Should you or should you not take diet breaks?
Let's talk about it.
First, let's break down what diet breaks are exactly.
The strategy is quite simple and if you've looked at weight loss content in the past
few years, you've probably already know a bit about it.
To start, for weight loss, no matter the nutrition strategy you prescribe to, which there are
plenty, a calorie deficit is required.
It doesn't have to be intentional, and some diets are better than others in unintentionally
reducing calories, but in the end, weight loss starts and ends with a calorie deficit.
And, normally, the way we're taught is to sustain this calorie deficit all the way until
we achieve our desired weight.
There might be some hiccups here and there, but the trend is mostly downwards the entire
time.
However, with diet breaks, we kinda challenge this notion of having a sustained deficit.
And of course, based on the name, it means taking breaks by interspersing your traditional
long-term sustained deficit diet with moments of loosening up some of your dietary restrictions.
Sounds pretty awesome, right?
Who wouldn't want to take a break from their boring diets, especially if taking a break
is actually better for you?
But first, where did the idea of breaks being better for you came from anyway?
Well, that's actually a bit of a funny story.
In 2003, a pair of researchers in Rhode Island set out to achieve one thing, and that's to
help people prevent weight regain, where people regain the weight that they previously lost.
And to achieve that, they first wanted to understand a bit more about weight regain.
So they decided to run a new experiment where the focus was to intentionally cause weight
regain in subjects trying to lose weight.
And the way they decided to induce weight regain was by prescribing these subjects with,
you guessed it, diet breaks.
During these breaks, subjects were told to completely stop their dieting efforts and
just eat however they feel like.
Their thought process was that these breaks will mimic the events some people experience
when they relapse from their diet.
And if that happens, then there should be no doubt that subjects will start gaining
weight.
But when the results came in, much to their surprise, the results showed…
“No gain.”
“No gain?”
And from then on, the interest in diet breaks as a dietary strategy erupted, and other researchers
have attempted to take it a bit further to see if diet breaks can actually be better
than conventional dietary strategies.
Now fast-forward 20 years, we should and do have a good set of data to help us figure
things out, but still, today, the general feeling for diet breaks have been pretty mixed.
Based on where you get your information, you might believe they're a waste of time, or
they are indeed super important for weight loss.
Now, before we dive into the actual science, let's go over a few of the supposed benefits
that diet break supporters tend to claim.
One is that diet breaks can help reverse the negative impacts long-term dieting and weight
loss have on hunger-modulating hormones, like leptin.
Another claim is that dieting and weight loss can also cause your metabolism to slow down
due to metabolic adaptations, and taking diet breaks can reduce this effect.
Also, if this is true, then it means that diet breaks can technically accelerate weight
loss.
And another common one is that diet breaks can help you better stick with your diet,
since you also get a mental reprieve from the boring monotony of calorie restriction.
Surface-wise, it all sounds good, but we don't just stop at the surface around here.
When we dive a bit further, we'll see that diet breaks are probably…
a bit overrated.
Now, it's also good to clarify the differences between diet breaks and two other similar
strategies, known as a cheat meals and refeeds.
Cheat meals are simply singular meals that do not adhere to the restrictions of your
diet.
Refeeds are single or multiple days of the week when intake levels are higher than your
deficit days.
Usually, cheat meals are used just for the sake of taking a break from dieting to enjoy
yourself for one solid meal.
Refeeds tend to have a more strategic use, typically to provide more carbs on your training
days, but some do believe that it can also provide similar hormonal and metabolic benefits
as diet breaks.
As far as diet breaks itself, it's defined as breaks lasting several days, several weeks,
and even months at a time.
And, during the breaks, your calorie intake can be fully unrestricted, or elevated up
to maintenance levels, or elevated to where you're still in a deficit but just a smaller
one.
As you can see, diet breaks can have quite a lot of variety and unfortunately, it's a
clear obstacle that researchers have to manage.
Luckily, while I was rummaging through the studies, I did notice a few common outcomes
across different diet break structures.
And again, it seems to paint a picture that diet breaks are a bit hit-and-miss.
First, the majority of the data did further support the unexpected 2003 findings that
diet breaks, compared to continuous dieting, lead to similar levels of weight loss, as
well as fat loss.
But obviously, similar weight loss also means that diet breaks do not accelerate weight
loss further as some might believe.
Now, there is one study, the MATADOR study in 2018, that found diet breaks can indeed
enhance weight loss, and it's probably the one study people often mention when making
this claim.
And when we look at the results, it does seem pretty convincing.
They even showed that slowing metabolism, measured as resting energy expenditure, can
be somewhat mitigated with diet breaks.
But there are a few things about this paper that leaves me scratching my head a bit.
First, the way they presented the metabolic benefits is a bit strange.
They used an adjusted formula for resting energy expenditure rather than using simple
absolute figures, which when we look at those, the metabolic benefits no longer exist.
But even for the adjusted figures, it's strange how in the diet break group, metabolic rates
actually nosedived in the first four weeks and then incredibly rebounded in the subsequent
weeks, which, from our understanding, really doesn't make much sense.
If breaks can indeed help with metabolic rates, then the initial drop should be much more
gradual but instead, it falls significantly faster than even the continuous dieting group.
As for the increased weight loss, which is great, but there is one big thing to consider,
and that's time.
For the continuous diet subjects, the diet took 16 weeks to complete.
For the group adding the diet breaks, the whole thing ended up taking 30 weeks to complete.
That's about 90% increase in dieting time with only about a 45% increase in weight loss.
That's not bad, of course, but not stellar given the time differences.
There's also other things to consider about this, like the moderately high dropout rate,
relying on the subjects to weigh themselves at home, having subjects eating at home unmonitored
rather than in a lab setting, the lack of measuring metabolic rates during breaks, and
most importantly, subsequent research did not come to the same conclusions.
Instead, two more recent studies, one in 2023 and one in 2021 known as the ICECAP trial,
found that diet breaks provided no additional benefits in weight loss, body composition,
and resting metabolic rate.
The ICECAP trial went a bit further and found no between-group differences in leptin, testosterone,
IGF-1, ghrelin, and even sleep.
Essentially, the claims that diet breaks can enhance weight loss, improve metabolism, and
improve hormones, do not seem to exist in the scientific literature.
Quite a breaky bummer.
But that does leave us with one more thing, and that's the potential psychological benefits
of diet breaks.
And for this, it's still a bit mixed, but things do kinda point towards the direction
that diet breaks can be useful.
In the same 2023 study, although physiological outcomes were similar, subjects given diet
breaks did report lower scores of disinhibition, or the desire to overeat.
This might mean that diet breaks can help deal with things like cravings or frustrations
with their diet, which can ultimately translate to greater weight loss success even if it
takes longer to achieve it.
Now, in fairness, the same study also found that diet breaks did not improve motivation
nor self-reported ease of sticking to their respective diets.
Kind of interesting.
But other studies examining other effects, like hunger ratings, diet satisfaction, and
eating desires, all seem to slightly favor diet breaks.
So in a psychological sense, which is nothing to scoff at, diet breaks might be worth your
time if you're willing to invest the extra time.
But in an overall sense, especially in the sense of weight loss efficiency, diet breaks,
not a lot going on for it there.
And before you guys go crazy in the comments, yes, diet breaks can be used for more than
just weight loss.
But in these other cases, the use for them is often much clearer, like using diet breaks
or refeeds during a recomp, where it makes sense to support your training days with higher
calorie intakes to drive muscle growth.
And it really goes for training in general, increasing intake, especially carbs, for performance
is a no-brainer.
But reallly, diet breaks are usually mentioned in the context of weight loss.
So, right now, if you ask me whether you should take diet breaks or not, first, there's nothing
wrong with taking breaks during moments when maintaining your diet is really tough.
Moments like going on vacation, a party, a fancy dinner, or you just had a really sh*tty
day and you can miss me with that salad for dinner noise, then by all means take a small
reprieve and recalibrate once you're ready again.
But in the overall general sense, I am kiiiinda leaning towards diet breaks being…
meh.
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break-loving friends.
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As always, thank you for watching and don't forget to GET YOUR PROTEIN!
Even on breaks.