Has anyone else read this?

Some interesting ideas.
The first and most simple idea is that of the "Free Meal". This is a single meal, once or twice a week, that breaks your diet. This is mostly psychological, so you don't have any sense of deprivation. The free meal ultimately will have little impact on your overall progress, and will likely help your long-term commitment. He identifies that the timeframe isn't really long enough to affect the various hormones involved in the physiological response to dieting. In general you should wait several weeks after starting a diet before considering a Free Meal, so you've transitioned to that change. And they should not be on consecutive days.

The second concept is that of the Structured Refeed. The structured refeed are deliberate periods of high-carb overfeeding that last 5 hours up to 3 days (it's pretty prescribed based on how much you exercise and how much you have to lose how long to do it). Basically, you are carb-loading every 2-3 hours. Focus is also on lower fat, with lean protein. Then you return to normal eating plan. Intent here is both psychological and physiological. It's very precise though on what you should eat for macros, how frequently to eat, and even how frequently to do a re-feed. To me, this seemed pretty complicated on how to follow.

He also presents the idea of "Full Diet Break". These are 10-14 days off your diet. Based on how much body fat you have, he identifies how frequently a Full Diet Break is recommended (for me, it would be every 3-4 months). It also seemed pretty complicated on how to follow. Basically specific macros to consume throughout this period. I did pick up though, that during this period you should not exceed your maintenance level calories. That spurred me on to figure that out -- so even if I have a crazy day, I'll plan to stay within maintenance.

So for me, the Free Meal is probably the only thing I will consider. I like this idea though. I like that you can incorporate this in, and if something happens that throws your day off, it's just part of your plan -- vs feeling like you've failed.


One of the studies he references is "Wing RR and RW Jeffrey. Prescribed 'Breaks' as a means to disrupt weight control efforts. Obes Res (2003) 11: 287-291).

The study was set up to find out why people go off the dieting bandwagon. The researchers wanted to determine what behavioral things happen when people go off the diet for some period and why they have trouble going back on.

So the subjects were first put on a typical diet meant to cause weight loss. Then the subjects were told to go off the diet for either 2 weeks or 6 weeks so that the researchers could see what happened when people fell off their diet but hard and started regaining weight. Here's what happened: not only did the subjects not regain very much weight, but they had almost no trouble going right back onto their diet when the 2 (or 6) weeks was over. So the scientists completely and utterly failed to reach their goal of studying what they wanted to study.

Basically they made an almost accidental discovery which raised another set of questions: why didn't the subjects regain a ton of weight and why did they have little problem returning to their diet? That is, knowing that most people who go off of a diet for even a short period will balloon up, regaining weight rapidly, and fall off their diet, what made this study different?
...
The key difference why the study failed so miserably: control. Psychologically, feeling like the break is now under your control, or that it's part of your overall plan, makes it far easier to not feel like the diet is completely blown and get back on the diet when things settle down".

Even the subtlety of calling it a "Free Meal" vs a "Cheat Meal" is very powerful. One makes you feel that this is something positive -- it's just part of your diet to have that meal. The other that it's something you've done wrong.

Anyway - the book is a real pain in the *kitten* to get, so I wanted to share some concepts. Good luck! Hope it helps someone.