Nutrition calculator
Carb cycling calculator
Write three day types — high, medium and low carb — assign one to each day of the week, and get the whole grid in grams: carbs, protein, fat and calories per day, plus what the week adds up to. Edit any number in the table. Free, instant, no sign-up.
Your three day types
Everything scales with bodyweight, so the template is written in grams per kilogram. Protein normally stays flat across all three days — carbs do the moving, and fat moves the other way to keep the low days edible.
Your week
Calories come from the rounded gram figures using the Atwater factors — 4 kcal per gram of protein and carbohydrate, 9 per gram of fat — so the columns in the table always add up to the calorie figure beside them.
The grid gives you the grams — the coach turns them into meals you will actually cook.
What is carb cycling?
Carb cycling means varying carbohydrate intake by day rather than eating the same amount every day — high on the days you train hard, low on the days you rest, with protein held steady throughout. It came out of physique competition, where the practical problem is fuelling heavy sessions while running a deficit, and it solves that problem by moving the fuel to where the work is instead of spreading it evenly and being short everywhere.
How this calculator works
You write three splits in grams per kilogram of bodyweight and assign one to each day. The calculator multiplies each split by your bodyweight, rounds to whole grams, and converts to calories with the Atwater factors. The defaults sit deliberately below endurance-sport carbohydrate guidelines — the joint ACSM, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Dietitians of Canada position stand puts light-to-moderate training days at 3–5 g/kg and hard endurance days at 6–10 g/kg, but a lifter in a deficit is not eating for a stage race. Protein is held at 2.2 g/kg, the top of the 1.6–2.2 g/kg band Robert Morton's 2018 meta-analysis identified as the point where extra protein stops adding to gains from resistance training.
What carb cycling does and does not do
It does not have a metabolic magic trick in it. Head-to-head, a cycled plan and a flat plan at the same weekly calories produce very similar body-composition changes — energy balance is still doing the work. What cycling gives you is better-placed fuel and a plan that fits a training week: full glycogen for the session that matters, a lighter day when you are sitting still, and a psychological break from eating low every single day. Treat any claim that it "boosts metabolism" or "forces fat burning" as marketing.
Assigning the day types
Put high days on your two or three hardest sessions — the leg day, the long run, whatever you would most hate to do flat. Put low days on complete rest days and on days with only light or skill work. Medium days cover everything else. Then check the cycle total against your target: if the average is 300 kcal above where you want to be, take it out of the low days rather than flattening the high ones, because the high days are what the plan is for. And keep protein where it is — that is the one number that should look identical on every row.