Diet breaks and loosening the reigns

Good conversation between myself and a few dieters on another forum:

I'll put their words in quotes:

So like clockwork, I'm getting bored with being on a "diet" and everything that goes with it... the constant focus on "weight loss" and even the "I just want to be healthy" mantra isn't really resonating with me much these days...

Now I know I'm not the only one here who has had this happen.... and believe me I'm trying the "just suck it up, and deal with it" approach.... but I think hearing how people deal with it might help...

So how do you handle it? Stick it out? Change it up?

Or...

Maybe even take a break?

I run a fitness consulting business. Which is only meaningful here to provide context. I am fortunate enough to deal with a lot of people. I don't care who I'm working with, pretty much everyone gets a diet break. When that break occurs and how it's structured depends on the person - their psychology and status on the spectrum of fat <----> lean.

In general though, every 6-12 weeks they're getting 7-10 days of non-dieting. This provides a huge psychological buffer. It also has the potential to offset some of the metabolic adaptations that can occur in response to dieting for extended periods of time.

If we zoom into the weekly level, all of my clients also get free meals and/or refeeds. The former is simply intelligent leisure eating where you're not stressing over energy/nutrient composition of the diet. The latter is very deliberate and punctuated periods of high carb feeding. Who gets what again depends on where they fall on that spectrum.

The fatter someone is, at least on a physiological level, the less they have to worry about offsetting those adaptations I mentioned above.

All I know is that I tried the "take a break" approach & have gained 7-8 lb. Now I'm having definite difficulty getting THAT back off & continuing toward my goal.

Which brings up a good point. Maybe two.

1) Breaks can't be pure compensation for all the hard work invested in weight loss over the previous months or whatever. I call it the teenager syndrome. But in many cases, people who diet with a lot of rigidity tend to rebel when they give themselves a break. Rather than a intelligently eating loose, they binge. I'm not suggesting this is what you've done, but it's worth mentioning that a break is not a free pass to gorge. It's simply a period to bring calories up around maintenance and to be a bit more liberal with food selection.

2) Don't sweat the scale too terribly much during a break. A lot of water storage can take place when you bring calories/carbs back up during a break. Often times I've seen where clients get softer during their breaks (mostly due to water) and then when they jump back into 'the program' they're noticeably leaner than ever before within a few days.

Steve: This was something that I've been curious about. I am no expert on diet and fitness, but I was always under the impression. that the starvation response to diet and its effect on metabolism can be altered by diet breaks.

But recently I was looking up what causes plateaus in diets and how to get past them, and I did not see any discussion of this. Maybe I wasn't finding the right articles, but everything I read said that one must either decrease their caloric intake or increase the amount of calories they burn --- or both. The articles I found said that often people at higher weights lose weight at fairly good pace because they burn more calories by virtue of having to carry around so much weight. It went on to say that when that weight is lowered, the body doesn't have to work as hard, so less calories are burned.

Can you point out any sources of information on what I quoted above?

I discuss starvation mode here:

http://body-improvements.com/resourc...starvationmode

And plateaus here:

http://body-improvements.com/resources/eat/#plateaus

They can be one and the same. Often times they're not. Give this a read and then, if you still have questions, I'll be happy to discuss them here.

Long story short though, even with diet breaks, you're not likely going to offset the adaptations many people term 'starvation mode.' Unless, that is, you go and regain all the weight you lost. There's something the research calls adaptive thermogenesis. It impacts everyone differently. But many people who lose considerable weight will register a lower than predicted energy expenditure due to adaptive thermogenesis. Part of this reduction will be from a depressed BMR. Another part of it will be from a reduction in what's referred to as NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis).

The links above will go into much better detail.

The last thing I would do (personally) is take a break. That would be VERY dangerous for me. First, I wouldn't want to undo all of the hard work I put in to lose the weight I have taken off. While its a long, slow and laborious effort to take off weight, it is so easy to very quickly put back on a lot of weight. It would really discourage me if I let myself do that. Also, taking a break would make it that much harder for me to get back on track because I'd be used to eating all sort of foods that I would, once again, be forced to give up once the break was over.

Someone mentioned above about undoing all of their hard earned progress by taking a break. That assuming that a break has to be deleterious to their results. Which isn't the case at all. People tend to have this false dichotomy that either they're gaining fat or they're losing fat. There's no middle road. Which is unfortunate, since in many cases inserting that middle road strategically along the way tends to do really good things psychologically and physiologically for a lot of folks.

Let's not forget that there are 3500 calories in 1 lb of fat. A typical diet break might be 7 days. In order to gain 2 lbs of fat, you'd have to eat 1,000 calories each of those days ABOVE AND BEYOND your maintenance.

That's easy to do I suppose if you go from dieting to binging. But that's not at all recommended. What we're talking about is going from a deficit to maintenance. Not huge, daily surpluses.

That was me. I agree with what you say and thank you for your advice. I guess part of my own concern over taking a break in my diet is not fully trusting myself to limit the break.

Well that's something entirely different and it's a very valid concern. The 'dieter's mindset' is a quirky thing. For many people, if they're not "on" they're "off." Again, no middle road.

Which is why breaks are a learned strategy. They have to be all about finding ways to sensibly loosen the reigns a bit without diving head first into the deep end of the calorie pool.

It reminds me of a good friend of mine who has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning. (dieting) He recently came home (maintenance) and couldn't adapt. He wanted to run people off the road with his car like they do in the humvees over in the desert. Or shoot anyone who happened to make him angry.

As a culture, we're brainwashed to diet endlessly. Rigidity abounds, and we're not very good at loosening it. When we do, again, we tend to overcompensate.

But there strategies. And my suggestion would be to at first treat these breaks with as much rigidity as you do your energy deficit periods. If you track calories and nutrients while dieting, do it while entering maintenance too. This way you can hold yourself accountable.

That's a start anyhow.

And yeah... I'm not a fan of tweaking something that's working perfectly fine now. If you're happy and things are heading in the right direction, who am I to tell you to change anything? Nobody. Keep it up. There are many roads that lead to Rome when it comes to successful fat loss.

My strategy is something I've fleshed out over many years of working with a lot of different people. It's certainly not the only way. And I certainly don't rigidly apply it to every single person I work with. There's flexibility for sure.

At the end of the day though, my primary objective is to not only teach someone how to lose fat. It's also to teach them live a lifestyle the promotes the maintenance of said fat loss. As a society, we're excellent at losing fat. We just downright suck and maintaining it. People lose the same 20, 40, 80 lbs over and over and over again. And that typically doesn't happen with my approach to things, which is why I stick with it.

I am starting to trust myself more and more now that I have been at the diet for a couple of months now. At first I was treating myself as an addict (which I believe I really am when it comes to food).

I'm not opposed to that idea. I mean, neurochemically certain foods can elicit responses similar to those of drug use. And this doesn't even factor in the psychology side of things. Our bodies are very efficient machines, mentally and physically, at seeking tasty food and eating lots of it.

It's in the very evolutionarily derived fiber that kept our cave dwelling forefathers (mothers) alive during times where food was scarce. The concept of excess food and insane energy density is very novel in the grand scheme of things.

When I first started I avoided situations which would tempt me to deviate from my diet. For instance, when my co-workers would go to lunch, I would only go if they went to a place which would be easy for me to stay on my diet. I would avoid, for example, Italian restaurants because I would be tempted to eat the pizza, pasta, garlic rolls, etc. But now there is no place I avoid when we go out to eat. The other day we went to Mexican restaurant. It was hard to find something on the menu I could have, but I did it. (I did have to peel a layer of melted cheese that was curiously placed on top of my salad, but when I got past that, it was lettuce, tomatoes, garbanzo beans, grilled chicken and veggies. I did not eat the fried flour tortilla bowl). So I definitively have more confidence in myself now than I did when I first started. My concern is being able to maintain my discipline - because my track record has not been so good in this regard.

Good for you. And be patient. You'll get better. Grooves are formed by grooving them. And grooving them requires a lot of consistent work. Work that sometimes goes against the grain for a while. The good news is that the direction of the grain tends to shift with enough effort. And if you can stick with it long enough, things will become more natural and automatic.

At that point, you'll learn how to deviate without feeling guilty and without loosing control. There's light at the end of the tunnel and it sounds like you're figuring that out.