Of refeeds and diet breaks
Replies
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This is a good example of what I've mentioned previously, where a response to hormonal down regulation will manifest in all dieters, not just lean. And the more aggressive the deficit, the harder those effects will be, and the shorter the dieting period will have to be.
The diet break does not have to be so extended, though it can if that's your choice. Diet breaks are usually 2 weeks between dieting phases. So, after 2 weeks assess where you're at mentally, and if you would like to do another round of dieting, you can create a much more sustainable strategy.
This is actually a very good segue into an article I just came across this morning, and it drives the point hard that leptin, and subsequent hormone cascade, does indeed take more than several days to return to baseline, and that reverse dieting (gradually increasing calories until maintenance is achieved) is doing nothing except just prolonging the deficit period:
My advice would be to prioritize getting rid of the urges as opposed to maintaining your post-diet weight. However, the following advice may be able to accomplish both to some degree. The first step is to immediately return to a surplus for a few days post diet. It’s been shown that high carbohydrate intake has the ability to temporarily boost leptin levels in the short term [15-16] which is the science behind the concept of high-carb refeeds on a diet. Give yourself at least 3 days at a surplus with a hefty amount of carbs and then drop calories to maintenance levels once hunger levels and urges begin to subside. Those surplus days can be untracked (recommended) or tracked depending on your comfort level. But it must be a surplus followed by a maintenance period.
Sorry to be so long in replying - internet access is still pretty iffy for me and I do a lot of keeping up via cell phone, but I absolutely detest trying to post anything with the stupid phone app!
I did break down this weekend and raised my calorie limit to 1800. I kept trying to push for the last 10 lb loss before trying a break, but it just wasn't working. My weight has been bouncing around 272 lbs for the last month, though I'm having "plumbing" problems too which makes the scale wildly inconsistent.....
I really have no idea where my maintenance level actually is. MFP says a sedentary person at my weight has maintenance at 2460 calories; calculator.net says 2360. While I've been sloppy in my logging lately, I still seriously doubt I'm consuming anywhere near either amount - I'm going over, yes, but not more than 500 calories a day and certainly nowhere near 1000 calories a day, and yet I haven't really lost any weight in 2 months. Water weight has been horrible the last 2 months, which makes it really hard to even tell what is going on.
I've tried lowering my carbs to see if that would help and set my macros to 30% carbs, 40% fats, and 30% proteins, but I'm not meeting those at all and think I'm actually somewhere in the neighborhood of 45% carbs, 30% fats, and 25% proteins - and that's being generous. I think I'm averaging somewhere between 90 and 100g of protein a day and thats with me focusing on protein while still trying to balance calorie intake.
Starting yesterday, I raised my limit to 1800. The side effect of this is that it helps the mental thing with the added 400 calories a day. Also, I'm attempting to reign in the logging and tighten it up - that means no more half cut sweet teas! Back to unsweet - as long as its strong enough to hold a spoon upright lol
I'll leave it at the 1800 level and work on tightening up my logging for the next 2 weeks and then reassess at that point. If I still haven't quite hit maintenance, I'll up it again until I can find that maintenance point.
Thank you for your advice! Its hard for me to understand at time as I'm not a biology major and struggle to grasp the intricacies involved in the whole nutrition thing; I do well to get a basic, simple plan going, and while I'm trying to get the macros better balance, I focus more on the calories and let the macros fall where they lie most days.4 -
We do super low carb by actively avoiding pure happiness lol.
But while we're on the topic, and because I can't seem to ever get away from the debate (I think I have a dark passion for joining them), let's talk about carbs.
Just to get it out of the way, first and foremost, dietary carbs are entirely optional as a macro. Full stop. They are biologically non-essential for survival. So all of the "you need carbs to live" statements can just see their way to a biochemistry and nutrition textbook. Our bodies make their own internal glucose from substrates taken from amino and fatty acids. This is known as gluconeogenesis: to make new glucose. In ketogenic diets, after a while of restricting carbs, our organs are perfectly adept at running on fatty acids (also known as being 'fat adapted') and glucose gets exclusive rights to fueling certain cells and parts of the brain where ketones can't.
Now for the intricacy. Survival =/= optimal. Just because we can survive without them doesn't mean they need to be eliminated or reduced to an unsavory degree. Dietary carbs are a pure fuel source. Runners and high performing athletes carb up prior to their events because they act like diesel fuel; easily burned and powerful catalysts for energy. Bodybuilders carb up during their bulk because carbs are an anabolic source of energy that use insulin to drive glucose into muscle cells instead of fat cells during anaerobic resistance training. But guess what macro usually gets reduced during their cut phases? Yup. Carbs. Because in a caloric deficit, they all know that energy is going to be reduced and when you don't need as much energy, you don't need as much of the fuel to supply it.
For the average joe/jane, an excessive amount of carbs isn't necessary. To clear the air, when I'm referring to carbs, I'm talking about glucose, sucrose, and fructose. If the first thing anyone thinks of is donuts, pastries, or ice cream, those are classified as hyper-palatable, easily overeaten treats that are a combination of carbs+fat+salt and low protein, designed to make anyone overeat, likely due to their low protein content.
For any, and I mean literally ANY, diet to work, adherence is the absolute dictator of progress. Your style of diet does not affect your mailman's, just like a facebook/mfp/internet group's style of diet doesn't affect yours. As long as protein is constant between all diets, the only other 2 macros that get swapped around are carbs and fat, with vegetarian/vegan and keto/carnivore dieters representing the extremes of either end, respectively.
Boy do I wish the keto/low carb crowd could grasp the 1st and foremost statement! I hear so much woo on that one - one friend absolutely insisted he could eat a million calories and lose weight because the body is running on ketones only and not on sugar at all....
I've wondered if lower carb would be a benefit to me, but despite trying to get the carbs down, I'm not really succeeding. I'm lucky to hold to around 40-45% carbs and struggle to get to 25% protein and 30% fat. I like my meat, but I like vegetables too, and I just don't want to build my diet completely around meat and dairy-besides which, I have to be real careful with the amount of dairy I consume anyway. I don't mind giving up fruit - I don't eat a lot of fruit anyway, but I do like my vegetables and prefer a rounded diet.
Its nice to know that low carb isn't completely necessary - I do get tired of getting the sermon from the keto-ites who swear that my satiety problems would all go away if I'd just do keto.......0 -
Nony_Mouse wrote: »Remind me what size deficit that is for you? It may simply be too aggressive for you, even if all the general rules of thumb on what you should be able to sustain say otherwise. I say take a break, even just for a couple of weeks, then restart with a higher calorie limit.
I was hoping that 1400 was at around 1,000 calorie deficit as I was shooting for averaging 2 lbs off per week, but I'm not sure it actually is 1,000 deficit for me. I haven't lost anything in 2 months - I'll post a 3 lb loss only to gain it back the next week. I'll be down 3 days straight then on my weight record day, I'll pop up by 3 lbs. I've been really struggling with a water weight yo-yo lately. I'm averaging right around the 272-273 lb mark and ahve been since January; I can't seem to get below 270 lbs for the life of me!
I started at 375 lbs. I dropped 100 lbs last year; I'd like to lose at least 50 this year, though I'm not off to a very good start
If I go by the conventional wisdom of not losing more than 1% of your body weight, I'm still in the range where 2 lbs/wk is still safe; its just not working right now. I know I'm over eating; I just have a really hard time believing I'm over-eating to the tune of 1,000 calories a day. I've got that built in calorie calculator working in my head most days, so when I do eat something, my brain is automatically calculating the calories in the item, and while I know my eyeballing of portion sizes is off, I wouldn't think it was that bad!
Still, I am going to try to tighten my logging up for the next 2 weeks and try to reign in the "cheats" and see where that gets me; perhaps I am worse off than I thought I was. I'm going ahead and moving my calorie limit up to 1800, too. According to the calculator, that should be somewhere in the neighborhood of a 1 lb a week loss technically; we'll see if I actually lose that. I'm hoping the bump up will help with the satiety problems I've been having.
I lost the 100 lbs last year with a continual deficit; I didn't know anything about diet breaks until late in the year. With that in mind, if I can find my maintenance level, would the 2 weeks at maintenance still be recommended, or would I need more than that to compensate for the long stretch of deficit? And while I'm doing this, should I deliberately boost my carbs to 50% or higher of the total (not that that would be that difficult for me.....)
I'm striving really hard to get at least 100g of protein in a day; most days, that's a struggle. I've started back to using milk for my coffee, eggs for breakfast, protein bars when I can get them into my calorie range; I'm just having a really hard time getting enough protein in with my calorie budget limit and still get a varied diet! I keep jerky to snack on, and cheese, but I have to admit that while I love cheese, a 1oz portion at 80 calories doesn't provide much protein and really doesn't hold me long at all. Same problem with jerky and other lower calorie snacks. And fruit will actually make me hungrier! I know I should bring more vegetables for snacks, but I haven't won that battle with myself yet.0 -
Try putting garlic cloves in roasted artichokes - they come out spreadable like butter. Trim the artichoke, cut off the top, open up the leaves somewhat, drizzle olive oil, cut into the center and insert a garlic clove or two, wrap in heavy foil and bake for an hour or so (depending on the size) at 425 degrees. You can mash the soft garlic with butter and spread it on crusty bread with dinner.
One more and then I'm caught up lol
This sounds like heaven! I'm off to get an artichoke to night lol Though I've never done anything with one that was whole and fresh; I've always just used the jarred ones.....
I wonder what this would taste like on flat bread, with shredded chicken, roma tomatoes, spinach, a little basil, and maybe some black olives and a little cheese? sort of a mediterranean pizza......0 -
oh, one more - did anyone see the article on the front page concerning diet breaks? I'd love to see your comments!
http://blog.myfitnesspal.com/taking-break-from-diet-lose-more-weight/0 -
I'm looking for book or (online) course recommendations. And I'm requesting in this thread because I have a lot of faith in you who post regularly here.
I've been searching for a basic human biology/nutrition book or class because I find myself at a loss trying to grok some of the more science-based comments and posts on MFP. It's a looong time since high school and college, and I honestly didn't pay serious attention to biology classes back then. There are a lot of gaps in my understanding of the basics, and I'm sure that even what I remember has been surpassed by better research over the years. (For instance, I'm pretty sure bloodletting has fallen out of favor by now.) I don't expect to become another SciBabe, but I need a serious review of the basics.
Google and Amazon are so rife with woo and bro-sci that they're pretty useless, even when deploying a strong sense of skepticism. So I turn to you. Got any recommendations for a neophyte?
@ZoneFive Chris Masterjohn has a very good list of books to get started if you're interested in nutrition, microbiology, chemistry, and A&P.
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/2017/08/05/textbooks/1 -
Whew, hope everyone else had a more calm weekend than I did - there was some epic emotional shakedowns going down in the Moose household the last couple of days. Thankfully all appears to have been resolved for the better, but I still feel a little concussed. In any case, my spouse and I quit smoking yesterday - I've been wanting to quit all winter and put my foot down about quitting by my birthday (which is tomorrow and also the first day of spring) so here we go! As a side-effect of that, we're going to be cutting way down on eating or drinking out for at least a month or so, so I've decided to take the next couple of weeks as a reverse refeed - two weeks of straight deficit! We'll see how that goes - I've done longer deficit stretches occasionally before but it's been a while, and I'm perfectly willing to jettison the idea if I start getting hangry or lose energy or whatever. The ice is finally melting enough to start running again and I'm not giving that up for a couple extra pounds off!
I've started taking fish oil, too, so maybe that will help with something or other? I'm actually a little confused about what fish oil is supposed to do exactly, but I finally read one too many reputable people recommending it for me to keep ignoring it. At least I'm not prone to the fishy burps. I'm 7 workouts into my lifting program and am finally starting to get to actually heavy (for me) stuff - I probably started too conservative, but I figured spending the time to work on form wouldn't hurt. Even after just a couple of weeks I can really feel my strength improving, especially in the whole core-and-posterior area, and I think I maybe managed to flex my bicep yesterday? Not that my arm looks different or anything, but I'm just not sure I ever intentionally isolated my bicep before. Fun!
In any case, that's how I'm doing, refeed crew- hope everyone (including the kitties) is doing well!10 -
@bmeadows380 - This is gonna be long given your collective responses.
The one recurring theme I'm seeing in your responses is that your consistency in logging has eased up and that inconsistency is clashing with your belief that you're not truly eating as much as you might be. I'm not placing blame because I've mentioned dozens of pages ago that people are just naturally horrendous at being accurate in their personal estimate, if left to their own devices.
In other words, we became overfat because we "ate to satiety" or eating intuitively. That means something completely different to a naturally lean individual vs an overweight individual. Obesity changes the way we perceive reward and pleasure in food long term, if not permanently. Even the formerly obese, like myself, have difficulty in regulating intake if not at least keeping mental track of what I'm eating. The only difference between you and me is that I've been tracking for 8 years, and I still can't be left by myself in a kitchen full of food. You're going to have to find a method of tracking that fits your style of eating. For myself, I do follow a low carb diet on most days, so I only have low carb food in my house.
Environmental factors play as much of a role as tracking does. It's very easy to dismiss good intentions by just saying "F it, I'm going to eat this pint of ice cream.. I'll only be over my calories by 800kcal and I'll just consider it a refeed" while totally overlooking the fact that that extra sliver of cheese or peanut butter or deli meat, or whatever added to an already 800+ kcal surplus. At the same time, if you've been militantly rigid in your approach for a year, it's very easy to mentally throw in the towel and just be tired of tracking altogether leading to the same result.
We can easily undo our own hard work by making ourselves feel better about our choices. It's human nature. It's also a mental game that we perpetually live with. It's a cold, hard truth, but that's the price we pay for overindulgence.
Now, might keto/low carb help? Possibly. Does it work for everyone? Absolutely not. What @mmapags linked in the ketogenic diet thread: https://sci-fit.net/ketogenic-diet-hunger-suppression/ are objective data correlating that there has been evidence of keto diets reducing hunger, or at least spontaneously reducing hunger for any number of reasons that have yet to be determined.
Now, if you love vegetables, there's no reason to give them up. You can still be low carb if you ate exclusively non-starchy vegetables. I actually do believe that if you were to meet your protein goal from whole food products like animal and vegetable proteins, you would feel a lot more satisfied with your diet instead of trying to struggle meeting protein from supplements. I say this, because you've expressed, among other similar dieters, that protein is a struggle to get in.. that reason is because it's very hard to overeat animal protein due to its satiating nature or maybe even its texture/taste. If you add the bulk from vegetables, it becomes very hard to intentionally overeat. Mind you, it *can* be done, it's just very hard to overeat. Volume eaters feel gastric distress by the time they feel satisfied. Fat that comes along with the protein fulfills your fat macros in that case.
Do high carbers (who follow a whole food/whole grain approach) also feel equally satisfied? Yes, they do. Would it work for everyone? Absolutely not. They still follow the same approach of eating whole food products, with the inclusion of starchy vegetables and whole grain products, which are consequentially low fat by nature, so their satiety doesn't come from fat, it comes from the carb content and protein.
Put in perspective, carbs+fat+salt (anti-protein products) = pure pleasure for most people, so there's nothing satiating about it, they're easy to overeat, and they're extremely energy dense with little micronutrient content. If you're now adding supplemental protein to that, it doesn't do much in the way of training your own palate to focus on whole food. You've just added another factor into training yourself to believe that a sweetened protein product isn't doing much for your diet.
You mentioned milk (carbs+fat+protein), eggs (protein+fat), and protein bars (artificially sweetened carbs+fat+protein) as sources of protein. These are energy dense sources of protein, and yes, even milk and eggs add up to calories in the long run, even if they're natural sources. This is where mindfulness comes into play with your diet. If you can't stand egg whites on their own, add 1 whole egg to 3 egg whites to increase the protein content. If you can't stand low-fat milk, opt for nut juice (AKA almond milk) or something to cut out the extra calorie content of whole milk. Protein bars are unnecessary if you can get the bulk of your protein from leaner cuts of meat (chicken/turkey breast, fish, beef, pork, etc).
In no way am I intending for this to be a lecture or anything to promote orthorexia, but your situation provided a good basis for why mindfulness in your diet needs to have not only intent, but a vigilant hyperawareness, of what you're eating. If you have trigger foods in your house that cause overeating (cheese, nuts, junk food, etc), get rid of them. If you HAVE to have them, then force yourself to be put in a situation where you have to go out of your way to buy the individual serving sizes.
Example: If I bought a gallon of ice cream, believe I'm eating it. So, instead of buying a gallon for freezer storage, I have to go an actual overpriced ice cream shop and buy a serving myself just to enjoy it. More often than not, I can't be bothered to leave the house, so I just won't buy it. I also only carry low-fat swiss cheese in my fridge. If I want the decadent stuff, I'd probably have to go to Whole Paycheck and buy a wedge of it, and that's a pain in my *kitten* too. So I don't.
It takes a good while to develop a habit you can live with and see results. I can't tell you what to eat (I can only suggest), but be realistic in your approach. We already know the rule that ultimately determines fat loss is CICO, so whatever you have to do to adhere to it is up to you.12 -
@anubis609 Thank you very much!
I have found that my brain and my stomach are not on the same wavelength when it comes to fullness, and there have been times where my stomach is telling me "I'm full" but my mind is craving more food and is screaming "it's hungry". Its actually a very strange feeling, but also a powerful one because its the mind part that is extremely difficult to overcome, especially as the day goes on and the stresses that accumulate over the day wear out my self control.
I've definitely learned not to keep snack foods in my house as I know I can't stop at a few. And there's a few that are going to have to go because my intake of them has slowly crept up over time. I can't tell you the number of times I'll go into the kitchen on a evening and open the pantry door and the fridge door wanting to snack on something, and I've gotten better at not having anything there to catch my attention, but sometimes my brain is very creative...... I've gotten better in many ways - donuts don't tempt me anymore, and I can usually bypass cookies and brownies now when they show up in the lunchroom. But a lot of it is my mind wants to eat - it doesn't really care what kind of food it is, it just wants me to be eating something, and doesn't listen to the signals to tell me I'm done. What I do gravitate toward are breads and bread-like substances, the heavy starches, etc. I've gotten better at just saying no--I'll tell the waitress at Olive Garden to not even bring any breadsticks out because I know that I won't be able to stop at a half or even one - but breads and starches get my attention way faster than even the sweet stuff. And I still can't bypass pizza.....Carb items like bread are usually what fulfills my cravings and has the biggest saity hit for me than anything else. Sadly, they tend to be high in calories, too, and do nothing on the protein front. I'm finding a few alternatives and even have figured out how to get homemade bread down to a decent level, but its still something I limit - to the point of keeping a loaf of bread in the freeze and popping a slice in the toaster on occasion because if I don't, the loaf spoils before I finish it.
I do need to change up what I'm eating and get back to logging better than I have been. I've tried skipping breakfast to save more calories for dinner, but that backfires on me because I'm so hungry that by the time I get to my "feeding window" I over eat to compensate. Skipping dinner doesn't work as the evening is when I really get hungry and snacky - so I've already found that intermittent fasting doesn't work for me. If I'm out in the field and working, I can skip lunch, but if I stuck at my desk all day long, the drive to snack is insane. I think a lot of it is a response to boredom or tedium; if I'm working on a project I enjoy, I get so enveloped in it that I forget to eat. Unfortunately, my job does not fall into that category!
And I am fatigued on the diet front. Other than attempting a break back at Thanksgiving, I've been at it non-stop for over a year. It was just very hard to give myself permission to take a break. I'll work this week on reigning the logging back in, then look at trying to change up what I'm eating to see if that can help on the saity front. I have increased my calorie limit for now, and that's already been helping today. And if the danged snow would go away, I'd start working on getting some exercise in to help....4 -
*waves*8
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bmeadows380 wrote: »@anubis609 Thank you very much!
I have found that my brain and my stomach are not on the same wavelength when it comes to fullness, and there have been times where my stomach is telling me "I'm full" but my mind is craving more food and is screaming "it's hungry". Its actually a very strange feeling, but also a powerful one because its the mind part that is extremely difficult to overcome, especially as the day goes on and the stresses that accumulate over the day wear out my self control.
I've definitely learned not to keep snack foods in my house as I know I can't stop at a few. And there's a few that are going to have to go because my intake of them has slowly crept up over time. I can't tell you the number of times I'll go into the kitchen on a evening and open the pantry door and the fridge door wanting to snack on something, and I've gotten better at not having anything there to catch my attention, but sometimes my brain is very creative...... I've gotten better in many ways - donuts don't tempt me anymore, and I can usually bypass cookies and brownies now when they show up in the lunchroom. But a lot of it is my mind wants to eat - it doesn't really care what kind of food it is, it just wants me to be eating something, and doesn't listen to the signals to tell me I'm done. What I do gravitate toward are breads and bread-like substances, the heavy starches, etc. I've gotten better at just saying no--I'll tell the waitress at Olive Garden to not even bring any breadsticks out because I know that I won't be able to stop at a half or even one - but breads and starches get my attention way faster than even the sweet stuff. And I still can't bypass pizza.....Carb items like bread are usually what fulfills my cravings and has the biggest saity hit for me than anything else. Sadly, they tend to be high in calories, too, and do nothing on the protein front. I'm finding a few alternatives and even have figured out how to get homemade bread down to a decent level, but its still something I limit - to the point of keeping a loaf of bread in the freeze and popping a slice in the toaster on occasion because if I don't, the loaf spoils before I finish it.
I do need to change up what I'm eating and get back to logging better than I have been. I've tried skipping breakfast to save more calories for dinner, but that backfires on me because I'm so hungry that by the time I get to my "feeding window" I over eat to compensate. Skipping dinner doesn't work as the evening is when I really get hungry and snacky - so I've already found that intermittent fasting doesn't work for me. If I'm out in the field and working, I can skip lunch, but if I stuck at my desk all day long, the drive to snack is insane. I think a lot of it is a response to boredom or tedium; if I'm working on a project I enjoy, I get so enveloped in it that I forget to eat. Unfortunately, my job does not fall into that category!
And I am fatigued on the diet front. Other than attempting a break back at Thanksgiving, I've been at it non-stop for over a year. It was just very hard to give myself permission to take a break. I'll work this week on reigning the logging back in, then look at trying to change up what I'm eating to see if that can help on the saity front. I have increased my calorie limit for now, and that's already been helping today. And if the danged snow would go away, I'd start working on getting some exercise in to help....
I have a deeply, deeply boring job and have found that I've done best keeping the nibbles at bay by eating multiple snacks throughout the day instead of a traditional breakfast or lunch meal. The only hot meal I eat most days is dinner. I have no idea if it would help you, but it sounds like you've tried a lot of other things already.0 -
bmeadows380 wrote: »@anubis609 Thank you very much!
I have found that my brain and my stomach are not on the same wavelength when it comes to fullness, and there have been times where my stomach is telling me "I'm full" but my mind is craving more food and is screaming "it's hungry". Its actually a very strange feeling, but also a powerful one because its the mind part that is extremely difficult to overcome, especially as the day goes on and the stresses that accumulate over the day wear out my self control.
I've definitely learned not to keep snack foods in my house as I know I can't stop at a few. And there's a few that are going to have to go because my intake of them has slowly crept up over time. I can't tell you the number of times I'll go into the kitchen on a evening and open the pantry door and the fridge door wanting to snack on something, and I've gotten better at not having anything there to catch my attention, but sometimes my brain is very creative...... I've gotten better in many ways - donuts don't tempt me anymore, and I can usually bypass cookies and brownies now when they show up in the lunchroom. But a lot of it is my mind wants to eat - it doesn't really care what kind of food it is, it just wants me to be eating something, and doesn't listen to the signals to tell me I'm done. What I do gravitate toward are breads and bread-like substances, the heavy starches, etc. I've gotten better at just saying no--I'll tell the waitress at Olive Garden to not even bring any breadsticks out because I know that I won't be able to stop at a half or even one - but breads and starches get my attention way faster than even the sweet stuff. And I still can't bypass pizza.....Carb items like bread are usually what fulfills my cravings and has the biggest saity hit for me than anything else. Sadly, they tend to be high in calories, too, and do nothing on the protein front. I'm finding a few alternatives and even have figured out how to get homemade bread down to a decent level, but its still something I limit - to the point of keeping a loaf of bread in the freeze and popping a slice in the toaster on occasion because if I don't, the loaf spoils before I finish it.
I do need to change up what I'm eating and get back to logging better than I have been. I've tried skipping breakfast to save more calories for dinner, but that backfires on me because I'm so hungry that by the time I get to my "feeding window" I over eat to compensate. Skipping dinner doesn't work as the evening is when I really get hungry and snacky - so I've already found that intermittent fasting doesn't work for me. If I'm out in the field and working, I can skip lunch, but if I stuck at my desk all day long, the drive to snack is insane. I think a lot of it is a response to boredom or tedium; if I'm working on a project I enjoy, I get so enveloped in it that I forget to eat. Unfortunately, my job does not fall into that category!
And I am fatigued on the diet front. Other than attempting a break back at Thanksgiving, I've been at it non-stop for over a year. It was just very hard to give myself permission to take a break. I'll work this week on reigning the logging back in, then look at trying to change up what I'm eating to see if that can help on the saity front. I have increased my calorie limit for now, and that's already been helping today. And if the danged snow would go away, I'd start working on getting some exercise in to help....
You're welcome, and very much right regarding the bolded part. That's where obesity changes the actual neuron signaling in our perception of fullness. Satiety (the physical feeling of fullness) and satisfaction (the psychological feeling associated with fullness) are now separated in most overweight individuals, and it's near impossible to put them back together. My usual advice is to just stop eating when you're less hungry than before you started eating. I phrase it in that way because if I say, "stop eating when you're full" that limit can be high. The Okanawan diet tells people to stop eating when they're 80% full (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hara_hachi_bun_me; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet), which is basically the same principle.
I will also randomly open the fridge for no reason. I'm not hungry and it's just become a lifelong conditioning pattern I've ingrained into myself. I end up closing it when I realize I have no reason to be in there because just like being in a grocery store or shopping area, if I'm in there for too long, I'm taking something with me, even if I don't need it.
The good thing is that you can identify what your trigger points are, how you enact on them is another step. Psychologically, we're programmed to avoid states of discomfort. And for all intents and purposes, dieting is extremely uncomfortable. You're imposing a restriction on yourself, and since willpower and motivation are fleeting, the discipline doesn't come from how well you can white-knuckle your way through it, it's accepting and acknowledging the fact that if you have goals to be lean, "you should be eating like it's your job to be lean" that determines discipline (a quote I took from Alex Juan Cortes who is a powerfully articulate ballet dancer who will probably offend most people and rightly doesn't care because it's something people need to hear: https://alexanderjuanantoniocortes.com; https://twitter.com/aja_cortes?lang=en).
What that implies is that strategic diet breaks are necessary in the face of a chronic deficit. Successful people work smart, not hard. Successfully lean dieters didn't strictly diet year over year, we took diet breaks, whether intentional or unintentional, when we knew we might mentally or physically give up. Yo-yo dieters know this feeling better than most. They know what happens when they hit goal. They go HAM on food because they thought they were fixed. Then they do it all over again because they also went banana split and pizza on food, and over did it. The difference is that their diet breaks were full on binges. What I'm advocating is to just allow room for an additional treat on top of your normal diet food, where normal diet food is just seen as normal food. Eating "all the things" is actually supposed to be an alien form of consumption that's been not only accepted, but celebrated and promoted now.
I pose this scenario to many people that ask me for help (for some unknown reason): Everyone has an ideal version of themselves in their mind. What would the ideal version of yourself be eating and doing to maintain their body composition? Do what they do.7 -
MegaMooseEsq wrote: »Whew, hope everyone else had a more calm weekend than I did - there was some epic emotional shakedowns going down in the Moose household the last couple of days. Thankfully all appears to have been resolved for the better, but I still feel a little concussed. In any case, my spouse and I quit smoking yesterday - I've been wanting to quit all winter and put my foot down about quitting by my birthday (which is tomorrow and also the first day of spring) so here we go! As a side-effect of that, we're going to be cutting way down on eating or drinking out for at least a month or so, so I've decided to take the next couple of weeks as a reverse refeed - two weeks of straight deficit! We'll see how that goes - I've done longer deficit stretches occasionally before but it's been a while, and I'm perfectly willing to jettison the idea if I start getting hangry or lose energy or whatever. The ice is finally melting enough to start running again and I'm not giving that up for a couple extra pounds off!
I've started taking fish oil, too, so maybe that will help with something or other? I'm actually a little confused about what fish oil is supposed to do exactly, but I finally read one too many reputable people recommending it for me to keep ignoring it. At least I'm not prone to the fishy burps. I'm 7 workouts into my lifting program and am finally starting to get to actually heavy (for me) stuff - I probably started too conservative, but I figured spending the time to work on form wouldn't hurt. Even after just a couple of weeks I can really feel my strength improving, especially in the whole core-and-posterior area, and I think I maybe managed to flex my bicep yesterday? Not that my arm looks different or anything, but I'm just not sure I ever intentionally isolated my bicep before. Fun!
In any case, that's how I'm doing, refeed crew- hope everyone (including the kitties) is doing well!
Congrats on quitting smoking! Nicotine withdrawal hits some harder than others, so hopefully you actually are able to get through it. On that front, there are cognitive and physiological benefits to nicotine intake, including maintaining weight loss (I mean nicotine as a chemical, not in the form of a cigarette), so if you need to supplement nicotine replacement therapy (NRT; gum, lozenges, e-cigarettes, etc) then there's also no perceivable harm in those things. It's the carcinogenic effects of lighting up a combustible substance that does harm, not nicotine in itself. That said, it's also an addictive substance, so I'm not promoting the use of NRT haphazardly, I'm just suggesting them if you start feeling the negative associations with quitting cold turkey. https://examine.com/supplements/nicotine/
As for fish oil, there are almost too many positive associations with it to not recommend it: https://examine.com/supplements/fish-oil/1 -
Hey guys and girls! I had a week/end/week. Thurs - yesterday. A family member passed so there was an emergency 1000 mile round trip. I tried my best to eat as best as I could, but it is extremely hard when traveling like that. The first day was OK because I was able to pack decent food/snacks. The next days were full of Quick-Trip, take-out, drive-thru, and whatever was available before/after the funeral. I even grazed on M&M's because of nervous eating...there was alot of nervous eating actually. Needless to say, I went over my goal and probably over my maintenance (Heavy on the carbs). It wasn't a full on binge. I tried to be mindful, but ... This morning my body is trying to shed the slug (tmi, I know). This is what I call LIFE.
My question is: I was planning on taking a diet break at the end of this month, but the last 5 days were at the very conservative at maintenance. (I'm actually not real sure because my logging was sloppy.) Should I just get back at it and then take the break when planned? Should I consider those 5 days my diet break and skip the end of the month break? Would that be enough time for my glycogen to be replenished? They were carb heavy days, hence the slug. Or should I consider those 5 days the first 5 days of a break and continue at maintenance for another week or so?6 -
Unless you have a specific reason for scheduling your diet break for the end of the month, why not count the past five days as part of the break and carry on from there? Everything should balance out over the two weeks.6
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What I really want to do is get back to it. Call these past 5 days a diet break, skip the planned one, and move back to my deficit, but I'm not sure that what I've done is enough to be a beneficial diet break.0
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Hey guys and girls! I had a week/end/week. Thurs - yesterday. A family member passed so there was an emergency 1000 mile round trip. I tried my best to eat as best as I could, but it is extremely hard when traveling like that. The first day was OK because I was able to pack decent food/snacks. The next days were full of Quick-Trip, take-out, drive-thru, and whatever was available before/after the funeral. I even grazed on M&M's because of nervous eating...there was alot of nervous eating actually. Needless to say, I went over my goal and probably over my maintenance (Heavy on the carbs). It wasn't a full on binge. I tried to be mindful, but ... This morning my body is trying to shed the slug (tmi, I know). This is what I call LIFE.
My question is: I was planning on taking a diet break at the end of this month, but the last 5 days were at the very conservative at maintenance. (I'm actually not real sure because my logging was sloppy.) Should I just get back at it and then take the break when planned? Should I consider those 5 days my diet break and skip the end of the month break? Would that be enough time for my glycogen to be replenished? They were carb heavy days, hence the slug. Or should I consider those 5 days the first 5 days of a break and continue at maintenance for another week or so?
Condolences to you and the family.
As for the diet break conundrum, consider the past 5 days of untracked/relaxed eating as part of your diet break. It's up to you to extend it, but from here on out track to maintenance if you do extend it, then get back to your regularly scheduled deficit. Being flexible in what life throws at you is part of life long maintenance. In the big picture, those small unexpected blips don't amount to much. If you're consistent with your diet 42/52 weeks of the year, that's just over an 80% adherence rate, which falls in line with part of the 80/20 rule (usually applied to nutritional quality, but assuming those 42 weeks focused on nutrient density, then it works out to be the same).
I think there's a bit of confusion regarding glycogen repletion and diet breaks. Those two concepts are mutually exclusive and separate ideas from each other.
With refeeds you can completely saturate glycogen in about 2-3 days by eating a buttload of easily digestible carbs and topping off stores in succeeding days. Glycogen depletion occurs when you perform aerobic and total body anaerobic exercise consistently throughout the week while keeping carb intake minimal.
Diet breaks are literal as the name implies. Taking a break from a diet (period of calorie deficit). This is to give your body and mind a reprieve from the cumulative stress buildup from a chronic deficit, and to get hormonal regulation back up to speed to match your current lower body weight.4 -
Hey guys and girls! I had a week/end/week. Thurs - yesterday. A family member passed so there was an emergency 1000 mile round trip. I tried my best to eat as best as I could, but it is extremely hard when traveling like that. The first day was OK because I was able to pack decent food/snacks. The next days were full of Quick-Trip, take-out, drive-thru, and whatever was available before/after the funeral. I even grazed on M&M's because of nervous eating...there was alot of nervous eating actually. Needless to say, I went over my goal and probably over my maintenance (Heavy on the carbs). It wasn't a full on binge. I tried to be mindful, but ... This morning my body is trying to shed the slug (tmi, I know). This is what I call LIFE.
My question is: I was planning on taking a diet break at the end of this month, but the last 5 days were at the very conservative at maintenance. (I'm actually not real sure because my logging was sloppy.) Should I just get back at it and then take the break when planned? Should I consider those 5 days my diet break and skip the end of the month break? Would that be enough time for my glycogen to be replenished? They were carb heavy days, hence the slug. Or should I consider those 5 days the first 5 days of a break and continue at maintenance for another week or so?
Condolences to you and the family.
As for the diet break conundrum, consider the past 5 days of untracked/relaxed eating as part of your diet break. It's up to you to extend it, but from here on out track to maintenance if you do extend it, then get back to your regularly scheduled deficit. Being flexible in what life throws at you is part of life long maintenance. In the big picture, those small unexpected blips don't amount to much. If you're consistent with your diet 42/52 weeks of the year, that's just over an 80% adherence rate, which falls in line with part of the 80/20 rule (usually applied to nutritional quality, but assuming those 42 weeks focused on nutrient density, then it works out to be the same).
I think there's a bit of confusion regarding glycogen repletion and diet breaks. Those two concepts are mutually exclusive and separate ideas from each other.
With refeeds you can completely saturate glycogen in about 2-3 days by eating a buttload of easily digestible carbs and topping off stores in succeeding days. Glycogen depletion occurs when you perform aerobic and total body anaerobic exercise consistently throughout the week while keeping carb intake minimal.
Diet breaks are literal as the name implies. Taking a break from a diet (period of calorie deficit). This is to give your body and mind a reprieve from the cumulative stress buildup from a chronic deficit, and to get hormonal regulation back up to speed to match your current lower body weight.
Thank you.
I guess I get so confused when I hear people talking about hormones and glycogen and this and that. I honestly thought that a refeed was just a mini diet break and that they both served the same purpose.
Thanks for the clarification. 0 -
What about hormones? Does it take them a certain amount of time to readjust? I was for certain that I read someone saying that Lyle said that a diet break needed to be 10 days to 2 weeks to straighten something back out.
I guess that I'm still confused... a little.1 -
Hi! I am planning on incorperating refeeds in my diet plan. Firstly i read around and saw that they recommend 1 day refeed, bit here it stood that you should have atleast 2 days of refeeds. I am reasonably lean. Would 2 days every 2 weeks be a good place to start? Putting in my pic for reference of my current fitness level. I have been dieting for about 2 and a half months0
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What about hormones? Does it take them a certain amount of time to readjust? I was for certain that I read someone saying that Lyle said that a diet break needed to be 10 days to 2 weeks to straighten something back out.
I guess that I'm still confused... a little.
Hormones are dynamic within a few days as well. It's an extremely rough example and hardly accurate, but it serves its purpose in demonstrating what I mean.
Let's use leptin as the primary hormone example. For whatever weight you are before dieting, let's assume it's at 100%.
After a few days on a deficit, leptin starts slowly dropping. After 6 weeks on a chronic deficit, and lost a good amount of body fat, it's now at 60%. When you do a refeed for 2-3 days, it bumps it back up to 70%. When you go on a diet break for 2 weeks it goes up to 90%.
Then you diet again for 6 weeks, and lose a bunch of body fat, and leptin dropped from 90% to 50%. Go on a diet break to bring back up to about 80%.
Diet again. It drops when you lose body fat. Diet break again. It goes up slightly, but it will never be as high as it originally was because you now have less body fat.
The longer the diet break, the more of a hormonal regulation you're able to maintain, but never at previously obese levels. It works that way because you're no longer obese. But now that new peak at a lower body fat, is your new 100% for that body weight. If you want to increase it further, then you gain weight, but since you don't want that, you accept the new low as a new max level.
I hope that makes sense, but that's horribly simplistic of how it kind of works.
Or think of it like a belt or pants or something. If you want to fit into your old bigger size, you have to gain weight. If you'd rather donate those old pants (forever gone), then you accept the fact you have to buy a new wardrobe to fit your leaner size and that's now your new pant/belt size.
ETA: As we get leaner, the less of a longer deficit period you need to have because you simply don't have enough body fat to sustain it, so lean dieters can be at a deficit for 3 days, 1 day maintenance, deficit 3 days, 1 day maintenance, just to keep hormone levels from dropping suddenly. The 1 day maintenance kind of acts like a slack line to pull it back up before it plummets. And the extremely lean hardly need to diet at all. They can actually get away with alternating days of deficit and maintenance, which on average becomes a very slight deficit, if any and maintain body fat at a low level.6 -
What about hormones? Does it take them a certain amount of time to readjust? I was for certain that I read someone saying that Lyle said that a diet break needed to be 10 days to 2 weeks to straighten something back out.
I guess that I'm still confused... a little.
Hormones are dynamic within a few days as well. It's an extremely rough example and hardly accurate, but it serves its purpose in demonstrating what I mean.
Let's use leptin as the primary hormone example. For whatever weight you are before dieting, let's assume it's at 100%.
After a few days on a deficit, leptin starts slowly dropping. After 6 weeks on a chronic deficit, and lost a good amount of body fat, it's now at 60%. When you do a refeed for 2-3 days, it bumps it back up to 70%. When you go on a diet break for 2 weeks it goes up to 90%.
Then you diet again for 6 weeks, and lose a bunch of body fat, and leptin dropped from 90% to 50%. Go on a diet break to bring back up to about 80%.
Diet again. It drops when you lose body fat. Diet break again. It goes up slightly, but it will never be as high as it originally was because you now have less body fat.
The longer the diet break, the more of a hormonal regulation you're able to maintain, but never at previously obese levels. It works that way because you're no longer obese. But now that new peak at a lower body fat, is your new 100% for that body weight. If you want to increase it further, then you gain weight, but since you don't want that, you accept the new low as a new max level.
I hope that makes sense, but that's horribly simplistic of how it kind of works.
Or think of it like a belt or pants or something. If you want to fit into your old bigger size, you have to gain weight. If you'd rather donate those old pants (forever gone), then you accept the fact you have to buy a new wardrobe to fit your leaner size and that's now your new pant/belt size.
ETA: As we get leaner, the less of a longer deficit period you need to have because you simply don't have enough body fat to sustain it, so lean dieters can be at a deficit for 3 days, 1 day maintenance, deficit 3 days, 1 day maintenance, just to keep hormone levels from dropping suddenly. The 1 day maintenance kind of acts like a slack line to pull it back up before it plummets. And the extremely lean hardly need to diet at all. They can actually get away with alternating days of deficit and maintenance, which on average becomes a very slight deficit, if any and maintain body fat at a low level.
I need simplistic. Thank you.
I think I'm going to use the last 5 days as the beginning of my diet break and go on for another 5-7 days at maintenance. While I did eat at maint or above, I actually didn't eat the things that I really wanted. I have been jonesing for a real cheeseburger with a real bun. It was one of the foods that I was saving for my diet break.
And oh yes, I hope your leg is back to it's normal size and color.9 -
andreascjonsson wrote: »Hi! I am planning on incorperating refeeds in my diet plan. Firstly i read around and saw that they recommend 1 day refeed, bit here it stood that you should have atleast 2 days of refeeds. I am reasonably lean. Would 2 days every 2 weeks be a good place to start? Putting in my pic for reference of my current fitness level. I have been dieting for about 2 and a half months
I'd put you maybe around 18% bf (give or take a couple points in either direction), mostly in the lower abdomen area, which is the primary problem area for men.
That said, you're perfectly fine to do a 2 week deficit > 2 day refeed which is pretty standard. But if you've been strict dieting for 2.5 months, then take a 2 week diet break at your new lower body weight maintenance first. Then go ahead with your plan. If you're not already strength training, focus on that as your primary activity, unless you're a marathon athlete. But I think adding some size to your frame would help offset some of the bf% estimate from a visual aesthetic perspective. You don’t need to fulk and get powerlifter big, I’m just talking general strength training and it’s fine to train like a bodybuilding bro with a various amount of rep ranges for hypertrophy.4 -
What about hormones? Does it take them a certain amount of time to readjust? I was for certain that I read someone saying that Lyle said that a diet break needed to be 10 days to 2 weeks to straighten something back out.
I guess that I'm still confused... a little.
Hormones are dynamic within a few days as well. It's an extremely rough example and hardly accurate, but it serves its purpose in demonstrating what I mean.
Let's use leptin as the primary hormone example. For whatever weight you are before dieting, let's assume it's at 100%.
After a few days on a deficit, leptin starts slowly dropping. After 6 weeks on a chronic deficit, and lost a good amount of body fat, it's now at 60%. When you do a refeed for 2-3 days, it bumps it back up to 70%. When you go on a diet break for 2 weeks it goes up to 90%.
Then you diet again for 6 weeks, and lose a bunch of body fat, and leptin dropped from 90% to 50%. Go on a diet break to bring back up to about 80%.
Diet again. It drops when you lose body fat. Diet break again. It goes up slightly, but it will never be as high as it originally was because you now have less body fat.
The longer the diet break, the more of a hormonal regulation you're able to maintain, but never at previously obese levels. It works that way because you're no longer obese. But now that new peak at a lower body fat, is your new 100% for that body weight. If you want to increase it further, then you gain weight, but since you don't want that, you accept the new low as a new max level.
I hope that makes sense, but that's horribly simplistic of how it kind of works.
Or think of it like a belt or pants or something. If you want to fit into your old bigger size, you have to gain weight. If you'd rather donate those old pants (forever gone), then you accept the fact you have to buy a new wardrobe to fit your leaner size and that's now your new pant/belt size.
ETA: As we get leaner, the less of a longer deficit period you need to have because you simply don't have enough body fat to sustain it, so lean dieters can be at a deficit for 3 days, 1 day maintenance, deficit 3 days, 1 day maintenance, just to keep hormone levels from dropping suddenly. The 1 day maintenance kind of acts like a slack line to pull it back up before it plummets. And the extremely lean hardly need to diet at all. They can actually get away with alternating days of deficit and maintenance, which on average becomes a very slight deficit, if any and maintain body fat at a low level.
I need simplistic. Thank you.
I think I'm going to use the last 5 days as the beginning of my diet break and go on for another 5-7 days at maintenance. While I did eat at maint or above, I actually didn't eat the things that I really wanted. I have been jonesing for a real cheeseburger with a real bun. It was one of the foods that I was saving for my diet break.
And oh yes, I hope your leg is back to it's normal size and color.
You’re welcome and thanks, it’s normal in size and shape. But has some random splotches of painless bruising discoloration. I have to put my leg modeling on hold for a while. Lol4 -
andreascjonsson wrote: »Hi! I am planning on incorperating refeeds in my diet plan. Firstly i read around and saw that they recommend 1 day refeed, bit here it stood that you should have atleast 2 days of refeeds. I am reasonably lean. Would 2 days every 2 weeks be a good place to start? Putting in my pic for reference of my current fitness level. I have been dieting for about 2 and a half months
I'd put you maybe around 18% bf (give or take a couple points in either direction), mostly in the lower abdomen area, which is the primary problem area for men.
That said, you're perfectly fine to do a 2 week deficit > 2 day refeed which is pretty standard. But if you've been strict dieting for 2.5 months, then take a 2 week diet break at your new lower body weight maintenance first. Then go ahead with your plan. If you're not already strength training, focus on that as your primary activity, unless you're a marathon athlete. But I think adding some size to your frame would help offset some of the bf% estimate from a visual aesthetic perspective. You don’t need to fulk and get powerlifter big, I’m just talking general strength training and it’s fine to train like a bodybuilding bro with a various amount of rep ranges for hypertrophy.
Thanks for the helpfull answer! I have been in a deficit for the entire time but 2 weeks feels super long to me since i want to be done cutting as soon as possible. Becouse, just as you point out, my upper body just feels so small atm and i want to start bulking to fix that. I am currently doing strength training and also some mma mixed with 1h cardio sessions.0 -
andreascjonsson wrote: »andreascjonsson wrote: »Hi! I am planning on incorperating refeeds in my diet plan. Firstly i read around and saw that they recommend 1 day refeed, bit here it stood that you should have atleast 2 days of refeeds. I am reasonably lean. Would 2 days every 2 weeks be a good place to start? Putting in my pic for reference of my current fitness level. I have been dieting for about 2 and a half months
I'd put you maybe around 18% bf (give or take a couple points in either direction), mostly in the lower abdomen area, which is the primary problem area for men.
That said, you're perfectly fine to do a 2 week deficit > 2 day refeed which is pretty standard. But if you've been strict dieting for 2.5 months, then take a 2 week diet break at your new lower body weight maintenance first. Then go ahead with your plan. If you're not already strength training, focus on that as your primary activity, unless you're a marathon athlete. But I think adding some size to your frame would help offset some of the bf% estimate from a visual aesthetic perspective. You don’t need to fulk and get powerlifter big, I’m just talking general strength training and it’s fine to train like a bodybuilding bro with a various amount of rep ranges for hypertrophy.
Thanks for the helpfull answer! I have been in a deficit for the entire time but 2 weeks feels super long to me since i want to be done cutting as soon as possible. Becouse, just as you point out, my upper body just feels so small atm and i want to start bulking to fix that. I am currently doing strength training and also some mma mixed with 1h cardio sessions.
The reason for the 2 week diet break is for the hormone regulation and psychological reprieve as I outlined above. I mean, sure, you could grind it out longer if you can stand it, but unless you're planning to walk on stage and get judged for being a human string of beef jerky for a few days, it's not worth the struggle IMO. It also gives you an idea of how to eat normally when you're no longer cutting and just eating like a lean human being. No one wants to cut forever, and to gain some size and strength, you're gonna have to be in a slight surplus for a period of time. But without that 2 week maintenance buffer, jumping straight into a bulk the day right after a deficit will shuttle more nutrients for storage than muscle and fuel.
Think of it this way, dieting is slowly starving yourself by depriving the body of nutrients for X amount of time as a loose metaphor. If it suddenly saw all the food, the first thing it wants to do is make damn sure you don't do that again, and will pack it away for a few days before it realizes "Oh, you're not trying to get fat? Oops, well I stored some energy just in case you think about doing that again." The body is hard wired to survive by doing everything it can to avoid discomfort. If getting fat keeps it from suffering, it's going to.
That said, do you have to consistently be on a diet break for 2 weeks? No. You can have a working week of maintenance calories as a diet break before starting another round of cutting. Whether it's optimal, that's subjective, but I certainly don't feel that it adds positive reinforcement to the long-term game of life. The phrasing of "wanting to be done cutting asap" leads me to believe that patience isn't in the cards for your goals.
If patience isn't your strong suit, and you're hellbent on neglecting sound advice, then at least having knowledge on how to safely cut hard and quick for rapid fat loss would be a better tool to use. RFL (https://store.bodyrecomposition.com/product/rapid-fat-loss-handbook/) and/or UD2 (https://store.bodyrecomposition.com/product/the-ultimate-diet/) would be your best bets. UD2 (my recommendation between the two if I had to choose, but both are good) would be used more likely after you've achieved a level of leanness using RFL, but you can also use UD2 solely to meet your body comp needs, since it carries some nuance for a surplus for hypertrophy.
Neither book is a maintenance strategy guide. They're meant to get you to your goal as efficiently as possible. How you learn to keep your ideal body going is going to be dependent on you.
As for your strength training, just follow the rule of progressive overload: increase weights, reps, and/or sets over time and you'll be stronger by virtue of measurable counting. Example: say you can bench 150lbs now for 3 sets of 5 reps. If you are able to bench 155lbs for 3 sets of 5 reps, congrats you got stronger. If you can bench 150lbs for 4 sets of 5 reps, congrats, you got stronger. If you can bench 150 for 3 sets of 6 reps, congrats you got stronger. The way you apply those changes to your needs is still going to be heading towards progress, as long as intensity is present. Benching 95 lbs for 5 sets of 10 reps doesn't do diq if you aren't going to failure. Even then, it's just painfully tedious.
The way Lyle simplifies this boils down to "Lift the thing. Put down the thing. Repeat 2 - 8 times. Add weight to the thing. Repeat as needed."2 -
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I have - to my slight embarrassment, now I’ve read this - lost weight continuously for the last year and a half without taking a diet break. There were several occasions that I called ‘diet breaks’, but which were in reality just losing weight more slowly.
I’m now only 20lb from goal and set to 1lb per week, but I’ve noticed that I’m occasionally feeling hunger in a way that I wasn’t previously even on fewer calories.
My question is this: is it worth taking a proper diet break at this point, or have I already screwed up sufficiently that there’s no point and I may as well just keep going until goal?2 -
With refeeds you can completely saturate glycogen in about 2-3 days by eating a buttload of easily digestible carbs and topping off stores in succeeding days. Glycogen depletion occurs when you perform aerobic and total body anaerobic exercise consistently throughout the week while keeping carb intake minimal.
You can replenish glycogen sufficiently in a single day or if you're like me and an amateur competitive eater in a single meal. My latest personal experiments show elevated glucose levels for four days after a re-feed post glycogen depletion (three days fasting).
Glycogen depletion occurs with prolonged caloric deficit and doesn't require exercise for depletion. It also requires both carbohydrate and protein intake reductions as the body can produce substantial glycogen levels from gluconeogensis. My latest personal experiments also show elevated glycogen levels can be maintained on a protein/fat only re-feed for at least three days post glycogen depletion (five days fasting).
Yes, you can replenish glycogen in one day, but the period of not eating slowly dips into liver glycogen, and that period of not eating is sleep. Therefore, you'd have to top it off in the days succeeding day 1.
Liver glycogen depletion occurs with a prolonged caloric deficit. Muscle glycogen doesn't follow that rule. It exists to live for fueling the muscle groups where they reside. Using extended fasting as an example, if you needed to sprint for your life (for whatever reason you want to use), muscle glycogen (and ATP) is used in that process to run like hell.
Gluconeogenesis can replete muscle glycogen in about 18-24 hours after those stores have been used, so to consistently deplete them in preparation for a refeed, you would have to consistently use them. Gluconeogenesis can use any substrate that can be broken down to create carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules.
As for measuring glycogen levels, unless you're taking muscle biopsies and measuring them in a lab, glucose levels only indicate free-floating glucose in the blood, which is not indicative of storage capacity.
For the purposes of a carb refeed, aside from leptin/hormonal regulation, is if you're following CKD, you want to be glycogen depleted from a total body perspective to prime the muscles for an anabolic response to stimulus and that glucose/insulin spike is what's going to be the catalyst for that.
But I'll bite.. what experiments are you running? What's your hypothesis, method, and data from the results you've seen?4 -
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