Eat ice cream every night & LOSE WEIGHT!

Rachel Paul, 47, shed 193 lbs. Learn her easy carb-cycling secret here

- LISA MAXBAUER

We lose, we gain... Oh, the diet highs and lows are frustratingly familiar to so many of us, including Rachel Paul, who lost an amazing 145 pounds on a weight-loss reality TV show years ago, only to immediately watch those pounds bounce back onto her body. But what if we could harness the power of a different type of high and low—modulating our carb intake from day to day to permanently stoke our metabolism so we consistently move toward lasting success? Here, how using Rachel’s delicious diet-cycling strategy works wonders for women over 40. And with no deprivation!

Back in 2015, Rachel participated on the TV show Extreme Weight Loss and ditched almost 150 pounds with the help of trainer Chris Powell. “It was quite a year,” she gushes. But her story didn’t end there.

“Pretty much immediately after we shot the finale, I started celebrating,” she reveals. “I went back to exactly what I was doing before.” And before long, she was back up to 365 pounds. She tried diets, but nothing worked. As she aged, she discovered that hormones play a major role in locking stubborn pounds on our body. She explains, “If you go into too much of a calorie deficit, your cortisol goes crazy.” That’s the stress hormone linked with belly fat. She needed a better way than slashing calories.

This switch gets results

Racking her brain in 2022, Rachel remembered the strategy she’d used to lose weight on the show: carb cycling. So she gave it another try. Each week, counting her macros, she ate four high-carb days in a row, followed by two low-carb days. The seventh day was a reset day meant to mimic future maintenance.

Rachel paired comfortable carb cycling with exercise. She started hiking and later returned to CrossFit. “It’s like recess for adults,” she says.