating clean. So then why wouldn't one just eat clean all the time and not really worry about dietary increases or reductions? Don't we all just want Lean Bulk periods? I mean at the end of the day everyone wants to get bigger without the added fat. Or do you have to cycle to get there?

One last question: carnitine tartrate before bed or not and with NA-RALA (morning or PM)? I am trying to employ your ALA recommendations of cycling within the week and then not on the weekends and wanted to give carnitine a shot for a little while.

Ok, one more thing: great recommendation on the Body Octane - that is a great Pre-WO supp.