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Do Diet Breaks Actually Work for Metabolism Recovery and Fat Loss? · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: You've probably heard that if you take a diet break, you'll lose more fat than if you dieted straight through, and that a couple weeks of maintenance will get your metabolism going again.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: That is not what happens.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: Today I'm gonna tell you where those ideas came from, what a diet break can actually do for you, which is worth doing, and how to use a diet break so it doesn't turn into two weeks of uninhibited eating and actually benefits you for fat loss.
• 0:27
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:40
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape.
• 0:44
  Philip Pape: And a couple of episodes back, on episode 501, I looked at the idea that perimenopause is what's causing your weight gain.
• 0:51
  Philip Pape: And today it's kind of a similar thing, except this time the claim isn't about your body.
• 0:55
  Philip Pape: It's about a specific strategy.
• 0:57
  Philip Pape: And it's a strategy a lot of people talk about, a lot of really smart people in the space are using and repeating.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: And I want to kind of separate something out right here at the beginning because on episode 493, I talked about what happens when a diet ends and how you come out of it.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: Uh, that is a different question.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: Today we're actually talking about interrupting a diet in the middle on purpose while you're still trying to lose fat.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: And I know some of you are like, yeah, okay, diet break.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: A lot of you are like, Well, I didn't realize that's even a thing I could do, right?
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: I'm trying to lose fat, so it's this contiguous thing until I get to my goal.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: But this is where strategy can be very helpful.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: This really matters a lot more for you than it does the average person, especially if you're over 40, because you've probably been dieting in some form on or off for a while.
• 1:46
  Philip Pape: And I'll just leave it at that for a while.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: Like some of you have been doing this since the 90s, since Weight Watchers, South Beach, whatever it was.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: So the idea of stopping your fat loss mid-cycle, like what's the benefit?
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: Okay, we're gonna get into that today.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: And then at the stick around to the end of the episode because I'm going to talk about the things that change when you take a break, like the scale and what to expect, especially if you're lifting, so that you don't freak out and you understand how to measure, hey, this thing is actually working.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: So for today's episode, we're going to first talk about where diet break advice originally came from.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: And there are kind of three separate things that get combined together into one claim when I hear this.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: Second, what happened when researchers looked at all the trials related to diet breaks?
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: What did what does that tell us?
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: And then third, what does a diet break actually do for you?
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: And I actually think it's underrated.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: And as always, we are gonna give you the fix, which is gonna be six specific things.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: These are not complicated, these are simple things that can fix it so that you get the most out of diet breaks.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: So you've probably heard that if you diet straight through without a break, your metabolism starts to adapt, it adapts downward, and eventually you hit a stall, right?
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: You might hit a plateau.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: But if you break your diet up or if you eat by eating at maintenance for a couple weeks in the middle of a diet, you can keep your metabolism from adapting as much and therefore lose more fat over the whole thing, right?
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Because then you can induce the bigger calorie deficit like you intended instead of uh eating the same food and having a smaller deficit, right?
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: That's part of the logic.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: And therefore you could have essentially less dieting and the same or more results.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: And it's very appealing.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: It's like, yeah, we always want things for less of the hard part.
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: And so I want to look at the recent history of this starting around 2018.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: And the first piece of history is Lyle McDonald, who was writing about full diet breaks back in the mid-2000s before a lot of these trials existed.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: And his argument is around leptin, thyroid, the uh psychological load, I guess, the mental load of a long diet, things like that.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: And he was reasoning a lot through a lot of this, also anecdotally, because it's what we see in people.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: And we hadn't yet studied it.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: The second one is the metabolic adaptation research, where when you lose weight, your resting metabolic rate drops more than your new body size would predict.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: By that I mean when you lose weight, your metabolism should drop, but also it seems to drop more than that.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: And when we look at controlled feeding studies, the average drop is around 120 calories a day, huge spread from one person to another.
• 4:29
  Philip Pape: And that's metabolic adaptation.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: But it still doesn't tell you about diet breaks and how that could affect it.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: Then the third one here is a study that a lot more people talked about regarding intervals and breaks.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: And that was the Matabdor trial in Australia in 2018, where they took 51 men with obesity.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: One group dieted straight through while the other one did two weeks on, two weeks at maintenance, and they went back and forth.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: And they were both in like a 33% deficit.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: All their foods were, uh all their meals were cooked for them by a kitchen, like associated with the researchers.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: The intermittent group lost 12.3 kilos of fat compared to eight in the continuous dieting group.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: And so if you hear somebody say, Yeah, you can lose 50% more fat, it may come from that study.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: Now it's a good study, tightly controlled.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna knock the study, but I think there's a design detail that affects how we interpret the result.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: Both groups completed 16 weeks of calorie restriction.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: So let me say that again.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: Both groups completed 16 full weeks of calorie restriction.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: It's just that the intermittent group, that was two on, two off, they needed 30 weeks on the calendar to get 16 weeks of dieting because of all the stops.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: So, really, the study showed that you get more fat loss per week of dieting, but not that you get more fat loss per month of your life or per week of calendar.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: So that what we call touch time, right?
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: In um in engineering, which I know the person again listening on Spotify who doesn't like that I mention that, we call it touch time versus continuous time or calendar time, I should say.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: So we care about the calendar oftentimes.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: And if you're dieting on and off and that helps you get through the diet and it takes twice as long, you might be perfectly fine with that, actually.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: In fact, that might exactly be the advantage of it.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: The other thing is that the continuous group, their fat loss flattened out around week 12, which is often what happens when people are adapting and their deficit gets smaller and smaller toward zero.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: So even that efficiency difference might be a result of adherence and not a metabolism result, you know, for the intermittent group.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: So that's where we get some of this advice from.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: Now, what what is the best data we have right now?
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: Well, the first one is a meta-analysis and nutrition reviews by Poon and colleagues.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: This was 12 randomized trials, 881 participants.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: And the way they set it up is pretty good.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: They only included actual diet breaks and refeeds.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: So these were periods at maintenance calories.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: They didn't in they didn't have intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting, time-restricted feeding, all that stuff.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: That's a different intervention.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: They just did the diet breaks and refeeds.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: The between group difference in body mass was almost zero, 0.01 kilograms.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: So that's like basically nothing happened.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: There was no difference in fat mass between the control group and the group that had the diet breaks, no difference in lean mass either.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: And it wasn't a small study, right?
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: Almost a thousand people.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: It's pretty good.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: The second study is from the Jeb group at Oxford, published in Obesity last year.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: And there were nine intervention arms with almost 800 participants.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: 77% of them were women, which we we don't often see.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: Usually it's split or it's men.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: The difference in weight change for them was 0.09 kilograms.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: They also checked the dropout rate, right?
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: The whole promise of a diet break is it makes your diet easier to stick to.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: So it should show up in a study as fewer people quitting.
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: But it didn't.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: There wasn't any difference in attrition in the participants.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: Okay, so two different research groups, different countries, different rules, different methodologies, the same result.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: That is, diet breaks do not produce more fat loss.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: Now, one thing did change, right?
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: I don't want to ignore this.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: That's resting metabolic rate.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: In the pool trials, the continuous dieters dropped their resting metabolic rate by about 92 calories a day, whereas the group taking breaks dropped it by only 39 calories a day.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: Now, it wasn't statistically significant on its own, right?
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: And the difference was 47 calories, but we've seen this sometimes across other studies.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: So 47 calories a day difference is basically the case you can make from a physiological perspective for diet breaks, that you would not have your metabolism drop as much by about 47 calories a day.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: Which again, you could argue is that something or is that not much of anything?
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: When you split it by population, it looks like the the amount of metabolism protected was about 73 calories a day in people with overweight and obesity, about 11 calories a day in resistance trained people.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: So the more lean and trained you are, the smaller it got.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: So that kind of confounds the data as well.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: Now, here's a part I actually find more interesting.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: Okay, a little bit of a tangent, but stay with me.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: I think it's important.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: The whole diet break argument is aimed at your metabolism, at your resting metabolic rate for the most part, right?
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: There's the psychological piece, of course, we're going to cover, but most of the argument made is about physiology.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: And that is not where most of the metabolic adaptation happens anyway.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: Most of what we see when people lose weight and we measure total daily energy expenditure is predicted by non-resting energy expenditure.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: So that's your movement, how much you fidget, how fast you walk, whether you take the stairs, whether you're doing the dishes, standing up or sitting down, all that stuff, right?
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: A lot of it, which is unconscious.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: We talk about this often, how when you go into a fat loss phase, oftentimes you move less without even realizing, even though you're trying to compensate by more steps, for example.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: And then that component of your metabolism then drops proportionally with how much weight you've lost as well.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: And that part is bigger than the resting part that changes your metabolism.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: So if you become a smaller and less moving person over several months of dieting, that is not gonna get fixed by a diet break, right?
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: You can eat at maintenance for a couple weeks and you're still probably at the same activity level, this lower activity level than you were.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: And of course, you've you've lost that weight.
• 10:25
  Philip Pape: So it doesn't help from a metabolism standpoint.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: So if you're thinking, how do I use a diet break properly?
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: Because we're gonna get into the fix, but I always like to give you a practical way to do it to follow along.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: When do I take it?
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: How many calories?
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: What do I do with my carbs?
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: All that stuff, which we're not gonna get into on today's show.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: I have a free guide on that.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: It's called Fat Loss Refeeds, the Fat Loss Refeeds Guide.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: Go to link in the show notes or go to wits and weights.com slash free.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: It covers refeeds and diet breaks during a fat loss phase, how to set the calories, how to handle your hunger, how to keep your perform performance up in the gym.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: Totally free.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash free.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: You might even want to get it right now.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: Pause the episode if you can and kind of follow along with what I'm talking about here and be like, okay, now I see what you're getting at.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: Wits and weights.com slash free or use the link in the show notes for my fat loss free feeds, guys.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: Again, link is in the show notes, witsight and weights.com slash free.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: Okay, so if it doesn't help with fat loss and it doesn't help with your metabolism, why do I still use diet breaks all the time?
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: Why do I love diet breaks, actually?
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: Me personally, Philip, those of the show.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: And why do we have it and eat more lift heavy?
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: And why does my app recommend diet breaks?
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: And why do really smart people recommend them?
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: Well, let's look at a very recent trial in Nutrients, the journal Nutrients.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: They took 30 women with obesity, 12 weeks, both using a 25% deficit.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: One group dieted straight through continuously, the other one did a refeed day every week, plus two full seven-day diet breaks in weeks five and week 10.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, got it?
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: So you had a continuous group and you had one that did single-day refeeds and week-long diet breaks.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: The diet break group was essentially dieting only 71% of the time.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: The fat loss came in at 9.3 kilos in the continuous and 9.2 in the break.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: So they were the same fat loss.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: If anything, tiny bit less in the diet break group.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: But if you look at what the diet break group had to do to get that result, their measured deficit was 690 calories a day.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: The continuous group was 1,005 calories a day.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: That's the average, right?
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: And that was statistically significant.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: So the continuous group had to diet harder and longer, essentially, to get the same fat loss.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: And remember, both groups lost the same amount.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: It's just that the intermittent group didn't have to be dieting as much.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: And we see a same direction for the adherence.
• 12:44
  Philip Pape: Dietary adherence was 91.4% in the diet break group versus slightly less at 88.4% in the continuous group.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Same thing with protein compliance, 93 versus 87.9%.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: Hitting their calorie target, 89% versus 85%.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: All of these lean in the same direction.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: So the case for a diet break is the same fat loss, but less time under that calorie restriction and slightly better compliance while you're doing it.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: So for somebody who's been dieting on and off for 20 years, like you, dear listener, probably, I'd argue that that is worth a lot more than any the other claim about like it affecting your metabolism anyway, or trying to gain more some extra advantage of fat.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: This to me is an advantage, the ability to do it.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: Now, Dr.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell is on the author list.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: So whether you consider that a conflict or not, I don't.
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: Great guy at a University of South Florida.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: And back in 2020, Campbell published a refeed study in resistance trained people that concluded the refeed preserved fat-free mass and resting metabolic rate.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: But then Payos and colleagues published a comment to that paper showing that on reanalysis, only the dry fat-free mass differed.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: There was no difference in total fat-free mass and none in the resting metabolic rate.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: And then Campbell published a reply saying, Yeah, I agree.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: So, which I wanted to mention that because that's a good example of science out in the open working the way it's supposed to do.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: So I'm not going to claim that a refeed can preserve muscle either.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: Now, there is also a trial in resistance trained women from Seedler and Colleagues, where they had 38 women for six weeks using a 25% calorie deficit.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: And they found no difference in body composition, no difference in resting metabolic rate, no difference in seven of eight eating behavior measures, hunger restraint, all of that.
• 14:35
  Philip Pape: The one thing that changed was disinhibition on a validated eating questionnaire, which got better in the diet break group and worse in the continuous group.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: So that is consistent with the story on adherence, that it is easier to stick to the diet when you have breaks.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: And the average age in that study, to be fair, was only 22, which again, a lot of these studies are hey, we're gonna pay you some money to do in this study while you're in college, stuff like that.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: The only diet break trial I could find that was run in post-menopausal women is a small pilot from 2012.
• 15:13
  Philip Pape: They had 25 women with obesity and they did three blocks of restriction separated by five-week maintenance periods.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: And the intermittent group lost more lean body mass than the continuous group.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: So that was that's in the direction we don't like.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: But again, that's 25 people, women with obesity, not lifting, small pilot study, right?
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: Sedentary women.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: So hard to really pull anything from that, but I always do like to say, hey, what other studies can I find out there?
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna put too much into that one.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: But I think the idea that taking a break helps you stick to your diet makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: So what is the fix?
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: Well, there's six things.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: Simple, not always easy.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: Number one, you decide what the break is for before you take it.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: If the reason is I'm gonna lose more fat, don't take it because you're not.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: You'll be disappointed.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: You're gonna blame your metabolism, all that jazz.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: If the reason is, hey, I've been at this for 10 weeks and I'm really struggling to do it now, I'm struggling to be consistent.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: Great time for a diet break.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like taking a D load with your training.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: Too much fatigue.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: That's number one.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: Number two, take it based on an if-then trigger that you plan for in advance.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Does this sound familiar to you?
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: This is a strategy we talked about on a recent episode, episode 499.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: So go check that out.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna kind of reteach the whole method.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: Go episode 499.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: We talked about having if-then strategies as one of the skills.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: The short version is if you wait until you feel like you need a break, then you're deciding at the wrong time.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: You're probably hungry and tired and annoyed, emotionally distraught.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: And that's the worst possible time to make a decision.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: So even though number one was decide what it's for, number two is decide ahead of time when you will take it because of number one.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: Like plan for it ahead of time.
• 16:57
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of people, this could be if then, as well as like once it's been five weeks, I'm just gonna take one.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: Because you know at that point it's gonna start to get tough.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: Five, every, every six weeks or something.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: Number three, a lot of people get this one wrong.
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: You do the diet break at actual maintenance.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: What does that mean?
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: I mean you have to be tracking your numbers so you know what your maintenance calories are right now at this point in your diet.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: And then not just like listen to my body, not I'm gonna eat intuitively for two weeks, because that's where people go wrong.
• 17:26
  Philip Pape: So for a lot of people, you're probably in like a 300 or 500, maybe a 700 calorie deficit, and you're essentially bringing those calories back in and making sure you really get the full recovery, but also not eating ad libitum as they say, like whatever the heck you want, and potentially far overconsuming and really going against yourself when it comes to fat loss, right?
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: And when you take a break, that number has to be right.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: You've heard me talk about macrofactor.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: We use it all the time because it helps you track your expenditure and you know what where that number is.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: I'm an affiliate, full disclosure.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: If you want to support the podcast, go grab the app, macrofactor, use my code WITS and weights.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: But the reason I like for it is like the app is it works out your expenditure based on your weight and calorie intake.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: And so when you're gonna take a break, you just go right up to that number it currently says you're burning into by increasing carbs.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: Number four, a diet break is one to two weeks and then it's done.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: You don't need to go longer than that.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: If you do, that's more of a maintenance phase.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: Perfectly fine thing to do, but it's a different decision with a different purpose.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: Number five, protein, protein, protein stays the same.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: You don't change that.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: But what you're gonna do is you're gonna increase mostly carbs.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: And number six, you keep lifting like normal right through the diet break.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: In fact, a deload is a great thing to have at the same time as a diet break.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Don't force it, but a lot of people do the opposite.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: They'll take a deload and then they'll like, they're like, well, I'm not training as hard, so I shouldn't eat as much.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: Do the opposite.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: You're trying to recover.
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: If you're not training, if you're taking a break from your diet, your training, you need to take a break from your dieting and eat more.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Not you don't need to, but I'm saying they go well together, right?
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: So you so you always have to be lifting.
• 18:58
  Philip Pape: Now, I know I kind of rambled through a bunch of different studies and hopefully I didn't lose you guys, but really what I'm saying here is diet breaks can be very useful.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: It's very useful.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: But the reason they're useful is because of adherence and pretty much just because of that.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: Not because of fat loss, not because of maintenance metabolism, not because of muscle preservation necessarily.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: Now, if you find that it helps those things for you, awesome.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: Again, the science just seems mixed at this point.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying metabolic adaptation doesn't happen either, because it does happen, right?
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: We know that happens, but the diet break isn't going to resolve that.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: You should take a diet break because you need the relief and you'll be better at sticking with your diet afterward.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: Very powerful tool for that purpose.
• 19:36
  Philip Pape: And a lot of you aren't even doing it for that reason.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: You you're stubborn, I'll be honest.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: And you want to get the result, you want to get that fat loss.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: You're like, I can't slow down.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: But by continuing, when you actually need a break, you end up the wheels fall off.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: You end up getting more and more inconsistent, you don't get through it all, you get frustrated, and you don't get to your goal anyway.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: So very much consider diet breaks.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: Now, before we wrap up, I told you at the top I had a number to share with you about how the scale changes during a break and people who lift.
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: I'll give you that in a second.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: But if this changed how you are thinking about your current phase, go get my free fat loss refeeds guide I mentioned earlier.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: Go to winsoweights.com slash free or use the link in the show notes.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: If you know anybody else who's big into dieting and you think, hey, maybe they would benefit from learning about diet breaks, send it, send them this episode as well.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: All right, so here is a number I want you to consider before your next diet break so that you are prepared for it.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: The scale is going to move and you're going to react or freak out to it.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: Uh and when we look at I always like to point to studies so you understand where this is coming from.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: There's a trial called ICE CAP.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: I know.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: Crazy acronyms.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: I don't know where they get these.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: They had 61 resistance trained adults.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: They took a one-week break at maintenance in the middle of a fat loss phase.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: After that one week, their body weight went up about 0.6 kilograms.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: It's about a pound and a third.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: The fat-free mass measurement went up about 0.7 kilograms.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: Resting metabolic rate went up as well, and muscular endurance improved as well.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: So, what is happening?
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: Well, your water and your glycogen is refilling here.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: That's all it is.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: Your what your fluids are refilling.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: So when you see that jump on the scale, okay, which could be again a pound, two pounds, sometimes three pounds, depending on how big you are, during a break.
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: The thing to do is don't touch anything for up to a week after the break ends.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: Just get back to your normal deficit where you were, and the trend's gonna catch up.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: What you should see then when you get into this pattern of breaks is your weight's gonna go up, then it's gonna come back down.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: And all that is is temporary, right?
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: You don't want to make up for it or cut extra calories and go to a bigger deficit, which has its own risks and problems and then makes your diet even harder and backfires in other ways.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: So that's it.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Okay, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that a diet break changes how long you spend dieting and how well you hold it together while you do.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: It doesn't change how much fat you lose or your metabolism.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.