carbs are good!!

so, today was refeed day - and I've already been asked many times what that means.  Here goes...
A normal diet should have carbohydrates, proteins and healthy fats, in the correct proportions, eaten at each meal throughout the day.
As I prep for contest, my diet is anything but normal, and goes through different phases.  In this first phase, I am starting with low calories, almost entirely from lean protein.  The fat that I take in each day is the trace fat found in chicken and fish (very rarely lean beef) and all my carbs come from vegetables.  While I drop my caloric intake, I also pull back on the number and intensity of my workouts - but 1200 calories is still not enough to maintain my base-line metabolic need.  So, every 4 days, I take in a large quantity of complex carbs to "refeed" the body.  This lets the body know that I am not trying to starve it - so my metabolism does not begin to slow down - and it allows the muscle cells in the body to rebuild it's glycogen stores which get depleted with activity. 
So, today I ate 1782 calories: 147g protein, 181g carbs (157 of which I ate at one meal), and 49g of fat.
I also got in the leg lift that I skipped yesterday.  It wasn't record breaking - but it was good to move again:
squats, leg curls, glute isos, calf raises and some hanging leg raises to work the core.

This is the first time that I have done my contest prep diet this way.  typically, workouts ramp up to insane frequency and duration in the beginning, and calories keep dropping out as the show gets closer and closer.  But I read an article about this kind of reverse dieting - and it was the first contest-prep diet that made sense to me 100%.  It seems healthier and smarter than the 2 other methods that I've tried.  We'll see if it gives me the results that I need or not!! 

I get on the scale once a week - but the scale cannot always be trusted - especially if you are a woman!  so don't ever obsess about numbers.  How do you feel?  How do your clothes fit?  How did you do in your workout today?  Was it easier to keep up with your kids?  Those are the clues that tell us whether or not we are moving in the right direction!!