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Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia. And today I wanna chat about dieting, one of my favorite topics because I love helping people crack that nut of pushing past whatever plateau they feel they're experiencing or whatever resistance they feel they're experiencing and really helping them progress in their fat loss goals. And I wanna chat about calorie cycling today. I've talked about elements of it in different podcasts.

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Of course, protein-spearing modified fast is absolutely a type of calorie cycling. And I want to chat about it as a really smart strategy for some people to helping them adhere to their fat loss goals and be sustainable in the long run. And you don't just use calorie cycling if you're head up against a plateau, if you're struggling to adhere. There are many reasons why you might want to use it, and I want to chat about them today. The thing is, though, is that

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For some people, adhering to a diet or sticking to moderate to aggressive restriction for a period of weeks can result in and does result in something called adaptive thermogenesis. This is actually almost everyone. And so I'll go into why calorie cycling can help offset that and I guess essentially why you're using it and even why that even happens in the first place. And again, have talked a little bit about this before.

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But let's understand what actually happens first inside your body when you do drop your calories. Our bodies are adaptive machines. They're brilliant, they're complex, and they get very efficient and adaptive. In fat loss, you don't want to be efficient because efficient means your body burns less calories for a certain amount of work because it gets very good at running on very little. And ultimately,

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your body doesn't love an energy deficit. When you'll constantly eat less than you burn, your body doesn't think, brilliant, we're getting lean for summer. Your body thinks, we're starving, this is an emergency, survival mode is activated. And that survival mode happens in a number of ways. There are these hormonal and metabolic changes that make continued fat loss progressively more difficult. For some, almost impossible. So first of all, there's leptin.

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Leptin is produced by your fat cells, it's a hormone, and it's essentially your body's fuel gauge. When leptin is high, your brain gets the message that we're fed, we've got energy reserves, all systems go. When leptin drops, which it does dramatically during dieting, your brain gets a very different message. It gets a message that there's an energy crisis and it needs to conserve everything. And research on this is, you know, it's pretty apparent.

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studies show that when people lose around 21 % of their body weight, albeit that's actually a significant amount of weight, The leptin levels can drop by more than 70%. So that 70 % comes from studies like the work of Rosenbaum and Liebel at Columbia University. And they did a number of controlled metabolic ward studies in the 1990s and 2000. And even in one of these studies, they found that participants

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who lost 10 % of their body weight, so if you go from 90 kilos to 81 kilos, circulating leptin can still fall by roughly 40 to 50%. And this is one of the reasons why hunger is harder to control when you are dieting. And of course, speaking of hunger, then there's ghrelin, and that is our hunger hormone, one of them. This spikes during calorie restriction. Research shows ghrelin can increase up to even 24%, so,

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above what you would typically expect during weight loss. So you've got less of the hormone telling you you're satisfied and you've got more of the hormone telling you you're starving. And so it's like this hormonal perfect storm. And I've already talked about in a previous podcast, Kevin Hall's calculations on the brain and how the brain registers fat loss. And his calculations show that for every kilogram of weight you lose,

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your brain gets hungry for around a hundred extra calories. And of course, the more your weight drops, the less calories you actually need. this is just further compounding uh your body's response to caloric restriction and your thyroid hormones also down regulate. T3 and T4 regulate your metabolic rate and they drop during a sustained calorie restriction.

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So body is literally showing that slowing down your metabolism to conserve energy. Again, this isn't like doom and gloom for when you're dieting, but it is just one of these hormonal changes that occurs. And all of this together can culminate in something called, as we've talked about, and I've talked about this quite a bit with Brandon, Brandon de Cruz, adaptive thermogenesis. And this is when your energy expenditure dropped beyond what you would expect from just weighing less.

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Again, your body becomes more efficient. Your muscles require less energy to do the same work. You fidget less, which of course is that lack of spontaneous activity that might even be subconscious, and you move less without even realizing it. And research consistently shows that calorie restriction induces a reduction in energy expenditure that's larger than what the loss of the fat and muscle mass can explain. So that just means your metabolism doesn't slow down just because you're smaller, as you would expect.

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slows down because your body is actively trying to prevent further weight loss. And this is sort of even outside of how much weight you have to lose or how much excess body fat you have. So this isn't your body broken, quote unquote, this is just evolution at its finest. For 99.9 % of human history, food scarcity actually was a real threat. And so the people who survived famines were the ones whose bodies were really, good at conserving energy. So they were the superstars.

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So we're all walking around with these incredibly efficient survival mechanisms because clearly we're here because of those legends that survived. So how does calorie cycling fit into this particular conversation? So the idea behind calorie cycling is then what if we give the body a periodic moments of perceived safety within a diet, brief periods where it doesn't sense that threat where survival has to kick in.

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So the adaptive mechanisms don't go into full, don't go full noise. So this isn't like tricking your body. It's not some sort of metabolic trick. It's basically stress management for your metabolism. Just like you wouldn't train at maximum intensity every single day, or at least if you tried, you couldn't, you stress, you recover and you grow. Calorie cycling applies that same principle to nutrition, but it's just not done that often.

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push and then you release. You stress, then you recover. You create a deficit, then you restore some balance. You get that rhythm instead of that relentless restriction. Then your body has a more opportunity to respond to the inputs that you're putting in. And it can continue to play the game with regards to improving body composition. And of course there are different ways to calorie cycle. It is an umbrella term.

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So it can mean a lot of different things depending on basically who you're talking to or what protocol you're following. Probably the most gentlest form of it might be what some people, what you'd say people would do naturally, even if they don't call it calorie cycling. A lot of people will eat lower calories during the week just because they're in a routine, the structure, they've got their set meals. There's less room for deviation. They come the weekend then, they're a little bit looser, they're out socializing.

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might even have a couple of drinks and their caloric intake is going to be naturally higher. And this isn't even people who might be dieting per se, but even people who are at a healthy weight and they're at their maintenance calories, if they were to track them, like they might naturally cycle their calories. Thing is, this approach clearly also works if you are in a diet phase. So let's say your target, your deficit calories are, I don't know, 2000.

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across Monday through Thursday, you might decide to eat 1600 calories, then that additional 800 calories that you've saved, you top up on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and you allocate those extra calories to the times where you are going to be a bit more flexible and you can be a little bit free. Of course, the course of a week, of course, you've still got that same calorie budget. You're still in a calorie deficit, but you've just allocated those calories differently.

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That allows you just that flexibility without panicking about having to go out socializing or wanting to hibernate because you're afraid that you can't control the food choices in front of you. And then of course you've got like the strategic refeed. So you could say that this is a bit more deliberate. So talking about a planned one or two day bump in calories, usually with a focus on carbohydrates. And we focus on carbs specifically because they have the strongest influence on leptin.

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They refill your glycogen stores, which is our muscle carbohydrate stores, which are very often depleted when we're in a calorie deficit and we're training. And they tend to improve training performance more than fat or protein would in that context. And the other thing is, that when you are dieting, your insulin sensitivity improves as well, which means that your body will more readily take those carbs and put them back into your muscle cells.

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So during a refeed, protein usually stays high, so that doesn't change, but you're increasing carbs significantly while keeping fat moderate to low. So you might go from 1600 calories with 150 grams of carbs to 2000 calories with 250 grams of carbs for a day or two. And clearly, because you're only focusing on carbs, you're not really going off the reservation in terms of having a whole heap of junk food,

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potato crisps, French fries, cheesecake, like that, because actually you sort of can't. So this isn't about indulgent. It's about strategically refueling. And so you're topping up that physiological fuel tank. And this is particularly helpful for athletes, either resistance training or endurance athletes, particularly in a weekend when they might have a longer training session, they're requiring some additional calories. But this is perfect strategy to help fuel those sessions as well, get really good workouts.

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but also get that psychological break even over a couple of days from um having that calorie restriction. And there is solid research in the resistance trained individuals as well. One study found that carb refeeds per week during a seven week diet led to the same outcomes in terms of fat loss. So no worse or no better than continuous calorie restriction. And in fact, the initial manuscript for the paper

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suggested that the diet, the seven-week diet resulted in better preservation of fat-free mass. However, there was some critique around that showing that there was only, like there was something about the measurement of the fat-free mass. It was only the dry fat-free mass that was measured that actually differed. And this could potentially mean that those changes that potentially favored the refeed group were due mainly to hydration or dehydration. So,

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The measurements were taken right after the refeed phase for the individuals in the refeed study. And this is when more muscle glycogen and water would be higher. So it can look like more lean mass, but that lean mass edge might actually just be related to the glycogen or water. Albeit, I think when we zoom out and look more broadly, whilst these have little to no physiological advantage, there can definitely be small psychological and appetite.

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benefits and overall you get that better adherence and more motivation for sticking with the diet. And this is how I want you to calorie cycling and particularly these strategic refeeds, especially if you're a little bit apprehensive about bumping up your calories on certain days, thinking it's going to impact negatively on your fat loss. In the long run, it's actually going to potentially have a more positive outcome on your ability to sustain that diet. So the diet break is

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thinking about an even longer intervention. So a diet break is typically seven to 10 days, sometimes up to two weeks at maintenance calories, taken every four to eight weeks during a longer fat loss phase. Although I will say you can actually go a bit longer in a fat loss phase depending on all of the biofeedback that you care about, like your sleep, your hunger, your energy, and your appetite. Like if these things aren't out of whack,

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then you can go longer than eight weeks. But anyway, the diet break is just a longer period of time. So this is like a legitimate pause. It's not just a refeed. You stop digging into that deficit hole. You maintain your weight. You let hormones recover. You let training performance come back up. And then you continue in your next block of dieting. And again, there's a lot of research showing that there's efficacy in this approach as well.

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Again, physiologically, there's no magic. If you look at the research and people talk a lot about a trial called the Matador trial, was a long, it was an earlier trial in obese men and not resistance trained uh athletes, but 16 weeks of total dieting, either continuously or in a two week deficit, two week maintenance breaks. So clearly those 16 weeks for the diet break group actually took 30 weeks to complete. They did show that weight loss was greater and

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potentially the resting metabolic rate reduction was smaller in that intermittent group. They did show that psychologically, adherence was better. Physiologically, was no, there's no real magic to that. There's just less time under that deficit stress. And the same group also did a similar trials looking at trained individuals, controlling their training as well. So they tightened

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the control, they equated total weeks of an energy deficit using shorter diet breaks. And again, there was no significant difference in fat loss, fat-free mass, or resting metabolic rate once total energy was matched. However, participants felt better. Hunger and irritability dropped during maintenance weeks. So again, adherence improved, but physiology didn't really change. And this is what, when we pull these studies together,

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we show that intermittent approaches like calorie cycling can absolutely aid sustainability by giving people this sort of predictable relief from the restraint. And the final one I'll mention is alternate day fasting. And this is pretty dramatic actually. Alternate day fasting means that you eat roughly around 25 % of your maintenance calories one day a week, maybe 500 to 600 calories. And then you have

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115 to 125 % of your calories the next day. So you eat extremely low on one day and then pretty high on the next, alternating throughout the week. And then of course, when you average it out across the week, you're still sitting at that 25 % deficit, which is just over a moderate deficit really for fat loss. But I mean, the day-to-day experience is intense and anyone doing even the protein-spearing modified fast days, where on something like Monday's matter, you're having

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definitely more than 600 calories a day, maybe upwards of 900 calories, you still have that real drop in food intake which can amplify that one day experience for some. But of course other people really love it. And they do like that clear on off rhythm. So today they're fasting, tomorrow they get to feast. It can simplify decision making and meal planning obviously for certain personality types. But for a lot of people that...

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real restriction of super low calories one day, like over high calories in next, can result in this binge restrict pattern. So the approach can be really challenging. It can wreck training consistency as well if you're flat every second day. It can mess with your sleep and it can encourage that all or nothing thinking around food. However, I do think that the protein-spearing modified fast approach, otherwise known as rapid fat loss approach,

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where you do predominantly eat lean protein across the day, your calories are like maybe one third to 40 % of what you'd usually eat. It's enough, but it's not enough to make most people get neurotic around food. So that alternate day fasting then physiologically can absolutely work. Behaviorally, those really restrictive low days might not work for everyone. One thing I do wanna address though is,

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that, you know, won't I just make it up tomorrow? Which I understand a lot of people think. So if I go really low one day, will it mean I'll overshoot the next? What we know is that even if you lift calories higher on that subsequent day, particularly with something like protein-spearing modified fast, is that it's very hard to undo the deficit that you created the next day. Again, alternate day fasting, some people can absolutely overshoot and...

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Really binge and absolutely undo that work. But for the most people, if when they have the sort of either structured protein sparing days, the strategic planned diet breaks or refeeds, and they're aware of sort of the cycling that's occurring and it's not super, super restrictive, they're actually okay. And they can see it as deliberate periodization and psychologically they can get on board with it. So I've mentioned

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couple of features of calorie cycling, however you want to slice or dice it, and how it may or may not be favorable for some people. Those two things, or three things actually, that it can help offset some of those hormonal changes and help sort of uh balance them out, depending on the length of the refeed or the diet break, so you feel less hungry. Two is that you get that sort psychological break from being on a diet. You get some training benefits from having those

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of muscle glycogen stores filled and you feel more motivated to go back into your diet. And three, a potential con for some people, obviously it's just going to take a little longer for you to lose the weight because you're not in this continuous calorie deficit. And so if we, that would probably be one of the major things to consider that when we're just talking about the amount of fat you lose, calorie cycling is not going to get you there faster. The thing though with calorie cycling,

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It can give you a better adherence because of all of those reasons I just described. If you don't feel like you're living this perpetual state of deprivation, you can rebuild that motivation to diet every time you go back in to a deficit. And you're also not going to throw in the towel just because you're traveling or just because you've got a vacation or just because the holidays come up or you've been invited out to someone's dinner. All of these things can be worked in to a calorie cycling approach.

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so you can still adhere to your plan and more importantly, you just feel in control. Oftentimes, and particularly people who are all or nothing types, type A's, they do something and they do it amazingly, but if they can't do it, they're just absolutely off a diet and they will just go to town. Calorie cycling still requires planning and it still requires the same level of rigor, if you like, for the most part.

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Or be it with some more flexibility because you've got few more calories to play with, but you can't just not think about your diet just because you're on a diet break. And I think this is where the challenge can lie for some people a little bit. With all of that said, I do favor calorie cycling for people to give them all of those benefits, which I just mentioned, and allow them uh probably just more chance of adhering to their diet. Because if you just.

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plan to continuously diet until you lose the weight, at some point, there'll be a barrier or a block or an obstacle that you feel is insurmountable, and then you may well just give up altogether and lose all of those habits and behaviors that you sort of were putting into place. So what are some of the non-negotiables I think are important for calorie cycling? So can you just do it with any old diet? Well, I mean, let's just talk about two factors, regardless of what you're doing, which are

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I think a non-negotiable. Obviously protein is important. Minimum, absolute minimum 1.6, but closer to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day will help preserve lean mass during weight loss. The leaner you are, the higher you want your protein to be. And a lot of people I know are pushing their protein a lot higher than that 2.2 grams per kilogram. This will just help you maintain muscle when you're in a calorie deficit. Don't forget muscle.

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does account for a significant portion of your resting metabolic rate. So when you lose muscle, you're making it harder to maintain your weight loss in the long run. So you are essentially, you're lowering that metabolic ceiling. So regardless of your cycling pattern, whether it's strategic refeeds, or you're doing it for a period of seven to 10 days, keep protein consistently high, make that your non-negotiable. And then of course, how do you build a better body? It's the resistance training.

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Studies show combining caloric restriction with resistance training protects against lean mass loss and maintains or even improves muscle strength. Perfect. Diet alone, you do lose fat and muscle. Diet plus resistance training, you lose fat and you can really mitigate that muscle loss. So you guys know how I feel about resistance training and just how important it is. So if you were just counting your calories, how would you do it yourself? Step one.

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you'd calculate your maintenance calories. And you would do that by starting with an online calculator, giving a rough baseline number, and then you wanna track your intake and your weight for two weeks and see if that number of calories maintains your weight. And if not, if you fall outside of, you know, one to 2 % of your starting weight, then that will indicate that you just have to make a slight adjustment to that caloric value. Step two.

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decide your average weekly deficit. So for most people, this is gonna sit anywhere between 15 and 25 % to be sustainable. Too much more than that and it can trigger some of these adaptive responses early on. Step three, distribute that deficit across the week. And this is where you get creative. So maybe it is five days at a deficit, two days at maintenance. Maybe it's three low, one high, or two low, one high.

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Maybe it's two week blocks of dieting with a one week maintenance break. Maybe you look at your calendar and you travel for work every third week. Maybe that week is where you stick at maintenance calories. And when you're at home and it's easier to aggressively diet, you do it there or vice versa. So there's no single correct pattern, but the best pattern is one that you can stick to and that works in your real life. Step four, clearly keep protein high every day. Step five,

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Time your higher days strategically. So put them around your hardest or longest training sessions or your social events. Make them work for you, not against you. Then step six, this is important, monitor and adjust. If your weight loss stalls for a few weeks, genuinely stalls, not just normal fluctuations or behavioral changes, then do reassess. Maybe drop calories slightly, maybe extend your low day blocks.

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Maybe up your physical activity because your non-exercise activity has fallen through the floor. These are the things that you monitor. So it's important to remember that on your higher days, especially refeeds, you may see a jump in the scale weight. And that jump literally is not fat. It's glycogen storage. It's muscle carbohydrate storage, bringing water with it. So every gram of carbohydrate we store, we store an additional three to four grams of water.

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that weight will come off as you go back into your deficit because it's not a true fat gain. So track the trend in weight over weeks, not day-to-day fluctuations. So who wouldn't use calorie cycling? First, if you have a history of binge restrict cycles or disordered eating patterns, this approach might actually reinforce those behaviors. So the structure of high days and low days can actually become quite triggering for some people. So you might be better with a moderate consistent approach. And

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If you're an endurance athlete who have multiple long sessions weekly, and it's not just that sort of weekend where you really sort of had it hard, you might need more consistent feeling. So the unpredictability of having low calorie days when you have a surprise long training session may backfire on you. So you do have to be mindful of that. Although in my experience, I've had people be super successful doing it because we do bump calories the next day.

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If you're dealing with chronic stress, whether it's work stress, relationship stress, sleep deprivation, whatever, any other layer of planning and restriction might actually not be helpful. I know your brain might crave that kind of additional structure, but actually during high stress periods, sometimes being more simple is better. And then if you find yourself just becoming obsessive, obsessing over numbers, tracking and planning is making you anxious rather than empowered, then clearly this isn't working.

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because the goal of calorie cycling is to make your life easier, not harder. So if you do feel empowered by calorie cycling and you can get this air of flexibility, then it's absolutely working. If it feels chaotic and controlling, then it's absolutely not. So this is what I want you to take away. The real win with calorie cycling isn't that you're going to lose more fat when you diet. It's not about gaming your metabolism or finding some sort of magic work around. This may teach you rhythm. Fat loss,

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This is the win, shouldn't feel like a punishment. It should feel like precision. Periods of focus, periods of release. Times where you push, times where you maintain, you stress and then you recover. This does actually honor our body's natural ebb and flow instead of trying to bulldoze through these natural cycles anyway. It should speak to you and say that you can eat flexibly, you can train intelligently, you can have a social life and I can still move towards my goals.

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without turning my life into a spreadsheet. And so on the days where you're lower, you're choosing to do that so you have that flexibility when they're higher. And that is sustainability. And that, I think, is a real metabolic advantage. The fact that you can actually stick to something long-term without losing your mind. So, you sort of feel stuck like every diet day is Groundhog Day. Same deficit, same fatigue, same meals even. Maybe you need to add something like this into your schedule. Because at the end of the day,

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The best diet is one you can stick to. The best approach is one that helps you reach your goals without making you miserable in the process. Your body is adaptive, your metabolism is flexible when you work with it and not against it. So that's what I've got for you guys today. Hope you enjoyed it and keep an air out. I have webinar coming up Wednesday, October 29, running at twice, 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. New Zealand time. It is fat loss in the festive season.

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I'm talking you through five habits that may sabotage your fat loss goals in the festive season and then three strategies to help you overcome them. And you guys really just got a good broad overview of one of them, the calorie cycling. Anyway, look out for that on my socials and in my email. And if you're not my email list, you can get there by going to my website, mikkiwilliden.com, scrolling down to the bottom, putting your email in there and hitting submit and DM me on

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Instagram threads or X @mikkiwilliden in Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website Mickey Willard in calm put your email in there Alright team you have the best week. See you later