Of refeeds and diet breaks
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ZOMG guys, we're a Sticky!!!! We've finally made it
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Nice! That's great news. Thanks for starting this thread, @Nony_Mouse. I've learned a lot here.7
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Nony_Mouse wrote: »ZOMG guys, we're a Sticky!!!! We've finally made it
Congratulations! Such a wonderful resource for the community!5 -
Nony_Mouse wrote: »ZOMG guys, we're a Sticky!!!! We've finally made it
Congratulations! This is such a helpful thread, I'm glad to see that it's placed for easier reference.6 -
Yay to stickydom!
I will be a bit more cautious about going for a diet break on schedule next time (I'm a fat chick, and I lurk at the edge of the protocol, every 12 weeks or whatever it is, so I didn't really need one at 8 weeks, I was experimenting). It's been murder trying to get back on track this time. Next time I am going to try and budget in things I am craving until at least 12 weeks. I also have a much better idea of how to do this now
In better fitness related news, I did 18000 tough steps mostly around a RSPB site last weekend, and I coped. Given I started this journey to improve cardiovascular health, this is huge for me (6 months ago I wouldn't have even attempted it). My husband was basically all "who are you and what have you done with my wife". I'll live with the month or two's delay to goal. This is bloody priceless.
I'm also hovering a pound over my lowest weight pre diet break, so I'm not doing that badly. When I get back on the horse after Easter I am expecting all the entertaining stress / cortisol gain and glycogen gain to come off, after all. 11 -
I'm continuing on with my 1800 this week, but I think I messed myself up yesterday. It was Easter and I really chowed down on the ham, which has resulted in a lot of water weight gain this morning. I don't know if I'll have it all gone by weigh day on Thursday, so I might have to wait another week to get an idea of where maintenance is for me!
Oh well - I got a lot of protein in yesterday! lol8 -
Good morning! I hope everyone had a Happy Easter!
I just finished up a 16 day diet break. I'm packing 3-4 more pounds than before my diet break. I hope I'll have most of it off this week with my deficit. This diet break was kinda crazy for me. I was thrown into it by circumstances and so I just went with it. The first 2 days after the initial start I settled into it and maintained about a 2# surplus for about 9 days. Then something happened and I found it a little harder to control. I would start out the day good, but about mid-day I would think, 'wow I still have 'x' amount of calories for the day left' and so I would have a little snack and then another and before the day was gone, I was over. bummer.
I think this is another reason that when I hit my 2nd 10% goal (10# (well now 14#) to go), I will take an extended diet break. 2-3 months. I gotta learn how to control this thing. If I can't control and maintain at the heavier calories, how am I going to control when I have less calories to eat?12 -
Hurray for stickiness!
Just for the collective thoughts in regard to the blips from Easter or just recent diet breaks, it's part of the process. More likely than not, the first diet break, or first few, are going to be the learning curve. The relief that comes from no longer being on a deficit can easily be interpreted to be some days of unbridled feeding. Don't beat yourself up over it. The diet break is the diet break for a reason.
Remember that you have long-term goals, so repeated cycles of deficit and diet break are going to happen. Being too rigid leads to an explosive reaction to the diet break. Being too relaxed in the deficit may actually not put you in a deficit overall.
So, the happy medium is somewhere that allows you to eat as much as you can that allows you to still lose weight. This is the most optimal chance at maintaining a deficit allowed for your body type. Just as a reminder, the larger you are, the longer you can maintain a deficit. The smaller you are, the shorter your deficit will be.
Example: a 250 lb individual with 35% bf might be at a deficit with 2750kcal, which should perceivably be sustainable until they stop losing weight. Say they lose 30 lbs (assume pure fat) and at 220 at 26% bf , they don't lose at that calorie level, so a new deficit of say 2400 is needed to continue weight loss. As long as you're not feeling the effects of hormonal dysregulation, you can keep up this cycle up to 12-16 weeks or something before a diet break is needed.
Conversely, a 180 lb individual with 20% bf might need 1980kcal to be at a deficit, but at 165 lbs at 13% bf, they may not see weight loss at 1800kcal, and if they dropped it to 1600kcal it would work for a while, but as they get leaner, there's only so many calories left before it becomes unrealistic, so they could only do 1600kcal for 10 days before taking a week long break or they may need to average 1600kcal/day on a weekly basis (alternating days of maintenance and deficit).
These are just really rough examples to get my point across, but hopefully it makes sense. The point is that the diet break food isn't really going to be drastically different from normal dieting food where most of your food quality should be coming from whole food with just an extra allowance or two of something you've been cutting from your deficit diet - or the calorie dense equivalent of diet food; i.e. whole eggs instead of egg whites.14 -
Just a quick follow up to reinforce the notion of why focusing on pure scale weight isn't always conducive as a measurement to success.10
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So. Thanks to a new GP who actually listened, we figured out what the problem was with Me and My Thyroid. It was similar to what I was suspecting, but more complex, in that apparently after years of calorie restriction, my body got *pissed*. The suspicion is that it started making reverse T3 instead of T3, and everything got screwed up from there. This is typically seen in individuals who are *actually* anorexic, instead of my atypical diagnosis, but is not unheard of. (Cue my being pissed, because my stupid body gained weight when it put into place a safety net that typically doesn't activate until you're actually starving, as opposed to my "I'm gonna just burn everything off" slimmer-side-of-normal weight status.)
In response, for a while, I'd been dropping to <1000 calories a day, with <900 the past few weeks. Because to my little head, still, the response to "I can't lose weight" is still "I can't trust calories and you can't make me eat. But I'm going to go run 5 miles anyway."
But today, after my GP was all "I think we need to evaluate whether it's time to go inpatient, and that's my preference" I ran some trendline and r-squared analyses ... and saw that much to my surprise, I actually lost more weight when my deficit was smaller.
So I told her I'd agree to changing my synthroid again (she's concerned that I'm now hyper, according to T4 and TSH, which she says isn't helping the rT3) and although I also have an appointment with a functional medicine doc to discuss the rT3 and T3 issue (she had said to get one if I wanted, but that she wasn't going to prescribe T3, and neither was my endo) that I was willing to try eating more if those same trendlines continue.
I'm at a point where my more structured clothes don't fit anymore, and we know it has to be water, since you can't build fat in a deficit, so something has to change. And I don't have the resources to be hospitalized. So I need to play along with their game and at least try it.
It scares the crap out of me, but I changed my calorie goal to 1800, and I guess I try it from here.17 -
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How long does it typically take to drop water weight from a high carb/high sodium day? I ask because it always seems to take forever for me to lose water weight, which in turn plays havoc with my weekly weigh ins. I over-did it with the ham this weekend, and my weight spiked up 8 lbs from Friday to Monday. It's coming back off, but very, very slowly. I'm trying to figure out where my maintenance calories are, but the water weight is making it extremely difficult to evaluate. Tomorrow is supposed to be my weigh in day, but from what I saw this morning, I'm not going to have all the water weight off to be able to see where I'm at.
Right now, I'm eating 1800 calories a day and have been sticking to that limit very closely. In using the formula Anubus provided on page 194, my maintenance calorie level should be somewhere between 2771 and 3198 if I'm at 50% bf, or 2420 to 2793 if I'm at 40% bf (using the 1.3 - 1.5 sedentary to lightly active modifiers). One problem I have is that I have no real idea of what my %bf is, but I'm assuming its around 40-50% as I'm not very active and haven't really started much of an exercise program yet behind daily chores. And since I was very, very obese, I've got a lot of extra skin hanging around which I would think would also be a problem in trying to evaluate %bf - right?
The 2420 says I should be losing around 1.5 lbs a week on an 1800 calorie week limit, on average. And I think I am somewhere in that neighborhood, but I can't get a true trend established because of the water weight. I did lose weight in the last 2 weeks, BUT my weight has been pretty erratic in those 2 weeks due to TOM and then this weekend, and now its popped back up to 268, so I'm having trouble getting an idea of the rate I'm losing at in order to figure out for sure where my maintenance is and how much above the 1800 I should raise my limit.
I check my weight daily, but weigh in and record it only once a week, and I know it fluctuates during the week, but I'm usually okay with that as long as the general trend is down. However, many times, I'll be trending down nicely until weight record day, when it will suddenly bounce up 2 or 3 lbs, which in turn kills my record for the week. And then it will take several days to get it back down.
My goal is to find maintenance and eat at that or slightly above it for 2 weeks, if I can ever establish where it is. I'm trying to establish a trend line to help, but the water weight is interfering with that. Do you have any advice on how to get the water weight to level off? I'm trying to eat lower carb, but I'm afraid that might be exasperating the constipation issues I'm dealing with (sorry for the TMI). I've been focusing on fiber intake and trying to get the recommended values in, but that isn't helping, either.
I thought about just going ahead and raising my maintenance up to the 2500 (the sedentary, 40% bf calorie calculation), but I'm not 100% that would be true maintenance or surplus, and I don't want to accidentally remain in deficit. And I want to be sure that I'm eating at the right deficit level when I go back to deficit.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
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It takes me forever to lose water weight, and I shift around a lot, especially now that I'm back to working with weights every other day. This is one of the reasons I stopped weighing and started focusing on habits and compliance ... because my water shifts are bad.
BTW, I'm back to higher carbs now. Over 200 grams a day. I started listening to new audio books and well, just got more busy walking listening to them. I needed fuel. I think increasing the weights added to that too. I feel a lot better. The great thing about exchanging fat for carbs is that for the calories you don't have to cut too many grams of fat to do this. I'm still getting a whole avocado a day at lunch, which keeps me in a happy place.
Anyway, when I eat at maintenance, since I've been dieting so long, I allow for a slight adaptation factor and some small things I don't log that would possibly be in the neighborhood of around 50 calories, so I err on the side of caution and cut slightly below what my Fitbit is saying. But I'm at a very different phase of dieting than you are, so I would likely err on the side of being optimistic about the numbers in your situation.3 -
Sodium seems to be 2-4 days for most. Depends on if you were going much lower than body desires, and then went way over.
Glucose depends.
If very active and body has been trained to store alot in the muscles for workouts, and you top them all off with some big carb meals, and then go back to normal being active - 2 days possible if back to deficit.
If big carb meals proceed many lazy days like you got sick - you aren't using those muscle stores - could last a long while even in a deficit.
Since those stores can't be put back into bloodstream, and the body doesn't always call on muscle stores first even when using muscles briefly, they could sit awhile.
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The typical bodybuilding style of getting rid of bloat after a high carb/sodium day is to flush with a lot of water, increase potassium via Lite Salt or potassium chloride for seasoning food, reduce sodium/carbs, and a lot of LISS.
Not that anyone needs to do that, but it's a thing. Bodybuilders and physique athletes, and by extension physique chasers, have a horrible binge/purge cycle, speaking from experience.
Worst case scenario is that it may take up to 2 weeks for your scale weight to return to baseline, if that's your current metric of measurement. Every 1 day of eating blown way out of proportion (full on binge) = ~1 week to return to baseline, so for 2 days of complete overfeeding, it could potentially take 2 weeks.
The optimal and ideal realistic approach would be to just consider Easter as a refeed, go back to your normal routine and just allow yourself to be as consistent as possible from here on out. Daily weigh-ins take a mental toll, and menstruation plays a part in that. Lyle recommends picking an anchor week out of the month as your measurement of progress (in his Womens Book):
This causes several problems. The first is that it can exacerbate the normal issues many have with the
scale. The woman who is already fixated on the small day-to-day changes can be driven mad by the
weekly changes as she will be adhering to her diet and exercise program and almost over night, her weight
spikes by several pounds or kilograms. Hopefully readers will avoid at least this issue now that I have
pointed out what those types of fluctuations mean but I've even known female trainees who, despite
knowing full well the difference between body composition and body weight, still getting affected by these
types of weight shifts. Even taking a rolling average as I recommended above doesn't eliminate this because
the average value and trend line will be shifting up and down each week. Within any given week, the
rolling average will be useful but from week to week it will not be. An added issue is that it makes tracking
changes more difficult for the normally cycling woman compared to women with most of the hormonal
modifiers or men since comparing different weeks of the cycle to one another won't give any accurate
indication of what is happening in response to her diet or exercise program.
To better illustrate this, I've shown a hypothetical month of average weekly body weights and how
they might change in different weeks of the cycle along with month to month. These numbers are for
illustration only and any individual woman may see smaller or larger changes from week to week.
Phase | Month 1 | Month 2 | Month 3
Early Follicular | 143 lbs | 141 lbs (-2) | 140 lbs (-1)
Late Follicular | 147 lbs | 145 lbs (-2) | 144 lbs (-1)
Early Luteal | 145 lbs | 143 lbs (-2) | 142 lbs (-1)
Late Luteal/PMS | 150 lbs | 148 lbs (-2) | 147 lbs (-1)
You can see that average body weight is changing from week to week during the month with the
lowest value occurring in the early follicular phase and the highest in the late luteal phase. I might go so
far as to suggest women avoid any measurement during the last week of the cycle due to the large increase
that can occur which can be extremely psychologically stressful. In practice that would mean only tracking
for three weeks out of the month. Perhaps the bigger point of the table is that comparing any individual
week of the cycle to any other individual week is rather pointless due to the water weight shifts that are
occurring. Weight goes up from the early to late follicular phase, goes down to a different number in the
early luteal before increasing again in the late luteal phase. The week-to-week shifts in hormones and body
weight make any comparisons useless. The same holds for other body composition methods.
At the same time, you can see that it is possible to compare one week of the month to the same week
of the following month. Bodyweight or BF% could be compared between the early follicular phase of
Week 1 and the early follicular phase of Week 2 and this will give some indication of what is actually
happening over time. The same would hold for the late follicular to late follicular, early luteal to early
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luteal and late luteal to late luteal. So from Month 1 to Month 2, body weight goes down 2 lbs in each
week of the phase. The numbers are all still different from each other but the absolute change is the same.
I've shown a similar result from Month 2 to Month 3. The changes might not be this consistent in the sense
that every week might not show the same 1 or 2 pound loss and I'd expect the late luteal phase to be the
most variable. But overall, comparing only like weeks of the cycle to each other will give a much better
indication of what is happening than trying to compare weeks within the same month.
This does raise the question of what a woman's "real" weight or BF% both for her own peace of mind
as well as within the context of the calculations that will appear late in this book. That is, which week's
numbers should a woman use when setting up her diet or protein intake or what have you? In one sense it
doesn't matter so long as the same week of the month is used to make any changes. In another sense, since
any increase in water weight from week to week isn't "real" in the sense of representing a true change in
body composition, measuring in a week where water retention is known to occur makes no sense. As water
retention is likely to be at its lowest during the early follicular phase, I'd generally recommend using the
average body weight, BF% estimate, from that week. Usually weight will be at its lowest roughly 3-4 days
following menstruation and this would give the best indicator of a woman's true weight. There is another
reason that using the early follicular phase to set up a diet is important related to when it's best for the
normally cycling woman to actually start her diet that I will discuss in a later chapter.6 -
Dietary related (carbs or sodium) for me is usually 3-4 days. When I start getting twitchy, I'll look at the highest sodium day, and count out 4 days from that last high sodium day -- and 9/10 times, it resolves itself on day 4.
Travel is usually a week.
Race weight = usually two or three weeks.
Mid-cycle and cyclical = 10 days1 -
I had a "refeed" or "binge" on Easter. I ate a lot of bad bad food that day, and its taken me longer than normal for my body to get rid of the water weight. I hold onto water very easily, so this isn't a big surprise. Just annoying. I feel like a fat slob but I know that I probably only gained 1-3 pounds of fat that day. Oh well. Back to the deficit life.0
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I had a "refeed" or "binge" on Easter. I ate a lot of bad bad food that day, and its taken me longer than normal for my body to get rid of the water weight. I hold onto water very easily, so this isn't a big surprise. Just annoying. I feel like a fat slob but I know that I probably only gained 1-3 pounds of fat that day. Oh well. Back to the deficit life.
Unless you ate >3500-10500kcal over maintenance, fat accumulation isn't going to be that rapid, if it's any consolation. But yes, just go back to your normal routine. It corrects itself over time as long as there aren't frequent spikes to hinder it.7 -
Hey diet break crowd, hope everyone's doing well this morning/afternoon/evening. I was just thinking about you all because I've scheduled my second diet break, woooo! Assuming that the plan continues to chug along as expected, I should start dipping under 150 in early June, putting me 15 pounds away from my first goal weight at the top of normal BMI. I'm planning a vacation for the back half of June and realized that if I was going to eat at maintenance for five days, I might as well just stretch that out to 15 and get a real break in. I also like the idea of starting maintenance a week or so before heading out of town so that I can get used to my new normal a bit.
I'm also planning on starting a new strength program in June, probably Strong Lifts, as I'll have a hot cash infusion sufficient to upgrade my home set-up and pay for a few sessions with a personal trainer. The timing of the vacation isn't amazing for that, but so it goes. Depending on how I feel about my body at that point, I may extend the diet break for a month or so and see how that feels with lifting. I haven't felt like I'm suffering lifting in a deficit, but I really have no point of comparison, and my first 2-3 weeks were largely light form work anyhow. Just to toot my genetic horn a little, I carry my weight pretty well (now that my wine belly has been significantly reduced), and if I can get my waist-to-hip ratio down, I don't really GAF what the scale says.
I don't know if any of you have popped your head in the "can I reduce my waist" thread, but it's gotten me thinking about how accurate WHR is for people with more distinct waist tapers or lack thereof. I'm 21 pounds overweight and certainly overfat (maybe 35-40% bf by my eyeball), but my WHR is normal using my natural waist, and obese using my belly. /shrug
Enough babbling!9 -
That's all good news. WHR is actually a good metric to use (any measurement, really, in conjunction with scale weight) to better determine if any scale weight loss is correlating with measurements. That and some physicians like to use WHR to predict health risk susceptibility.
Plus if you're strength training, if measurements and scale weight are trending down, but strength is steady/improving, it's a good sign that you are losing primarily fat and retaining muscle/gaining strength. Outside of novice gains or getting back into training after a layoff, fat loss and hypertrophy muscle gain are almost mutually exclusive. Either way, even in a deficit, do not reduce the intensity of your heaviest lifting set. Say for Stronglifts, if your next scheduled lift is +5 lbs for your working set, then if you can hit it for 1-2 sets but need to reduce the weight for subsequent sets, that's still fine.
In fact, in a deficit, training volume might decrease, but that shouldn't deter you from trying to still get stronger. Which is why I tend to use reverse pyramid training (RPT) during a deficit. Warm up to a top set of my heaviest intensity for a prescribed amount of reps (3-5), then reduce load by -10% on following sets but add reps (5-8) > -10% for 8-12 reps.
If you're unable to maintain the intensity, then it might be time to reconsider the programming or energy intake.
For now, do what you're doing in terms of the plan and enjoy your diet break and upcoming vacation.2
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