The Art of Diet Breaks: Avoid Plateaus, Burnout and Weight Rebound
If your primary goal revolves around shedding excess body fat and you’re aiming to lose more than 1-2 pounds per week over an extended period of time - I'm here to introduce you to a transformative strategy that could revolutionize your weight loss journey.
This strategy is going to save you from…
Frustration
Feeling deprived and restricted
Losing your social life
Suppressed metabolism
Low energy
Poor performance
Burnout
Rebound weight gain
So what’s the strategy?
Diet breaks.
This blog post is going to explain not only why diet breaks are so beneficial, but also take you through exactly how to implement them!
What are diet breaks, and why are they important?
Diet breaks are intentional periods of time when you’re not in a calorie deficit. Diet breaks are an ideal time to reverse diet (see my recent blog post on this here) to prepare for another intentional fat loss phase.
Typically, when people set out with a weight loss goal, they attempt to do it all in one go - often with an indefinite time period e.g. ‘I want to lose 50lbs’, or an unrealistic one e.g. ‘I want to lose 30lbs in 12 weeks’.
These approaches come with several risks: psychologically, being constantly in ‘diet mode’ can be exhausting, and the longer you go for, the harder it becomes to stay motivated. You can feel restricted and unable to enjoy a ‘normal’, balanced lifestyle, including social occasions and unplanned meals.
Physically, you risk nutritional deficiencies, low energy levels, and a declining metabolic rate - meaning that the longer you diet for, the harder it is, physically, to continue losing weight, and keep that weight off.
Pushing too far into this ‘diet zone’ - whether through dieting for too long, dieting too aggressively, or a combination, increases the likelihood that when your diet is over - (either by choice because you ‘finish’ it, or because you pushed too hard that you ‘lost control’) - you’ll experience a rebound - regaining the weight you lost (and often even more), and having a worsened relationship with food. Often people report feeling out of control, or like it’s ‘all or nothing’ when it comes to food.
This is where diet breaks come in.
Interspersing structured periods of being in an intentional calorie deficit with deliberate diet breaks can help you strike the balance between heading towards your fat loss and health goals, whilst enjoying life and avoiding excessive stress. By taking a deliberate break, you can actually lower that ‘threshold’ for rebounding, allowing you to successfully reach your long-term fat loss goals.
Let’s look in depth at exactly how diet breaks can benefit your health, happiness, performance…and long-term results!
Benefits of Diet Breaks
Avoiding Burnout
Losing a substantial amount of weight can be a challenging and sometimes exhausting process. Taking breaks along the way allows your mind and body to recover, preventing burnout. It's not a sprint; it's a marathon, and pacing yourself can make the journey more sustainable.
Metabolic Adaptation:
Excessive or prolonged calorie restriction may lead to metabolic adaptation, where your metabolism temporary slows in response to a calorie deficit, making it increasingly difficult to continue losing weight. Incorporating diet breaks helps mitigate this effect by providing periods of increased calorie intake, which help to restore your metabolic rate to baseline levels, so that your body is responsive to any future reductions in calorie intake.
Psychological Resilience:
Constantly being in a calorie deficit can take a toll on your mental well-being. Being in a deficit, you have less energy for all physiological functions, including your brain function! This means you may experience reduced focus, mood swings, and other cognitive side effects. The mental effort of feeling in a ‘diet mentality’ can progressively take its toll too. Diet breaks provide a mental breather, reducing this stress and supporting a healthier relationship with food and a more positive outlook on your journey.
Preserving Muscle Mass:
Healthy, sustainable weight loss should focus on fat loss and muscle retention or even gain - aiming for as high a proportion of weight loss as possible to come from fat. Weight loss that is too rapid, or pushes you to more and more extreme measures to keep the scale moving puts you at greater risk of losing muscle - because as you excessively deprive your body of energy from food, it resorts to breaking down muscle tissue for energy. Intermittent diet breaks, with adequate protein intake, minimise these risks as they support healthy, long-term weight loss, ensuring that the weight you lose is primarily fat. This contributes to a more toned and healthier physique.
Lifestyle Adaptation:
Life happens, and sometimes it's challenging to maintain a strict diet regimen. Taking breaks allows you to adapt your weight loss journey to your lifestyle, making it more realistic and achievable in the long run. You can plan diet phases and diet breaks around your life events to create a sustainable approach that fits into your life and aligns with your priorities.
Preventing Plateaus:
Continuous calorie restriction can lead to weight loss plateaus, in part due to metabolic adaptation, and also due to a tendency towards decreased adherence the longer you diet for. Diet breaks are a pro-active response towards plateaus, allowing periods of reverse dieting, and mitigating the frustration that can be brought on by unwanted plateaus. These periods can be used to boost metabolism, increase muscle mass, and focus on training hard, whilst also putting you in a stronger position to continue with fat loss following your diet break.
Practicing Maintenance:
One of the biggest challenges isn’t losing weight - it’s maintaining weight loss. Diet breaks give you a chance along your journey to practice maintenance. By gradually increasing your calories towards maintenance, you allow your body to ‘settle’ at its new weight, whilst practicing the skills and habits that you’ll need to maintain this weight loss long-term. Diet breaks are a time where you can focus on healthy eating habits, your relationship with food, and even experimenting with a more intuitive and flexible approach to tracking. Practicing these during your weight loss journey will enhance your success in maintaining your weight loss once you’ve achieved your initial weight loss goals and enter into maintenance long-term.
How to Implement Diet Breaks
Diet breaks are not about waiting for a plateau then re-actively calling it a ‘break’. They’re about giving yourself parameters, and structuring your nutrition in a way that aligns with both your goals and your lifestyle. Here’s 5 steps to implementing diet breaks in your weight loss journey:
Step 1
Using 1-2lbs/week, or 0.5-1kg/week as a healthy rate of weight loss, calculate how much time it would take to lose your desired amount of weight in a healthy manner. This doesn’t need to be an exact figure - in fact, I encourage you to consider a weight range, rather than a specific goal weight, as this can promote an unhealthy relationship with the scale. Also note that the leaner you are to start with, and the smaller you are, the slower your rate of healthy weight loss - 2lbs a week may be healthy for 1 person, but too rapid for a leaner and/or smaller individual.
Step 2
Structure this into blocks of 6-12 weeks of ‘dieting’ interspersed with diet breaks that are AT LEAST as long as the diet periods. Plan your diet phases and diet breaks around your lifestyle - for example, going on holiday? Have a month that contains lots of birthdays or other celebrations? This would be an ideal time to plan in a diet break.
Tip: aim to make it as EASY as possible for yourself, rather than setting yourself up for challenges that you’re able to anticipate. Challenges will crop up even at the best of times, so you’re better off minimising the effect of any know-able barriers!
Step 3
Embark on your deficit for your decided timeframe. Even if you don’t achieve your anticipated weight loss, don’t keep going until you’ve reached your goal weight. Keep to your time-frame, and commit to that time-frame.
Step 4
Once you reach your first diet break, it’s time to reverse diet. You can find all the information about that in my blog post here, or join my Performance Macro Coaching programme if you want the guess-work taken out for you!
At this point, assess your progress - was the rate of weight loss as you’d anticipated during your diet phase? If so, you can probably stick with your original plan. If not, you may want to return to the structure you formed in step 2 to adjust it based on the rate of weight loss you experienced during the first diet phase. Now is also the time to reflect on whether you faced any challenges, or could have done anything differently during the deficit that would have increased your results.
Step 5
During your diet break, you’ll ideally have incorporated the priniciples of reverse dieting. Rather than a ‘free for all’, it’s a chance to enjoy some flexibility, practice long-term healthy eating habits that will help you maintain your weight loss, and put your body in an optimal position for your next diet phase.
Once you’ve completed your first planned diet break, rinse and repeat the cycle of diet phases + diet breaks until you’re at a point where you’re ready to maintain longer-term. Remember, you’re allowed to change and adjust your original plan based on how your body responds, as well as any life changes. This isn’t failing - it’s adapting and overcoming to enable long-term success!
An alternative approach to diet breaks…
Another approach to diet breaks is interspersing every 4-6 weeks of a calorie deficit with 1 week at maintenance. These 1-week diet breaks may alternatively be referred to as ‘re-feed weeks’. Whilst this approach may work well for some, it’s not my preferred method, because I don’t think it mitigates the risks of psychological burnout, nutrient deficiency, or metabolic suppression as well as the method outlined above.
My preferred method also encourages a more balanced and sustainable approach when you arrive at your diet breaks - because you don’t have the mentality that you’ve ‘only got 1 week before you’re back ‘on a diet’’, which can often trigger overeating - the ‘last supper effect.’
Success Stories
I want to share a couple of examples of clients who I’ve worked with where we’ve successfully implemented diet breaks to improve longevity through dieting.
Paris is a weightlifter who is working towards competing in the 81kg category (you must weigh in at 81kg or less on the day of competition). We started working together when she weighed around 91kg. Over the course of the last year, we’ve gone through several nutritional phases. Whilst there have been times where plateaus have happened unintentionally, we’ve used these experiences to inform planning future nutrition phases, including planned diet breaks and diet phases that align with competitions, life events, and training blocks. For example, choosing to cut weight away from competition has allowed Paris to train in the weeks leading up to the competition NOT in a calorie deficit allowing her to maximise performance. At other times, we’ve anticipated that things like work, travel or even injury could make a diet phase more challenging, so have chosen to use these as maintenance blocks in preparation for the next diet phase.
Another client of mine - let’s call him Jim - is an online nutrition and training client, who has a highly variable work schedule - working away for weeks at a time, which affects how much time he has to plan and prep food, as well as his access to the gym. Depending on his circumstances, we’ve planned what periods of time would maximise his chances of adhering to a deficit, and what periods of time could be more appropriate to practice weight maintenance. Over the course of his journey, we’ve seen that periods of weight maintenance have consistently resulted in subsequent drops on the scale once we re-start a diet phase. But more importantly, he’s ended these diet breaks stronger, with more muscle mass and a lower body fat percentage, highlighting the importance of focusing beyond the scale!
Remember: diet breaks are not about hitting pause.
They're a tactical maneuver to ensure sustained progress. Instead of viewing breaks as setbacks, consider them as strategic pauses to optimize overall well-being and dial in other areas of your nutrition and lifestyle while you have a little more energy to do so!
I’m here to guide you through incorporating these breaks into your nutrition plan without compromising your journey.
In Performance Macro Coaching, my approach isn’t just dropping your calories lower and lower until you reach a ‘goal weight’. With regular check-ins, feedback and adjustment, plus progress tracking that goes beyond the scale, I’m able to make regular adjustments so that your plan continues to stay aligned with your goals, and adapt as you do.
Upon signing up, you'll complete a comprehensive intake form, enabling me to tailor an individualised macronutrients-based plan to your unique needs and preferences. With ongoing adjustments, progression to nutrient timing, Q+A sessions and so much more, PMC is here to equip you with the tools and motivation needed to make nutrition work for you.
Ready to transform your progress and your performance?
Earlybird access to PMC starts on 1st April 2024 - guarantee your spot AND get access to exclusive offers if you’re on the PMC waitlist.
If you’re not already on the list, there’s still time! Hit the button below to get the offers sent directly to your email inbox!
With limited spots available to secure individualised macro coaching from just £49/month (or LESS with earlybird offers!), don't miss the chance to elevate your nutrition game and make lasting changes for a healthier, happier you.
Want to find out more about the programme? Read all about it here! Or, contact me today with any questions!
Plus, stay tuned and make sure you’re signed up to my newsletter to get next week’s blog delivered directly to your inbox. We’ll be looking at busting through plateaus. Even with the best of plans, plateaus happen - and when they do, they can take your motivation to an all time low. Get ready to find out not only how to minimise your chances of hitting a plateau, but how to bust through one if it does hit!
