♠️Diet Breaks♠️
🔹The concept of taking ‘Diet Breaks’ was first initiated and publicized by Lyle McDonald in his innovative book called “A Guide to Flexible Dieting”, and in the last few years more research has been accumulated on that matter.
🔹Have you ever started a diet break with the purpose of dieting “better” later ? Sounds counter intuitive, but it’s exactly how diet breaks work.
🔹And for the record, I’m not talking about cheat days or days where you simply stop dieting because you “don’t feel like it”. I’m talking about diet breaks, which actually serve a purpose to your progress and your fitness journey.
🔹Diet Breaks are essentially short periods of time, between 10 to 14 days, spent at an estimated maintenance, where calories are elevated by increasing carb intake to reduce hunger. This can potentially speed up your metabolism, increase energy expenditure, and regain some lost strength e while simultaneously losing some water weight.
🔹Studies show that periods of caloric restriction followed by small “breaks” at caloric maintenance, will result not only in better fat loss, and an increase in muscle mass, but weight is actually easier to keep off in the long term.
🔹And this happens for two reasons: both physiological and psychological ones.
🔹I’m not saying that dieting all at once doesn’t work, because obviously it does (a caloric deficit will always work). Also if you’re dieting for a close competition, you won’t have enough time to implement diet breaks in your prep.
🔹However, if you are not dieting for a competition and you would like to get lean, the implementation of diet breaks is certainly going to work better for long term maintenance.
Resources: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247292
musclehacking.org 