Hey what’s up everyone. First time posting here. I’m following advice on burning fat from a couple of the articles here, and am doing HIIT 3x a week (with plenty of other activity too – weight training, yoga, some steady state cardio, body conditioning class), keeping my carbs down around 120-150g a day with protein up around 180-200g (I’m 5’8" 170 lbs and 18% body fat, aiming for 13-15% by end of August).
One of the articles recommended having an additional 200g of healthy carbs every 4th day. If this falls on a HIIT day (like today), should I wait to have carbs until I get back from gym or eat before? I’ve been busting my butt doing something in between steady state and HIIT 6x a week and haven’t lost a lb in 4 months, assume it might have been because I’m semi-vegetarian and was eating a ton of carbs from dairy, fruit and cereal and my body was burning that instead of fat. Pls be nice I am totally new to this.
alex
It’s actually 40g from MD Low Carb, not 60g, my bad. And I was getting about 2400 calories a day before switching to lower carb diet, with abt 50-60g fat (entirely from stuff like avocados and flaxseed meal), 300-350g carbs, 160-180g protein.
I have reread your post a few times and you are asking if carbs before or after HIIT is a good idea… but you haven’t’ lost any weight in 4 months? I highly doubt whether you time the carbs differently it’s going to be a major breakthrough. Get your macros correct so that you are seeing a steady decline in the scale.
6 cardio sessions, weights, yoga, etc is probably way more than enough activity(I’d guess too much) so it’s 100% absolutely your diet OVERALL that needs to be reworked.
I just started reducing carbs last week and started HIIT this week, and have lost maybe 3 lbs in the past 7-10 days. It was doing 6 hrs of steady state cardio a week that had no results, even after 4 months.
Well whatever you are doing now since you dropped 3 lbs in 7-10… keep it that way till it stops working and then worry about changes.
Undoubtedly sage advice 
Yesterday while I was doing my HIIT I realized why my program had stopped working. In the first 3 months of the year, I lost 12 lbs, and it was just for the last 4 months that nothing was happening. I just remembered that when I changed gyms 4 months ago, I had an assessment with a trainer who told me to “work smarter, not harder” on the treadmill, and said I should be breathing slow enough to be able to hold a conversation. Before that, I’d been really pushing myself – 3x a week I’d do an hour on the treadmill with three sets of 5 min walking, 5 min jogging, 5 min running, 5 min running fast (with another 3x/wk on the elliptical), and every two weeks I’d make it harder by upping the running speed or sometimes reducing the walking time to 3 or 4 min. I was constantly pushing myself to do more, and that was keeping the weight dropping off at a decent pace of about a pound a week. Yes, I probably could have helped myself by eating less fruit and grains, but I was eating well and getting respectable results. I love the HIIT training though – just 25 min in the morning yesterday and I could still feel it at bedtime.