Hey everyone, it's Mikki here, you're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast I am joined again by Brandon DeCruz in the next in our collaborative series, bringing together our perspectives on nutrition, fat loss, and body composition.

And today, this episode focuses on diet breaks and refeeds, and how they can be used strategically during a fat loss phase.

So, we break down the difference between a structured refeed and a longer diet break, why neither should be treated as a cheat meal, and what actually happens as a calorie deficit becomes harder to sustain.

We discuss the research showing that refeeds don't necessarily accelerate fat loss, but may still be useful for managing hunger, diet fatigue, training performance, and ultimately, adherence.

We also share how we use these strategies in practice.

Including my scheduled refeeds in Monday's Matter, and how to structure higher carbohydrate days without turning them into a free-for-all.

Who is most likely to benefit from a diet break or a refeed, and why sometimes the best strategy is simply to keep doing what's already working.

So, I'm super excited to bring this series to you guys, particularly just having that opportunity to sit down with Brandon and discuss this stuff.

He is such a brainiac, and I'm loving getting his perspective on all of this.

All of the strategies that are ultimately helping you sort of achieve your goals.

For those of you unfamiliar with Brandon, he is an online nutrition and physique coach, accredited nutritionist, functional nutrition and metabolism specialist, and health and fitness educator with over 16 years coaching experience.

And Brandon is known for his ability to translate complex scientific concepts into practical, actionable strategies, and he specializes in helping clients lose body fat.

Build muscle, improve metabolic health, and create sustainable long-term results without relying on extremes or quick fixes.

As I said, this is a collaborative series with Brandon.

He is also the host of the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast, a show that is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts on Spotify, which is amazing.

And through both solo episodes and conversations with many of the industry's leading researchers and educators,

Chasing Clarity aims to bring you the best of both worlds.

He is also the host of the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast, a show that is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts on Spotify, which is amazing.

He is also the host of the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast, a show that is ranked in the top 5% of all podcasts on Spotify, which is amazing.

And Brandon has been on this podcast multiple times at this point.

And so, as I said, super excited to continue to bring these collaborative efforts to suit both of our audiences.

Now, before we crack on into our discussion, I would like to remind you that the best way to support Mikkipedia and get me in the top 5% of Spotify, that'd be amazing,

is to hit subscribe.

button on your favorite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of

Mikkipedia and it makes literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to

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All right, guys, enjoy the conversation. Today, we're tackling refeeds and diet breaks.

These strategies have been used in the bodybuilding and physique coaching

industry for decades, but depending on who you listen to, you'll hear very different claims

about what they actually do. Some people argue that they boost leptin, prevent metabolic adaptation,

restore hormones, or even improve fat loss. And then others will argue that they're unnecessary

and simply slow down the dieting process. And in reality, it's much more nuanced.

So today, we're going to cover five main areas. We'll discuss refeeds, diet breaks,

and the other strategies that are often grouped together. We'll discuss what happens physiologically

and psychologically as a fat loss phase progresses and why these tools may become useful. We'll break

down what the research actually shows. And then Mikki and I will each explain how we use these

strategies with our own clients and the benefits that we've seen in practice. Because ultimately,

refeeds and diet breaks are tools. Their value comes down to the understanding of what problem

we're trying to solve, who you're using them with, and then whether they're the actual right

intervention at that point in the fat loss phase. So Mikki, welcome back. I'm really glad we're

able to do this again and get back on the mic with each other and

get down the rabbit hole of another topic. I know. I'm excited as well, Brandon. I will say

I always find it weird when people call me Dr. Mikki Williden. There are only a few people

who do. I think you do. Cliff does. Cliff Harvey is just for listen. Dr. Cliff. And also Dr. Cliff,

exactly. Yeah, Cliff Doggy Dog. And maybe one other, I'm not sure. But I'm not usually called

doctor. So I'm like, oh, that's me. Hello. It's so interesting because you have so much

integrity, but also humility that you would not present yourself as doctor. I've met you in

person. Obviously, I'm sure that if I was to introduce you to friends of mine, especially

those outside of this industry, you would never say Dr. Mikki Williden. And another person in

my life who's a mentor of mine that's like that is Dr. Scott Stevenson. He does not want to be

called doctor. He does not want to be put on a pedestal. And the only time I'm allowed to call

him doctor, because in our own interactions, I'm not, it's just Scott, is when I introduce him in

a podcast. And it's so funny because sometimes the people with the most accolades,

and the most credentials, they are the most humble with them. Whereas we have other individuals,

especially in the era, we're in an era of social media PhDs, where people will get online

certifications as a PhD, online accreditations, and no disrespect, but they always want to be

called doctor. They want to present themselves as such, or they take a doctorate from a different

realm or a different field. And then they essentially prop that up to essentially make

it sound as though they're an expert somewhere else. So they,

they suffer with, or they go through expertise creep, where they use the power of authority.

Hey, I'm a doctor. Hey, dude, you're a dentist, my man. This doesn't have anything to do with

physiology or, you know, they're completely a chiropractor or something. But I always respect

the fact that you have advanced credentials, advanced schooling, but you're an incredibly

humble person. And that's why we love you. Oh, well, thanks so much, Brandon. And it is

funny because I do have clients come to see me and they're like, and I'm talking them through

like a particular, like a concept or something that we're going to be doing. And they're like,

well, Dr.

So-and-so says that we should be doing this. And I'm like, yeah, but Dr.

Williden, who you're speaking to, is saying that this is what we're doing here. You know,

like, so I, so I, I sometimes pull it out, but I'm also quite bemused at, at the level

of authority with which someone who does call themselves doctor gets when, when in reality

we're actually not different, which is super, it's interesting, right? It's just, I don't

know. Human, human behavior. 100%. So Mikki, let's start off. And before we get into what

the research actually shows or how we use these strategy with clients, I think we first need to

make sure that we're defining the terms clearly because people tend to use refeeds or diet breaks

and even cheat meals almost interchangeably when they're actually very different strategies.

And the broader concept here of what we will discuss today is what I would call diet periodization.

So rather than viewing a fat loss phase as simply eating the exact same calorie deficit every single

day until a diet is over, we can essentially manipulate energy intake and sometimes energy

expenditure across the phase based on what we're doing. And so I think that's a really good point.

So at the broadest level, we can separate the concepts that we're going to discuss into either

continuous energy restriction, where you're essentially creating a deficit on a daily basis

and intermittent energy restriction, where we are essentially interjecting and interrupting

that deficit with planned periods where calories are brought back up to maintenance. And within

that category, there are a few different strategies. So I'll give a little bit of a

definitional background behind each of these categories so that there's no confusion in terms

of what's going on. So first, we'll start with refeeds. And when we discuss refeeds, I'm generally

talking about a structured period of roughly one to three days where calories are brought back

towards estimated maintenance intake with a vast majority of that calorie increase coming from

carbohydrates. And one of the main things I'm trying to accomplish with a refeed is increasing

carbohydrate availability and essentially replenishing some of the glycogen that may

have been depleted during the diet. And the big important part here is that this is structured.

A refeed is still tracked, the foods are still planned, and there are targets in place.

Well, refeed is not, I've been dieting all week, so tonight I get to eat whatever the hell I want.

That's, I really want to make that clear. Now, diet breaks is essentially a longer period away

from the calorie deficit. So it's almost like if you were to extend, take an extended period of

refeeds, because this is essentially going to be one to two weeks at estimated maintenance calories.

And really the biggest difference between a diet break and a refeed is just the duration.

Whereas refeeds are generally short, and we're really just trying to boost up carbohydrate

availability, get some training performance back on board, and manage the size of a weekly

refeed. With the diet break, we're essentially doing it with a client that may have more of an

accumulated and significant diet fatigue, and they may benefit from spending a longer period

around maintenance. Now, the final thing that we will not discuss in detail, but I do want to

differentiate it from what we will be discussing in terms of intermittent energy restriction

strategies are cheat meals. Now, a cheat meal is generally untracked, it's unstructured,

calories aren't controlled, food choices aren't prescribed or even thought about oftentimes,

and these meals are often very high in both carbohydrate and fat, because they usually

involve the inclusion of highly palatable foods. So essentially, you'll have a lot of people that

say, I have a weekly cheat meal because I want to get my cravings out, which actually, if you look

into the cravings literature, it actually does the opposite, because the inclusion of crave foods

causes that Q condition response where you end up getting more cravings, but that's nor here nor

there. But from my perspective, when we look at a strategic carbohydrate refeed and then a cheat

meal, they're very different. They're very different. They're very different. They're very

different things. One, we're going to use in terms of a controlled intervention, and it's going to

have a specific purpose, whereas the other one is essentially a temporary removal of the normal

dietary rules. And that distinction is important because when we start looking at research on

intermittent dieting, all the studies that we're going to discuss today are examining structured

periods of eating at or around maintenance calories, not uncontrolled cheat meals. You

would actually have to go into the metabolic health literature to actually see the effects

of cheat meals, which is often looked at in short periods of time. So if you're looking at a

short-term overfeeding studies, essentially. So when it comes to differentiating, we're really

going to define these a little bit differently and really focus on diet breaks and refeeds.

Mikki, are you in agreement with that? Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just add a few things

just to what you've said, Brandon. First of all, I love the way that you said it was like

deliberately interrupting a deficit. And I think this is a really great way to sort of think about

it as a lot of the, I guess, the practical application of a refeed.

Or a diet break, its success or otherwise does come down a lot to psychology as well, right? And

how we think about these things. Because one of the applications that I use, like a refeed,

is that, you know, this is an opportunity for you to practice maintenance calories.

And a lot of the time people are either on a diet, quote unquote, or so off a diet,

it's not even funny. And that extreme is where I sort of fit the

what people call the cheat meal. And I just really, and I know that you and I probably feel

quite similarly, really just hate the term. Like cheat is such a, I mean, there's so much

connotation around that you're cheating yourself, you're cheating your diet. It sort of...

Think about any other category of life. What category of life or what endeavor that you are

pursuing is cheating a good thing? You know what I mean? So I really think that the vernacular

around it is just a really poor usage of a term, especially in terms of

someone that's trying to go towards a goal pursuit. They're trying to lose fat. They're

trying to get leaner. They're trying to improve their health. None of that should be looked at

in the construct in this, you know, this dichotomous manner of you're either on the

diet or you're cheating. We really want to do away with that type of nomenclature.

Yeah, I completely agree. And then also, and with it as well, like a lot of what we're discussing,

you mentioned the sort of the controlled nature of these tactics. And this isn't a bad,

like the control of it isn't a bad thing because it's actually still teaching you the skill and

building you the skill to eat more because eventually you do have to eat more because

you're not going to be in a deficit forever. Whereas a cheat meal encourages behavior around

food that isn't helpful long-term and that we're trying to sort of move away from. So I guess that's

something else that I just wanted to mention. Absolutely. All right. So now that we've defined

essentially what we're going to be discussing today and really the difference between refeeds,

diet breaks, and then cheat meals, which we won't go into,

I want to zoom out and explain why we would ever intentionally move someone out of a calorie

deficit in the middle of a fat loss phase. Because if fat loss requires a calorie deficit,

most people are going to ask, why would you ever deliberately give someone more food and

temporarily reduce that deficit? Because many people are one track minded. So they're only

thinking like, I just need to get the deficit. I just need to get that fat off. And really the

answer comes down to the fact that the longer someone diets and generally the leaner that they

become, the more diet fatigue they tend to accumulate from remaining in an energy deficit.

So when I'm working with clients,

I'm constantly collecting data and looking at how they're responding across the entirety of that

fat loss phase. And I'm not just looking at whether their scale weight is going down. Obviously,

that's part of the equation, but there's other parameters and biofeedback markers that I'm

looking at. And that's going to include things like their hunger and appetite, their energy

levels, their actual training performance, their steps and their general activity, their adherence,

and then your changes in other biofeedback markers. So that could be sleep, that could be mood,

that could be motivation. There's many that we could really categorize.

So what I'd like to do is I'm going to go ahead and show you a few of the things that I'm going to

do, Mikki, first, is I'd like to go through some of the major areas where the cost of prolonged

dieting starts to show up, because I think it's really important to give people a really

all-encompassing look into, hey, for every gimme, there's a gotcha. And so dieting causes certain,

I don't even want to term this negative, there are certain consequences of dieting.

And with that, there may be reasons or rationales for why we would utilize

intermittent dieting strategies to address them. So the first one is going to be hunger levels.

You know, as someone loses body fat and spends more time in an energy deficit,

hunger generally increases and satiety can be harder to come by. And we're also going to see,

like, if you look at the physiology of body fat loss, we're going to see a skewing of hunger

hormones. So we're going to see ghrelin, the main hunger hormone, increase. We're going to see

leptin, the main satiety hormone, that's actually secreted from adipose tissue, it's going to

decrease. We're going to see decreases in insulin, which actually insulin binds to the hypothalamus

and actually signals fullness. We're also going to see decreases in peptide YY. Now, that's all good

and well to know, but really what matters practically is what that client experiences.

So we know that the longer you diet, the deeper of a deficit you're in and the more body fat that

you lose, you're going to increase hunger, you're going to have increased appetite, which is

different from hunger. So hunger would be more of that true physiological hunger, so that deep

gnawing in your stomach, but also appetite, you may start thinking about food more. And that's

really where we see some food preoccupation. And then if hunger becomes high enough that that

person starts to really start to lose weight, they're going to start to lose weight. And that's

where we struggle with it. Often what's going to end up happening is they're going to start taking

more bites, licks, and tastes. They're going to eat off plan more frequently, or they're going to

have larger deviations on the weekends. And then the deficit that we design on paper no longer is

the deficit that they're actually sustaining. And that's one of the most common reasons for fat loss

stalls. Now, in addition to that, we also have to look at the implications of being in a sustained

energy deficit on energy expenditure, because as someone loses weight, their energy requirements

are naturally going to decrease because they're carrying around a lighter body weight. And we're

going to see all four components of total daily energy expenditure come down. You're going to see

resting metabolic rate decrease. You're going to see a thermic effect of feeding decrease just

because you're putting less food into the system. So you have less nutrients that need to be burned

and assimilated, and you get less output out of that. And your exercise output can fall. And the

biggest one out of all these things are need. So your non-exercise activity thermogenesis

is going to decrease quite precipitously in most people. We actually see that around 85%

to 90% of what is turned metabolic adaptation, or there's decrease in total daily energy

expenditure, actually come from unconscious decreases in need. So you're going to have

people that are in a diet. They're moving less without realizing it. They're sitting more. They're

fidgeting less. Their walking pace slows. Or even like, I remember there's been deep diets that I've

had that I blink slower. I'm giving a presentation, and I'm not hardly blinking. You don't think about

these things consciously, first and foremost. So it's hard to offset. But also, you don't realize

whether it's speaking with your hands or walking to get the mail. All these things burn energy. They

all burn calories. And so a lot of times when people are in a sustained deficit, we start seeing

decreases in that. Now, another area that's very important for all our audiences, whether you're

an endurance athlete like Mikki is, or you're a physique competitor, or you're a physique-focused

bodybuilding-esque type of person, is training performance. Because as we get deeper into

deficit, we've got to take nutrients, or we've got to take nutrients, or we've got to take

calories from somewhere. And often, that's going to be both from the energy substrate. So we're

going to decrease fat, but we're also going to decrease carbohydrates. And with a decrease in

carbohydrate intake, glycogen availability can decrease, which is going to impact higher volume

hypertrophy training. We're going to see lower muscular endurance. We're going to see fewer reps

at a given load. You're going to have reduced training output. And then even if you're doing

more of that long-term endurance training, you could essentially hit the wall. You're going to

bunk, essentially, because you do not have enough carbohydrate availability on board. And so that is

at a predisposition towards negative performance outcomes in terms of whether it be endurance or it

be resistance training. And especially when it comes to resistance training, if you have less

energy in the system and less performance, over time, that can be less of a signal to the body

to actually keep your muscle tissues. So that could put you in a precarious position to actually

lose lean mass. And then another thing that we have to consider is what I would broadly call

diet fatigue. And that's where the physiological and psychological effects of dieting start to

overlap. Energy drops, your hunger and food focus increase, which can just throw you off mentally

from a cognitive perspective. Mood and sleep can worsen, your motivation declines, and eventually

adherence becomes harder. And this is why I always tell clients, we cannot separate our psychology

from our physiology. If someone is hungry, they're exhausted, they're sleeping poorly, and they're

watching their training performance decline, we shouldn't be surprised when sticking to the diet

becomes more difficult. So for all of these reasons, we really need to be very cognizant of

what we're trying to do. And that is where it would be very advantageous to use some

auto-regulation strategies. So we can use that in the training context, but when I'm determining

whether it would be advantageous to bring someone back closer to energy balance, I really think that

the easiest way to understand how to approach this would be to compare it to training periodization.

So we don't expect someone to progressively push training every single week, day in and day out,

without eventually accumulating fatigue. And at some point, I will use some auto-regulation

strategies or even a deload, not because the training program stopped working, but because

temporarily reducing the stress can help dissipate fatigue and continue progression. Now, I think

about refeeds and diet breaks in a very similar way. They can almost act like a dietary deload,

where we temporarily reduce the energy gap, and it's going to help to manage fatigue and support

training performance and really put that person in a better position to continue executing going

forward. And so I think that it's advantageous

to realize that there isn't just one path towards the fat loss outcome that you're looking for.

Sometimes it's taking one step forward and taking one step back and kind of holding. And so these

are some of the physiological and actually even psychological effects that we can get from being

in a prolonged deficit. Now, Mikki, before we get into the research and stuff, obviously,

I went over some of those effects, but what changes do you tend to see as someone gets

deeper into a fat loss phase? And what makes you start considering a refeed or a diet break

for that individual? Yeah.

Great question, Brenda, because I utilize these in different ways, actually, depending on if I'm

working at that group level, because as you know, that's where I see the majority of my people are

in the sort of group cohorts, and we're going through something together, and I'll come back

to that. But if I'm working one-on-one with a client, then all of the sort of the biofeedback

measures that you mentioned, like appetite, hunger, like cravings, energy,

sleep, once these start being sort of disrupted sort of continuously, if you like, which is then

leading to behavior that sort of breaks adherence to the diet, then absolutely that's when I would

talk about refeeds, diet breaks with that individual. At the group level, though, I do do

it a bit differently because I have, I know I've got eight, for example, eight weeks with this

group. And there is, there is,

a lot that I want to sort of teach them within the eight weeks. So I always sort of posit,

let's say, Monday's Matter, the fat loss plan, as this isn't a one and done, this isn't an eight

week thing that you're just going to do. This is really a platform with which we're building

behaviors that will extend far beyond this eight weeks. And so my justification for having refeeds

within the eight weeks on a two-weekly cycle is, one, the, the, the,

and I, we talked about this actually with our rapid fat loss episode, that it's a pretty aggressive

approach across the eight weeks anyway. But actually it's one of the skills I want them to

learn is, is what I mentioned before about eating at maintenance, you know, eating more because they

haven't actually, without fear, had that practice of eating more in quite a controlled fashion

because they actually don't know what that really means. So I'm instigating it every couple of weeks

so they can eat more. So I'm instigating it every couple of weeks so they can eat more. So I'm

instigating it every couple of weeks so they can eat more. So I'm instigating it every couple of weeks so they

get within that eight-week period this opportunity to eat more. And it is interesting still, Brandon,

that, that across the eight weeks people see significant shifts in their body composition

favorably, even though they've got these four distinct times where they're, where over three

days we've lifted the carbohydrate in, we've got a metabolic reset meal, which is how I phrased sort

of you eat what you like but in a way that makes you feel good and you don't overeat, etc. So they

get that opportunity to sort of try it so, so yeah the way that I implement it is different depending

on at what level. What I will say though is well is sometimes it's like a, a refeed or a diet break

comes in

and maybe we'll jump into this, depending on the schedule of the individual, right? So isn't just

the biofeedback that i'm looking at we might be looking someone's schedule and thinking well,

you're traveling a lot for work, you know, in the next month or

or you've got your, you know, your vacation is coming up in about three weeks time where you're

away for five days. So it's, it can be determined more by that sort of outside influence, not

necessarily on the individual, because psychologically speaking, I suppose it's just,

you know, if you're on a vacation, or you've got other stresses, like this, the stress of like,

traveling for work, like, you don't also need to be stressing about your deficit at that point.

So yeah, you might be able to handle it, but actually, just take the load off. And we talk

about this idea that you can't chase two rabbits at once. You know, I often talk about this with

my endurance athletes, like, if you're wanting your A performance to happen in six weeks,

then we should not be focusing on fat loss right now, because they are two quite different goals.

But I do think we can extend it beyond sports performance,

just think about performance in life. Like, if you've got a lot going on in this area of your

life, like, it's very difficult to, to really dial in and focus the way that you want to

in your deficit. And the last thing I will say about that is that because if they fail,

if they try to focus on that as well and fail in that deficit, they'll build these narratives that

they can't do it. And that's actually just not the case. In fact, it's just life itself hasn't

lent it to being very favorable to be in that deficit.

I really like,

I really love your application of utilizing what I would term diet breaks, because it would be over

an extended period of time for vacations, I actually see that to be a very advantageous

use case of them. So I will tell you this, there are times that I'm seeing certain biofeedback

parameters start to go awry. You know, I mean, so maybe someone that is dealing with more hunger,

they are their sleep is starting to get impaired, or maybe training performance is starting to

decrease, but not to, like, it's not falling off a cliff, but we're just noticing one session per

week, they're just feeling

a little down and out, or it's really hard to actually have those top end performances, I do a

lot of like, top set and back offsets. And someone is in those back offsets, which are a higher rep

set as a secondary set, they just don't have that that gear left. And there are times that I will

utilize proactive approaches to these refeeds, meaning or reactive approaches where I'll put

them in based on that what that check in look like. But there's other times that I know someone's

schedule. And I know that they have a vacation coming up in two weeks time, whatever it may be,

and they are going to be eight weeks into a fat loss phase.

And so I will proactively in advance, tell them, listen, I want you to keep like, almost like your

eye on the prize, meaning I want you to see very adherent, I want you to think about putting

yourself in the best position to leave for this trip so that you feel confident that you look your

best. But during that trip itself is not going to be an active period of fat loss dieting. This is

where we're going to go back to maintenance, we're going to utilize I call it a deficit deload, but

we'll utilize a diet break type structure. And so we're getting some of that alleviation. And I do

that in advance, I often will

inform them one to two weeks in advance, because I don't want them stressing about having to diet

during the trip itself. And often, I also find that by giving them some advanced notice and some

informed consent, it leads to better adherence in the time period leading into that vacation. So I

think that that's a brilliant application, Mikki, because, yes, there are physiological reasons as

to why we would utilize some of these strategies. But I think that we cannot, especially from a

coaching perspective, discount the psychology. And if they are someone that is very type A,

or they're perfectionist, striving types, individual individuals, they may put excess

pressure on themselves to really nail it perfectly. And they might suffer with that dichotomous

thinking that we often encounter where they have all or nothing thinking black and white thinking

meaning you either nail the plan to a T to 100%. Or if you miss something, all bets are off. And

it's like, why? Why do I even try? I you know, the day is already done. It's already messed up. Let

me just eat whatever. It's already a waste of day. And so we really want to be able to pull people

out of that. And so we want to be able to pull people out of that. And so we want to be able to

pull people out of that. And so we want to be able to pull people out of that habit that they've

had previously to come to us and saying, listen, you know, we have to control what's within your

control. And when you're home, you absolutely have control over eating habits, your behaviors,

your decisions. But when you're on a trip, there may be some extraneous variables that come in that

we cannot expect, we cannot anticipate. However, we have a plan in place, you're gonna have this

extra calorie budget that will bring you back up to maintenance, and you have extra room to play

with. I kind of look at it as almost like I use a lot of financial analogies. It's almost like

having a reserve account, where you know that just like you would have a reserve account, you would

have extra money that you could spend. That is in addition to what you usually would spend when

you're back home. So I think that's a brilliant application that could be very feasible, and then

also beneficial for someone, especially if they are trying to fat loss diet. But that doesn't

mean fat loss dieting doesn't mean that you're in a deficit every single day and every week out of

that period. Yeah, absolutely. And I try to remind people that, you know, we're in doing this now,

and this might be eight weeks, it might be 16 weeks, but you've got decades left, you've got

decades left to do this. And we people can get very impatient, I think, with regards, they just,

you know, if they want to lose fat, they wanted to have lost it by yesterday. But the reality is,

is that, you know, time is passing. And it actually passes quite quickly at our age now,

too. And you know, in the age with which that, you know, the cohorts that we're working with,

so, you know, whether it takes eight weeks or 12 weeks, actually doesn't really matter in the

big scheme of things. Absolutely. So Mikki, you know, we can't do a podcast without us going into

that. That's what we're doing next, my friend. Rather than go study by study, I think what would

be a lot more beneficial, like we can do that in like, if we ever do a webinar on this, we could

go through every single study in nuanced detail, I think it would make more sense in this podcast

to just organize this around the outcomes that most people care about. So I'm going to look at

like, do they actually improve fat loss in terms of refeeds and diet breaks? Do they help to

preserve lean mass and metabolic rate? Do they help with hunger and adherence? And do they help

with training performance? So I'll start off, starting with fat loss,

the overall evidence doesn't show that refeeds or diet breaks consistently produce greater fat loss

than continuous dieting when the overall energy deficit is equated, meaning that regardless of

if you did a five and two diet, or you did seven days of a continuous deficit, as long as those

energy deficits are matched, you're getting the same effects. Now, we actually see this in the

ICE-CAP trial from Pios and colleagues that came out in 2021. They took resistant trained individuals

and they completed 12 weeks of continuous dieting or 12 weeks of dieting broken up in by one week

after every three weeks of dieting. Now, both approaches produce similar fat loss and fat-free

mass retention. And then we see something very similar in Seidler and colleagues' 2023 randomized

trial in resistant trained women, where one group dieted continuously for six weeks, while the other

inserted a one-week diet break after every two weeks of dieting. Again, there was really no

differences in body composition outcomes. And then when we zoom out, there's a 2025 systematic review

and meta-analysis from Pooning and colleagues, and they looked at 12 randomized control trials.

And looked at both continuous and intermittent dieting strategies. And they produced the same

improvements in weight, fat mass, body fat percentage, and waist circumference, with no

significant differences. So really, when we look at refeeds and diet breaks from a fat loss

perspective, this is not some magic tool. It's not creating a loophole or a workaround around

energy balance. If the diets are equated, the deficits are equated, they're going to yield very

similar fat loss outcomes. Now, we could make an argument later on, if it improves adherence and

someone sticks to a deficit better, it could have an impact on the overall performance of the diet.

It could have advantageous effects, but it's not due to the physiology of fat loss. It's not

boosting energy expenditure to a point that it's causing a precipitous loss in fat mass,

as compared to a continuous dieting purchase. Well, can I just ask you a question here,

Brandon? When people started investigating diet breaks and refeeds, was part of the hypothesis is,

hey, this could be changing physiology, almost like a hack for fat loss, because of the shifts

in these hormones. Is this what people were thinking? Yes.

When we initially started looking at diet breaks, actually, when we first started looking at

refeeds, that was the postulation. They thought that it could increase energy expenditure to a

point that it would cause fat loss. Here's the other confounder, and I come from the bodybuilding

industry. What we were seeing quite consistently, and I still see this in practice, was that it led

to when you include carbohydrate refeeds specifically, and they're structured. You're

giving an increase in calories back to that person's maintenance calorie intake. It's very

structured. It's the same food sources. It's the same food sources. It's the same food sources.

We were seeing more consistent fat loss outcomes, and I was seeing this particularly with women.

What I mean by that is that we were getting less fluid dynamics, because we were having what was

colloquially referred to as a whoosh effect. Oftentimes, dieting can cause an increase

in cortisol secretion. Cortisol can bind to the aldosterone receptor, and aldosterone is involved

in fluid balance. If you are a very stressed individual, you're getting poor sleep, you are

dieting as well, and you're retaining fluid due to the fact that you're having excess cortisol

secretion. What we were able to see was that that increase in carbohydrates and that release

in insulin, which is counter-regulatory to cortisol, would bring that in that cortisol

mechanistically. That's what we were thinking. It would cause a scale weight decrease. There's

many times that I would utilize refeeds. If you were just to think from a nutrition perspective

of someone in a surplus, if you gave them higher carbohydrates, say for instance,

someone is eating a 500-calorie deficit, and you just want to increase their intake,

they're at maintenance, but you want to increase their intake by 500 calories,

you give them 125 extra grams of carbohydrates. Logically, you would think, all right, that's 125

grams of extra food. Then we have to consider the fact that there's going to be three to four grams

of water for every gram of carbohydrate that's stored as glycogen. They should increase somewhere

in the realm of maybe 1.2 pounds, somewhere in that realm. A lot of times in the deficit itself,

we were actually seeing a dissipation. We were seeing people get on the scale the next one or

two days actually lighter. That was due to that essentially whoosh effect. That was something that

was termed, but I've seen it so many times in practice. I think that then they started to

investigate, hey, this could help with leptin. Now, there is a study on overfeeding carbohydrates

in women by Durland-Wenger and colleagues. They see that three days of essentially carbohydrate

refeeding increases serum leptin levels. They did it both in terms of three days of carbohydrate

feeding and three days of fat feeding. Even with the same calorie increase from dietary fat and

dietary carbohydrates, we only saw the increase in leptin from carbohydrates. We know that there's

a relationship between carbohydrates, insulin, and leptin. If you're going to increase anything,

it should be carbohydrates. That's especially important for training performance, restoring

glycogen. When it comes from a mechanistic basis, we don't have a lot of research that's actually

teasing out the actual effects from a hormonal perspective. Now, the interesting thing is when

we look at diet break and the refeed literature, this is in quote-unquote resistant trained

individuals, meaning they have a couple of years of resistant training, if that.

There is some military studies. There is a study by

Friedel and colleagues that looks at multi-stressor environments. What they mean by that is it's sleep

restriction, it's very high amounts of activity, and it's getting to a crazy low body fat percentage.

This is in men only. They get them down to like 5% to 6% body fat in a 1,000 to 1,200 calorie deficit.

They're doing somewhere in the range of multiple hours of activity. I believe they were only

sleeping 3.5 hours per night. It's safe to say that at the end of that eight-week trial

with these army rangers, they were essentially at cash rate levels of testosterone,

they had fallen off a cliff, all these things. They actually did a carbohydrate refeeding

protocol, but it's not termed that. It was before any of these diet break and refeed studies were,

but actually within one week of refeeding with an increase in carbohydrates, they were actually

able to restore thyroid levels. Testosterone started coming back onto baseline, but they

were also still very lean. We have to consider the fact that a lot of these sex hormones are

going to get increased once fat mass is regained, but they were able to see an improvement in thyroid

status. Now, we can think about it mechanistically. Insulin is going to

help with the conversion of T4, which is our inactive thyroid, which is what our thyroid

gland pretty much predominantly produces. 90 plus percent of thyroid hormone secreted by the thyroid

gland is T4, but what we want is T3. If we're looking for peripheral conversion, meaning in

the tissue, of T4 to T3, insulin can help with that. Although a lot of these studies don't tease

this out, there are some mechanistic arguments as to why maybe carbohydrate refeeding could be

advantageous.

However, I don't think that we have the types of study designs that have been able to tease

those things out. Even if they do do those things, we have to think about the fact that

a refeeding strategy of increasing carbohydrates is transient. It's temporary. It's one to two days,

maybe three days. Once you go back into deficit, you're going to have that decrease in those

hormones again. I don't think it's substantial enough that it would cause fat loss independently

from those hormone production, those hormonal conversions by itself.

Yeah, interesting. Thanks, Brandon.

Absolutely. All right. The next component that we need to look at is lean mass and metabolic rate.

This is where it gets a little bit more interesting. In Campbell and Colley's 2020

randomized control trial, resistant trained men and women followed either a continuous deficit

of 25% deficit across the week, or they used a larger deficit of 35% five days per week,

followed by two consecutive maintenance calorie high carbohydrate refeed days. The original paper

reported better preservation of fat-free mass in the refeed group. However, there was some

statistical musings, essentially.

There was a debate back and forth. There was a letter to the editor. If you look at the published

reanalysis, the clearest between-group difference was actually in dry fat-free mass rather than

total fat-free mass. I think it's appropriate to say that there is some evidence that consecutive

carbohydrate refeeds may help with lean mass retention. There was a secondary outcome from

that study. It's just hard to disentangle whether it was accurate. They did show that there was

about a doubling of where they were able to...

To preserve metabolic rate and cut metabolic adaptation at the level of RMR in half. However,

there's still some debates as to whether that data was clean. We'll look at other pieces of data that

actually look at this. When we look at metabolic rate more broadly, the newer 2025 Poon meta-analysis

does make the discussion more interesting because the reduction in resting metabolic rate

was similar with intermittent dieting than with continuous dieting overall.

Continuous dieting led to a 92-calorie drop in RMR, whereas intermittent dieting led to a 39-calorie

drop.

There was about a 50-calorie difference. We're not saying that these are massive,

but over time, they could add up to something. We are seeing differences. They're just preserving

a little bit better, but it's not anything that's going to make or break from a fat loss perspective

independently. It's not the energy expenditure savings that it's having that's reversing

metabolic adaptation and that is allowing people to lose more fat. Now, I think the strongest

evidence that we actually have for intermittent dieting strategies is their effects on hunger,

appetite, and hearing.

We can go back to that ICE-CAP trial, which was by Pios and colleagues. They found that the

intermittent dieting group experienced lower hunger and desire to eat and greater satisfaction

from a dietary perspective than the continuous dieting group. Then what they actually did was

they did a secondary study. They found that when they took participants out of a deficit for a

week time for one week period, they experienced less hunger and irritability, greater fullness,

satisfaction, and alertness. Now, there's a second diet break study that was done by Seidler

and colleagues.

This is based on a Bill Campbell's lab. They found an effect on disinhibition, which is essentially

someone's tendency to lose dietary restraint and overeat. Now, disinhibition increased in the

continuous dieting group while a decrease in the diet breaker, meaning that those that continuously

dieted without the diet break structure, they essentially were more likely to lose control

and be more likely to overeat and veer off the beaten path. We see an improvement from there.

I think if we're really to consider all the literature that we have on refeeds and diet

breaks, and obviously this is premature because there's only a few studies, I think this is

probably the most important perspective from you and I. When we really think about it from a coaching

perspective, I think it's important to highlight the fact that even if a diet break doesn't directly

make someone lose more fat, if it helps them manage hunger and makes them more capable of

consistently adhering to the diet, that's still a meaningful benefit because that could lead

to more substantial fat loss in the long term because of their ability to better adhere to

the diet itself. What do you think, Meg? Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think it's a good point.

I also wonder, Brandon, about personality types. There are some people, I think, who are much,

who I think the majority of people are well suited to having diet breaks for all the reasons you've

described, like the adherence and the ability to train better, et cetera. I think there will be

some people who might not need that intervention because their personality type, they're just,

they're like, cool, I can, you know, we know people who can just

tell them what to do and they will do it. They will absolutely do it until you tell them what to do

otherwise. So I think that the adherence piece holds for probably, you know, 95% of people,

but there'll be people who will be like, I don't need this, you know, it wouldn't really affect

or change. I agree with you because I've utilized intermittent dieting strategies during diets

myself, and then I've went without them at all. And I'm going to adhere either way, but I'm kind

of like a robot. I'm going to go one step further than even you. I think for many,

intermittent dieting strategies can be advantageous. And then for some, it could

be demonstrably negative. And what I mean by that is if you are, we have to look at personality

types, even like from a psychological perspective, let's consider the distinction between moderators

and abstainers. There are for some that are refeed, even if it's structured and they're

given instructions, once they get that little bit of extra carbohydrate, or maybe they get a little

bit of more dietary flexibility, they just cannot stop at that, you know, 125 gram increase. So

I'll tell you personally,

Lau and I have had discussions about this, and there were certain dietary strategies that he

found he just didn't do well with. And it was because like, for instance, he would not,

he could respond well physiologically to a moderate carb diet, but it would be hard to

lose fat because once he has carbs, he wants them all. And so for him, refeed strategies were

actually advantageous because he would put a window where he would have 12 to 16 grams of

carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight, and he would get that overfeeding. And he used to use

what was called the ultimate diet too, which is one of his initial books. It's the second book

that he ever published.

Now, that is a particular case where he essentially manipulated the strategy towards

his physiology and his psychology. But there are other people where just the act of getting back

to maintenance can cause them to actually overshoot. And once they went off their diet

itself, and they think they've broken the diet, it does not only lead to overeating that day,

but subsequent days. So it could be, hey, we implement one refeed day,

and that one refeed day becomes a whole refeed week. And really, it becomes,

it becomes an overfeeding week. And then it's harder to get back on the right track. So I think

that this is a strategy that A, is not necessary. B, it can be beneficial, but does not mean it is

beneficial. Yeah. No, I completely agree. And for some, it's, and part of it, when we're talking

about increasing just carbohydrate, right? It doesn't then therefore allow, if that was the

strategy, it doesn't then allow a lot of these hyperpalatable foods that people,

have in their head, they're like, oh, carbohydrate, I can have pizza. I can have,

you know, I don't know, name any, you know, biscuits, cake, etc. But a lot of, with those

foods, a lot of the calories are coming from fat. So when I'm thinking about carbohydrate, I'm like,

rice, you know, fruit. Yes. I don't know. I think that's the best approach to it,

first and foremost, because we're trying to restore glycogen, and also maintain digestion.

But I think that in and of itself, the construction and the controlled element and the structure

behind,

refeeds, especially when done in a coaching scenario, leads people to be more likely to

stay on track, because we're essentially just giving them increased portions of highly satiating

foods that are not overly palatable. So they're going to be less likely to have like that dopamine

release from cookies, cakes, sweet treats, and things of that sort, and be less likely to kind

of have like an abstinence violation effects, where they're essentially, they feel like they

broke the diet, and they, you know, had some of the forbidden fruit. And now it's like, all bets are

taken down the entire pantry.

Yeah, 100%. And I mean, it's, and to be clear, it's not like Brandon and I are saying you can

never eat these other foods ever again. But the purpose of the diet break or the refeed is not to

to bring in these hyper palatable foods like that. It's sort of just, it's orienting your

behaviors. So you're eating more food, you're feeling better. And you're almost losing that

desire to overeat.

Because over time, you know, you're, I don't know, just psychologically, you'll just respond

better to these, the idea of eating the other hyper palatable foods also. I don't know,

there's a lot going on.

Absolutely. Now, one other area that I think it's important to cover, we have limited data in this,

but because we are people that love to train, we have an audience that loves training,

we do have a little bit of actually ICR data in training. So in there was a secondary analysis

of the ice cap trial. And the researchers look specifically at what changes, what changes,

over a one week diet break, where calories were brought back up to maintenance entirely

through increased carbohydrate intake. And they found that lower body muscular endurance improved

after the diet break. And those trainees that were in that sub analysis group essentially reported

improvements in fullness, hunger, satisfaction and alertness. And I think that this distinction

makes physiological sense. They were able to get better, higher repetition, resistant training

performance. And if you think about what resistant training relies on, it's a glycolytic activity. So

by replenishing those glycogen source,

they were able to get better training output. And that's something I personally do with a lot

of the physique athletes that I work with. When they're deep into a diet, carbohydrate intake is

low. I utilize a lot of refeed strategies where it's based around increasing carbohydrate

availability during their most important training sessions, because I'm trying to get improvements.

Say that they have a weak muscle group. I'll give you a great example. I recently turned one of my

clients pro in the IFBB. So he became an IFBB pro. And one of the things that I've done is I've

been working on his back development, because that was the one area that the judges gave the most

constructive feedback and criticism on in his last show. He got second at nationals,

and he was one spot away from a pro card in two categories. But they said, listen,

he needs to bring his back up. So all offseason, we're working on that. But what you have to realize

is if something is a weak point, like previously, we always have to pay extra attention to that. So

when I would utilize refeed days or high carbohydrate refeed days in his program,

I would always make sure at least one of them,

landed on a back day, so that he had the highest training performance. It would either be the day

before the back day or the back day itself, because he used to train in the evening. So he

would get three, four meals in by the time he would get into the gym. And then it would just

make sure that we were maintaining performance on that high priority muscle group. And that was

something that allowed him to maintain training performance and thus maintain lean mass.

Nice one. And you can't discount the psychology of feeling better during training as well. So

that in and of itself is going to

be a motivating factor for people to, when they're doing the, the refeeds and having the

higher carbohydrate, right? Because a lot of the time when you're in a deficit, your training can

take a hit if you're not fueling appropriately around it, or just the fact that you're deep

into that deficit. So I love that. That's what I chat to my clients about too, is like, you know,

let's make the most of these added calories and do your training on that day. And you'll feel like a

rock star and that will sort of drive that motivation to continue to adhere to the diet

once they're off the diet break as well. Absolutely. There's the feed forward mechanism

essentially, because you have the positive effect from having the refeed and the performance

increases. And then it also has downstream effects on the days to come because you have

that heightened motivation. You feel better physiologically, physically, you see a better

pump in the gym. So there's even like a better performance outcome in one of your long runs.

And then it has this feed forward cycle.

Essentially where you're able to keep pushing until you get that next refeed, which is

essentially, or that next diet break, which is the next reprieve. Now we went through all the

research. What I want to do is now switch to more of like the practical application and really

discuss how we apply these strategies to our clients, because that's where the context matters.

So Mikki, I'm gonna let you go first. I want you to really discuss instead of Mikki,

money's matter. If you were utilizing, whether it be diet breaks or refeeds with a one-on-one

client, how do you typically structure those strategies when you do use them with these

clients?

Okay. So how I implement a diet break or a refeed for a client, we've already talked through some

of the scenarios, right? So their schedule might dictate when I'd put a refeed in, depending on

how early they are on into the deficit. Like if someone's been with me for a couple of weeks and

they're off on vacation, like I'm not necessarily going to say, or they're off on traveling for

work. I'm not necessarily going to say, have a diet break here, but I am, you know, I'm going to

because their motivation will probably be high. They don't have a lot of this sort of physical

fatigue that comes through dieting for a long period of time. And there are strategies we can

put in place that mean that they're largely going to be adherent. So I'm not going to just

automatically sort of implement a diet break there. But if someone has been in the trenches

for six or eight weeks and this is coming up, so we have that sort of planned in place.

So the adherence to their diet and those biofeedback markers we discussed, Brandon,

these are conversations that I'm having with someone as well as to whether or not we sort of

need a diet break. And also I want to think about what's going on in their life as well. So,

you know, maybe their sleep's disrupted, not because of the caloric deficit, but there's

something else happening that is meaning that their sleep isn't great. So I do really want

to chat about what's going on with regards to their lifestyle. And I'm going to talk a little bit

about the lifestyle and what's happening that week or the subsequent weeks that is causing

these other biofeedbacks that might not actually be because they need a diet break. It might be for

another reason. The cravings one is interesting. You did mention it, that cravings can be sort of

driven not just from the deficit, but from maybe exposure to foods that they haven't actually told

me about. So I think I'll be doing, I mean, this happens anyway. We do an audit as to what's

happening, but I'll be keeping an eye on that. So I think I'll be doing, I mean, this happens

anyway. We do an audit as to what's happening, but I'll be keeping an eye on that. So I think I'll

be doing, I mean, this happens anyway. We do an audit as to what's happening, but I'll be keeping

these things in mind. So, you know, if the biofeedback markers are changing legitimately

through a deficit, then I'm going to want to implement, like, it doesn't have to be like a

full break for a week or two weeks. It could just be sort of, I like a three days, you know,

three days sort of refeed type scenario. But I do want to at first determine that

all of that biofeedback data that we're

collecting is due to the fact that it's a deficit and not other sort of elements.

Absolutely. I think really what you're trying to get across is that these are useful tools,

but they're not something that we automatically utilize. I think you would agree with me with

that. I kind of look at this as an auto-regulated approach where what I'm doing is I'm looking at

the entire data set that that client is providing me with, and I have an extensive check-in form.

So I'm looking at many different parameters. And then really, when I think about these strategies,

I'm thinking to myself, what problem am I trying to solve? Because

really when it comes down to it, I'm only utilizing this if it's a necessary component. Besides,

there's going to be some exceptions to the rule where it is a scheduling conflict or vacation,

but I will know that way in advance. This is not something I use in early days in fat loss.

This is when someone has gotten deep into the deficit. We have lost a substantial amount of

body fat. And then I start seeing things like the rate of loss is becoming faster than I want.

That's one case that I would utilize refeed to,

to slow down that rate of loss. Especially I use a descending and dynamic approach to rate of loss

where I start very quickly off the bat when someone's motivation is high, their body fat

is higher, their calories are higher. So I just pull it out and I get things moving and they get

the motivation. And what you have to realize is that progress leads to momentum and momentum

leads to motivation. It's not the reverse causality. And so once I get someone bought in

and we see that early weight loss, like we discussed last week or last podcast on the

Rapid Fat Loss podcast, early weight loss is actually predictive of long-term weight loss

and long-term weight loss success. So if someone can get a good four to six week productive start

to a fat loss phase, they often do better long-term. But that does not mean I keep them in

that same net deficit from week one of the fat loss phase to week 12. I'm going to undulate,

I'm going to change that. Now, another potential scenario that I will utilize, a refeed, because

I'm always going to start with a refeed first. I really want to gauge that person,

which response I'm going to start with one day. I'm not going to extend it out. I'm going to kind

of use it in a titrated manner. If I start seeing that multiple components of their biofeedback are

coming in and I'm triangulating the data and I'm seeing that training performance is starting to

decline, their hunger and fatigue are increasing. Or there may be in this specific case, I just

spoke about Wes, my client that just turned IFE pro, there were certain specific sessions that

I wanted to better support. Now, in those specific cases, I'm going to use a refeed. And I also,

will utilize, and the only time that I will say I will always utilize refeeds are with physique

competitors. Because what I use refeeds for, and this is only later in a prep, I use them as an

opportunity to gather data that can eventually help me carb load them during their peak week.

Now, when I implement a refeed, I'm generally going to bring calories right back up to estimated

maintenance. I'm going to keep protein stable, or it may decrease because obviously we know that

carbohydrates are protein sparing. So if I'm really trying to increase the amount of buffer

room I have for carbohydrates, I'm going to use a refeed. And I'm going to use a refeed. And I'm

pulling down protein a little bit and increase carbohydrate, but I'm always going to keep that

stable. And then that entire calorie increase is going to come from carbohydrates. And really,

a big thing that I think is important to highlight is the dietary construction. Because what I do

personally with my clientele is I keep their normal dietary structure in place. I'm not

suddenly introducing a bunch of new foods that they haven't been eating. We don't know if they

digest well. I'm really, what I'm doing is I'm increasing the portions of carbohydrate sources.

I already know that they digest well and they perform well on.

And that makes the response much more predictable. And usually what I'll do is I'll prioritize that

higher carbohydrate intake really around the most demanding training session or the muscle group

we're prioritizing. I'll utilize a nutrient timing based approach. Now, another thing I don't do,

I think this is important. I don't automatically, and it's easy to say, hey, we have these estimation

equations, this, that, and the other. I always start low and titrate up. So what I will say is

I will go back to that person's predicted maintenance based off how much body weight

they lost and how deep they are into the deficit.

But sometimes I'll undershoot it purposely because I would rather start conservatively,

collect data, and then titrate up based on that person's response. So after I refeed,

I want to look at that person's body weight, their visual changes. So am I seeing better

muscular fullness? Am I seeing rounder, fuller looking muscles? How was their training performance?

How were their pumps in the gym? What was their hunger like? What was their energy like?

I also am big on digestion. So this increase in carbohydrate content of the same foods that you

ate, did that sit?

Well, with you, because I'll tell you personally, there are certain food sources that I won't

increase in those meals. So for instance, if I have someone that's eating a good deal of oatmeal

in their breakfast, I'm not going to just double that to get carbohydrate content. I might cut that

with cream of rice and they might have croats, or I might just bias that carbohydrate increase for

that day in other meals where it's going to be more high glycemic carbs that I know are going

to sit well. So there's a lot of titration, there is a lot of adjustments, and there's a lot of

gauging in that biofeedback. Now, that's what I do with refeeds. And I'll start with one day,

then I'll often go to two.

The most I'll do is three days. And that will usually be back to back that I will utilize that.

And I will be tracking that on each of those days. I often have additional check-ins when I'm

utilizing that with physique athletes. Now, a diet break is something that I use

more sparingly, but it's really when there is more accumulated global fatigue. And this would

be something that I would only really utilize with someone that has been dieting consistently

hard for several months. And usually in this case, there's multiple biofeedback markers that are

starting to show that we need to pull back a little bit.

So we're going to see that hunger is consistently high. Their training performance has started to

trend downwards. Their energy and their motivation are lower. And in a lot of cases, they're starting

to kind of feel burnt out from being in a deficit. So there are times that I have conversations with

clients where I really try to do a progress or essentially a goal reevaluation. And sometimes

we're eight, 10 weeks into a diet. And I ask them, listen, you had a specific goal that you came to

me for. Now, we are deep into this process, and it could have changed the way that you've been doing it.

And I ask them, listen, you had a specific goal that you came to me for. Now, we are deep into this process, and it could have changed the way that you've been doing it.

And I ask them, listen, you had a specific goal that you came to me for. Now, we are deep into this process, and it could have changed the way that you've been doing it.

There could be one of two things. You may want to pull out a little bit early, or you actually may want to push for greater

progress than you thought was possible. I have this specific case. I'm going to actually post a woman

tomorrow that I took her through a 24-week dieting phase. And it wasn't straight dieting. It wasn't a

straight linear deficit. There was times where I included refeeds or flexible high days, or I

included diet breaks. And she had vacations in the mix. So it wasn't 24 weeks, but it was 24 weeks

where fat loss was our focus. And initially, she had 24 weeks where I was actually dieting. And so

told me she wanted to lose, when she first came to me, 15 to 20 pounds. But once we had gotten

into the work together, we realized that she really needed to lose a lot more to actually

reach the goal that she had. So when we got into that 24-week fat loss phase, if I had just taken

her initial goal, she would have had to lose 10 more pounds because we had lost 10 pounds in our

initial period of time working together. But I had a feeling that we could go further, and I asked

her. And so we ended up losing, during those 24 weeks, 24 pounds. And her physique looks

completely different. But it really came down to a progress or a goal re-evaluation and asking her,

listen, now that you're actually in the process itself, how do you feel? In her case, she felt

great. So she wasn't dealing with hunger. She felt well-fueled. I kind of got her into a higher

energy flux approach. She went from 7,000 steps. She now averages 15,000. So she's a completely

different woman. But there's other cases where I have to ask this person, listen, is it that you

want to pull the plug sooner? Or would you like to keep pushing?

In a lot of cases, clients will tell me, actually, we're way further than I ever thought I could get.

Let's see how far we can get. And that's where I'll say, listen, before we move any further and

we push for more, let's pull back. Let's do a diet break. And let's restore your physiology

and essentially dissipate that dietary fatigue that you've accumulated. And then we're able to

come back into the deficit in a better position. And so I think that that's a really good strategy

to utilize in order to get someone further along, because it is essentially putting them

in the best position to succeed. Now, I do also want to highlight the fact that

this is not for everyone. And so just like we had highlighted, I can have two clients that are on

the same exact calories losing at the exact same rate. But one could be performing great and

honestly adhering easily. And there would be no need to slow down their rate of loss or to give

them the strategy. Whereas I could have another person on the same calorie intake, but they're

hungry, they're exhausted, and they're barely holding things together. And that would be

a person that would be a better candidate.

Yeah, 100% Brandon. And I guess a couple of other, well, actually a comment and then a question for

you. So my comment is, you mentioned about the training aspect of it and putting higher carb or

refeed days around heavier training loads. And as an endurance athlete and working with a lot of

endurance athletes, that's 100% a smart approach as well, right? So even if you're training for

something and your actual goal race isn't, and you know, it's not, it might be different, but

you're still building towards that session, then having like your, typically it's like either

midweek or it will be midweek and it's weekend. These are your longer days where you're out for

longer, or you've got that threshold work done. Then that's when we're going to put extra carbs

in. So you'll have more carbohydrate on those days as well. My question to you is an interesting

one, because I see it a lot, actually, on social media. And I think it's really important to

social media and unsurprising you, because you work with a lot more individual clients than I do

in a very different way that I do. So you're very calculated in how you do it, different

personalities, you know. I see on social media, people posting their macros for different days

of the week and the coach for them does manipulate their fat calories. And in fact, the fat comes

down to allow for more carbohydrate, whereas you've just said that you sort of, you reduce

protein, if anything, for that.

So can you just chat a little bit about the reasoning?

Yeah, absolutely. So generally, if I have someone and realize that I'm utilizing these refeeds and

these diet break strategies deeper into a diet. So I've already pulled out some of the dietary fat

to create a deficit. And then I've also pulled down carbohydrates. Now, if I'm looking from a

training performance perspective, a glycogen restoration perspective, even a visual improvement

perspective, my number one priority is restoring carbohydrate availability and making as many of

the increases in calorie intake from a diet break strategy as possible. So I've already pulled out

carbohydrates in and of itself. Now, when it comes down to dietary fat, oftentimes, someone will be

towards a level at which I don't really want to pull that down anymore. You know, A, I want to make

sure that they have enough for their hormone production. Although hormones really, when we get

down to like the brass tacks of science, you could be in a high fat diet and be losing body fat. And

that lack of energy availability is what's going to be driving your hormonal system to be down

regulated from an HPA access.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani 05,004

perspective or HPTA or HBO access perspective. So really, when we look at the differences between

fat intakes, we're not seeing a substantial effects, especially in natural or endogenous

hormone production. However, we still want enough for a mega fatty acid intake, we want to make sure

that they have vitamin and mineral absorption, and then also just like from the palatability

perspective, like making things taste well. So usually, I'll hold fat constant. But on those

days, think about it in a short term perspective, I can easily pull down protein because oftentimes

with people that I'm working on fat loss with, I can easily pull down protein because oftentimes,

they're eating 1.25 to 1.5 grams per pound, or that would be, say, 2.5 to 3.3 grams per kilogram.

And so I have a little extra, and there's an extra buffer. So I want you to think about it

like this. First and foremost, carbohydrates are protein sparing. But also, we have to think about

the fact that even if I pull down protein to say, from whole foods, and complete protein sources to

one gram per pound per day, or 2.2 grams per kilogram per day, they're going to actually bump

their protein intake up if I do that. So I'm going to have to think about that. So I'm going to have

to increase their carbohydrates. So they're going to get incomplete proteins, but they're

probably still going to land at 1.25. So I have no problem on a short term. But oftentimes,

to be honest with you, if it's not a physique competitor, I will leave often protein and fat

content the same. And I will just increase the portions of their actual carbohydrate content

because I honestly want them to almost look at the initial base diet as a skeleton, which we can

just add and subtract from. So really, I'm just trying to manipulate their carbohydrate sources

so that it's very easy for them. Now, yes, I may get more nuanced. There are times,

when I'm changing fatty acid composition with certain people when I'm loading them for

competition. So for instance, I'll give you a great example. When I'm carb loading or I'm

peaking someone, oftentimes I will front load the actual peak week itself with a fat load. So I'll

increase their fat content so we can restore intramuscular triglycerides. Because when somebody

gets really lean, they're actually burning through IMTGs. Now, I will do that preferentially through

mono and polyunsaturated fats because saturated fats do not work as well for this restoring of

intramuscular triglycerides. So I will use anti-inflammatory fats. I will use things like

almonds or nuts or macadamia nut butter. I will utilize extra virgin olive oil,

just anti-inflammatory fats. And then when we transition to the carb load, I will bring down

fats itself and I will increase carbohydrate content. I will make sure that there's a balance

between high glycemic carbohydrates to restore glycogen. There is fruit, so I want to utilize

multiple transportable carbs. So I will utilize something that's glucose-based like your white

rice, which is going to go through the sodium.

Glucose transporters in the gastrointestinal tract. And then I'll utilize some type of

fructose source, whether that be berries or even honey or something of that sort. So that goes

through GLUT5. So we have the increase in carbohydrate uptake from utilizing both a

glucose and a fructose source. But then I will also utilize something that has potassium in that.

So maybe I'll utilize potassium-containing fruits. Oftentimes, when competitors get very,

very lean, it's hard for them to go to the bathroom. So I might use dates or I might

utilize prunes. So I'm going to get some potassium content through.

But I'll also make sure there's some sweet potato within that week because I'm trying to balance out

their sodium to potassium ratio. So we have a good sodium-potassium pump and that we're able to...

Remember, we're trying to manipulate some of the subcutaneous to interstitial water and fluids and

things of that sort. So it's really like a cosmetic look that we're going for. So I'm trying to look

at all the variables. But in the actual diet construction for a lifestyle client, I'm really

focusing on making it easy to adhere to and something that's going to be highly satiating.

So really my goal when I'm utilizing a

refeed, and the reason I'm very specific about the food sources is because in the past,

and I know this personally because I've seen other people do this, if you ever see how people used to

do a refeed in the if-it-fits-your-macros days, they would take the calorie increase and they

would utilize a lot of hyperpalatable foods. They would put Pop-Tarts or they would utilize protein

shakes or whatever it may be. And if you actually weighed out, and I actually did an experiment one

time like this, if you weighed out their actual food weight across a day, we as humans, there's

research by Barbara Rolls and colleagues, that if you actually weighed out their actual food weight

across a day, we as humans, regardless of the calorie intake or the calorie density of our foods,

we eat approximately the same amount of food weight per day. So we can really drastically

change our calorie intake by utilizing, say, a low energy density diet versus a high energy

density diet. She has a lot of studies that look at this where she'll exchange salads with dressings

versus normal salads, or she'll do salad preloads or vegetable preloads or fruit preloads or soup

preloads. And they're essentially changing the energy density of these meals, but they're eating

the same amount of food in terms of food weight. And that is because,

our gastrointestinal tracts have gastric receptors that perceive food volume, which send a satiety

signal to the brain. So what I was starting to notice with a lot of it, if it fits your macros

dieters or macro coaches, was that their clients and people would come to me in this same fashion,

they were essentially utilizing their refeed days to fit more of the foods that they craved,

but they were actually hungrier after because they were utilizing higher energy density food

sources that actually had less food weight. So if you looked at the amount of food on a plate,

or if you measured it out,

and you weighed it, they were actually eating less food on the refeed days, despite eating 500

calories more than they were on their normal diet. So it didn't give them the satiating effects that

you would if you had just taken your sweet potato or your white potato and your rice,

and maybe your butternut squash and things like that, and just increased the portions of them.

So that's something I really try to help clients avoid.

Yeah, no, I love that, Brandon. And I expected a comprehensive answer, and you did not disappoint,

amazingly.

And what I would also say, just to reiterate, your skeleton diet approach, it's exactly what

I want to do with people as well. We are building habits, and we are building behaviors and building

plates for life. Yes, we're in a fat loss phase now, but what you do in your diet really needs to

be able to be transferred to life after a diet as well. And you cannot do that if you're just

chaotic with your food choices, and you don't have any structure around it.

100%. So Mikki,

I want to bring the research and then our coaching application together. And I want to talk about the

benefits that we've actually seen from utilizing refeeds and diet breaks in practice, because

the research doesn't show that these strategies magically accelerate fat loss. But I think there's

several things that they do that make a fat loss phase easier. And so that's really what's

important to me. So the first thing that I see is that it improves hunger. Because when someone has

been dieting for a while, and their hunger has progressively increased, temporarily bringing

calories back towards maintenance can give them some relief. So if you're in a fat loss phase,

they may feel less hungry. A lot of times what I actually notice is that they feel less focused on

food and mentally more refreshed. So I feel like it gives them a little bit more mental bandwidth

to continue pushing forward. The next thing that I see personally is a large benefit to training

performance. And this is especially noticeable with my physique athletes, because they're a

little bit more tuned in to their actual training performance, and they log every single lift.

And often, those are also the same individuals that I have to push harder from a deficit perspective.

So their carbohydrates are going to be a little bit more efficient, and they're going to be a little bit more

efficient. And they're going to be a little bit more efficient. And they're going to be a little bit more

efficient. And they're going to be a little bit more efficient. And they're going to be a little bit

actually gets lower than many of my lifestyle clients. So they are seeing more of a performance

decrement as compared to their building phase when they're in deep into like a prep. And so after

carbohydrate refeed day, a lot of times what I will do is I will have them check in, like it is an

additional check into their normal weekly check in. And I'm getting reports of better pumps. I see

that visually, but they also tell me, hey, I finally got a pump in the gym, where they have

better muscular endurance, where they have better training output. And another thing is, oftentimes,

this can help you with your weight loss. So if you're in a weight loss phase, you're going to get

a recovery enhancement, essentially. The other thing is, it's going to help with adherence. A lot

of times, I'll say this personally, when I tell a client in advance, hey, listen, we're going to go

four of your normal diet days, so you're going to be in a deficit. And then on day five, so say it

was Friday, on Friday, we were going to utilize a high carbohydrate refeed. A lot of times, it

allows them to buy into the process, first and foremost, more, but then also they are more

adherent week long, because they don't want to be in a deficit. So they're going to be in a deficit

and they almost have like an incentive to work towards, and it kind of breaks up the monotony of

the diet. Now, I will say that that is for many people, but at the same time, I do want to

acknowledge that for some people, including a refeed or a diet break or whatever it may be,

it's almost like they open up the floodgates, because once they eat more, their food focus

goes up, and then getting them back into the deficit becomes harder. So really, what I do

personally is I'm always looking at someone's personal psychology and our interactions. And

then also, I'm looking at their previous dieting history, because I don't want to assume that every

single person is going to respond the same way. So I'm looking at their previous dieting history,

and that this is a strategy for everyone. So I do want to make that very transparent.

And then another thing that you mentioned that I love is, and this we actually went through in

detail in a podcast that you and I did together about fat loss being more challenging, or fat

loss maintenance being more challenging than fat loss itself, is I really do think that this is

an opportunity, especially diet breaks in and of itself, provides people with an opportunity to

practice eating at maintenance. Because for every single person that we work with, the fat loss

phase has to end. And really what we find, and I know that you would agree with me on this,

is that many people, because of the myopic focus that they could put on something, and really the

drive, the motivation that they receive or derive from weight loss in and of itself, they're good at

getting themselves to adhere to the deficit. But once they reach that goal, and that carrot is

essentially taken away from them, they really struggle with developing the skill of maintenance.

And so I see this a lot of time with women, they're great at restricting, and they know how

to diet, but they really don't know how to eat at maintenance. So it's almost like these refeeds or

these diet breaks, they're not going to be able to eat at maintenance. And so I see this a lot of

times with women, they're great at restricting, and they know how to diet, but they really don't know

are an opportunity to show someone what eating more food looks like, how to essentially pause

your fat loss goals and fuel yourself and restore your energy availability. But then I think that

it's really important to see what happens when you do, especially a diet break. I think that's

the best use case for really teaching someone how to eat at maintenance, taking a week or two weeks

and getting them back to maintenance calories, because A, it teaches, especially women, that

you're not going to gain fat from eating at maintenance. I think there's a lot of misconceptions

around that.

Like women think that eating more, even if you're in a deficit and you're just getting back to

maintenance, they're very fearful of fat gain. But at the same time, they also have the opportunity

to normalize those scale fluctuations when they increase those carbohydrate intake. Because I

can tell them, listen, you're literally at maintenance and your weight is going to go up

one to two pounds. And they see that, and they realize as soon as they get back in the deficit,

it comes right off because they're dissipating the water that came and that was associated with

that carbohydrate content. But many times, this is an exercise or essentially a,

a skill building exercise at practicing what eating at maintenance is like that many people

have never done because they've really went into, you know, diametrically opposing viewpoints or

approaches. They've gotten themselves and over-restricted themselves into a deficit or,

and then they've, you know, got off the beaten path and eaten in excess. They've never just

eaten at a level that is fueling their body well, nutritionally, but is maintaining their current

body weight and body composition. A hundred percent, Brandon. I've got almost nothing to add

there other than, you know, I'm not going to go into too much detail, but I'm going to go into a

just to say that evidence builds confidence, right? So the more opportunity you get to practice

those skills and habits and behaviors that we're talking about, the more you actually believe that

you can do it. And so much of diet success is around that self-belief and sort of getting rid

of those self-limiting beliefs and seeing yourself as a person who can be successful in this space.

Because for both of us, we work with people who have been dieting for most of their life, you know,

a large part of them have been dieting for what,

it seems like forever and they don't quite believe that they can successfully diet and keep weight

off. So being able to practice the diet breaks, the refeeds and getting that evidence that they're

not going to just gain weight and they can eat more. I think that's so important. So yeah.

I agree, Mikki. One last thing that I do want to touch on is maybe delineating who we think that

benefits most from this. Cause we've discussed how there are certain personality types that

this might not be feasible for, but I also want to just make it very clear that there are certain

people that we need to utilize. So for instance, I find these strategies more useful when someone

has been dieting for a long period of time and they're getting to a point where they're leaner

than they ever have been in the past. They're really trying to manage both the fat loss goals

that they have with high training demands. And they're starting to feel some negative pushback

on their biofeedback. So they have high hunger. They have a substantial amount of diet fatigue.

That's when I think that these are the most beneficial.

But I also want to make sure that people realize that these aren't mandatory, nor

are they unnecessary or useful for every single person. If I have a client that is losing at an

appropriate rate, they're training well, and they're adhering consistently, then I don't

need to overcomplicate this by adding in another intervention, just because it's something that

is sexy or that a lot of people talk about. I think that a lot of these strategies should be

used when there's a specific problem that they can help us solve. But I don't think that we

really need to overcomplicate fat loss. There are certain time periods that I've had individuals

where they just get into a really good groove. And it's like they're finally firing on all the

cylinders. They like the routine of being in the deficit, and they want the diet straight through

the 12 weeks. And if we were to include these, it would either just slow down their progress,

it would kind of frustrate them, or it would really break that momentum that we've helped

them build. And so I think it's important to realize that these are tools. But just like

with every tool, it can be used properly, it can be abused. But

ultimately, we need to decipher and determine who are we actually utilizing this with,

because it's not a one size fits all protocol. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that, Brandon. And

particularly on that motivation piece and that momentum piece that you mentioned earlier,

like people are motivated by momentum, and you don't want to just cut that momentum because

we have to have a diet break every four weeks or every eight weeks or anything like that. So

entirely in agreement with that. Perfect. Mikki, is there anything else that you want to hit on

before we wrap this up? I don't think so, Brandon. I think we've comprehensively covered all of the

areas that we thought we might. Perfect. All right. So I think that the biggest takeaway from

this entire thing that I really want to get across to you guys is that these are strategies that are

useful, but that not every single person needs to use during a fat loss phase. They're really best

used and most useful when they're applied to the right person for the right reason,

at the right time. Mikki, thanks again for doing this with me. Before we close this one out,

where can everyone find your work and all the things that you have to offer?

Of course, Brandon. So I'm over on Instagram at Mikki Williden. Obviously, if you're listening

to this on Chasing Clarity, you'll know that, or you may have listened to me before. I've got my

own podcast. This is streaming on as well, Mikkipedia. My website is mikkiwilliden.com.

Those are the predominant ways to

with which you can reach me. But Instagram, I'm very responsive on Instagram.

100%. And for me, guys, you guys can find me on Instagram at BrandonCruzUnderscore or at my email

for one-on-one coaching, which is b2cruzfitness at gmail.com. If you guys enjoyed this episode,

please make sure that you're following both the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness Podcast and

the Mickepedia Podcast, because Mikki and I will be continuing these collaboration episodes

and tackling more of the topics that overlap between both of our audiences. For Mikki and

myself, thank you guys for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Peace.

See ya.

All righty. Hopefully you enjoyed that. As I said, this is just one of a continuing series

with Brandon. We've already got another one in the books. Really looking forward to again

diving in with him. And guys, if you've got any questions, comments, or anything,

you'd love for us to discuss, hit me up. I'm over on Instagram, Threads, and X at Mikki

Williden, Facebook at Mikki Williden Nutrition, or head to my website, mikkiwilliden.com.

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See you later.