Does Cheating On Your Diet Improve Fat Loss and Metabolism

Is there some truth and scientific research that cheating on your diet is good for faster fast loss? New research weighs in on full diet breaks or “cheating” on your diet for improving fat loss and metabolism.

By:  Tim Ernst – Founder of Body Blitz Max, 180 Muscle and Barbell/Dumbbell Ripped Muscle Complexes

Today I’d like to talk about some new research about diet breaks for faster fat loss.

In case you’re not familiar, a diet break is basically a dieting strategy that was first popularized by Lyle McDonald in his book, “A Guide to Flexible Dieting.”

If you haven’t heard of that or read it, I’d highly recommend giving it a quick read through.

His work is fantastic and this book is no exception.

He based his dieting guidelines in this book off an earlier 2003 paper from Wing and Jeffrey.

They basically found that whether you diet someone down for 20 weeks straight (they’re basically on the same deficit for 20 weeks).

Or if you give them a 6 week diet break in the middle of the 20 weeks.

Or if you give them three evenly spaced 2 week diet breaks.

At the end of the 20 weeks, you’ll basically see the same weight loss or at least that’s what they found in that study.

This was initially really surprising to these researchers because they were implementing these diet breaks to sort of induce weight gain in the subject.

What they speculated was that maybe these diet breaks are helpful in terms of long term sustainability and long term weight loss.

So from 2003 until now there hasn’t really been any other studies that have looked into this, but this year we got a new paper from burn and colleagues.

New 2018 Study!

They took 36 obese men and they split them into one of two groups.

Group 1

The first group basically just dieted straight for 16 weeks on the same caloric deficit.

They were on a 33 percent caloric deficit or in other words, they were eating 67% of their maintenance calories.

For example, let’s say they maintained their weight on 3,000 calories. They would diet on 67% of that, so 2,000 calories per day for 16 weeks straight.

Group 2

Group 2 used periodic diet breaks.

Every two weeks they would do a two week diet break at maintenance calories.

To give you an example:

They would diet on 2,000 calories for two weeks and then do 3,000 calories for two weeks, 2,000 for two weeks 3,000 for two weeks.

Then they’ve repeated that for 30 total weeks.

The reason why the dieting period was longer in group two is because the researchers wanted to control for total net caloric deficit and the only way they could do that and still implement the maintenance periods in the diet rate group was to have them diet for a longer period of time.

The Results

The bottom line was that the second group with the diet breaks ended up losing 50 percent more fat than the continuous dieting group and they didn’t lose any more muscle mass than the other group.

They also only lost 50 percent as much resting energy expenditure.

In other words, the resting energy expenditure only dropped by about half as much as the continuous diet in group.

As you can see in this graph, metabolism slowed in both groups initially but it sort of rebounded in the diet break group.

By week 16 there was a pretty big difference between the two with the diet break group having on average significantly faster metabolism.

These results are extremely impressive.

Not only do you lose more fat but you also sort of spare metabolism by utilizing these diet breaks.

I think that the metabolic benefits of diet breaks are particularly important especially for long term sustainability in so far as it allows the dieter to sort of eat more food.

Having a faster metabolism is always a good thing when it comes to fat loss.

I think that this idea is supported in this study because when they did a six-month follow-up after the dieting period was over, the disparity between the diet break group and the continuous dieting group had actually widened even more.

Now at this point the group that did the diet breaks were seeing eighty to ninety percent better fat loss than the continuous caloric restriction group and this is just because the continuous dieting group basically regained more weight after the diet had finished.

Even though these results are really impressive and I think that they should encourage people to use diet breaks, I don’t think that a diet break is a be-all end-all tactic for dieting success.

The Downside Of Dieting Breaks

One potential downside is that they usually require a longer dieting period.

In this study for example, the subjects that we’re doing the two week diet breaks were dieting for a total length of 30 weeks.

That’s seven months of diet!

A lot of people who may have some deadline to meet or perhaps they’re dieting for some specific reason, may not want to diet for seven months just to get ready for it.

I don’t think that this is necessary and my personal coaching experience I’ve seen a lot of success with shorter more aggressive approaches WITHOUT diet breaks and certainly you can get your results more quickly if take this path.

However, if you do take this path you run the risk of potentially gaining more weight after the diet has ended.

You have to be careful to be a little bit more controlled in that post diet period and you also may not experience the same metabolic benefits as if you use the diet breaks.

The whole idea of a diet break may sound very appealing.

You get to spend two weeks just sort of eating more than if you were just dieting.

However, going from a 33 percent deficit to maintenance calories isn’t all that much of a break and even though I used an example where you had a 3,000 calorie maintenance, many people (especially women) have a much lower maintenance than this.

Going from 33% deficit to maintenance might only be a bump of 400 or 500 extra calories per day which may not feel like all that much of a diet break and it might prolong the diet longer then it feels like.

Even during these sort of diet break periods you’re still tracking your intake, you’re still not eating anything or as much as you want and you’re basically just eating at maintenance and prolonging the diet while doing so.

With that said…

Conclusion

This new research has definitely opened my eyes and convinced me to a greater extent of the utility of diet breaks.

I think that people who are dieting for a specific reason or just want to get the weight off as quickly as possible, interspersing these 1 to 2 week diet breaks throughout your diet is a good way to (not only get better results), but also sustainable results.

We now have accumulating evidence to support this idea which has already been shown to be very successful in the field.

I think it’d be interesting to see this study replicated in non obese populations or maybe in resistance trained lean people to see if the the same results hold true here.

I think it also be interesting to see the study replicated in women.

I’ve personally found utilizing diet breaks for women who are dieting to be really useful, but we need to see that study to be sure.

Hopefully someone picks that up so we can find that out but for now I would hypothesize that you would still see very similar results in lean resistance trained people and also in women.

On the other hand one to two day short term acute refeed days seem to be very popular perhaps more popular than the full-blown one to two week diet breaks

However, I personally haven’t been quite as impressed with the data on those acute daily refeeds, but I still think they may have merit such as the 14 day veto challenge where you’re on keto for 14 days and then cheat.

What’s Next?

As I mentioned above, the ketogenic diet is the hottest diet of 2018 because it helps you quickly lose stubborn fat… it reduces fat storing inflammation… it helps you live longer and avoid today’s most deadly diseases.

But there are several problems that accompany a “traditional” high fat keto diet:

• You like to eat carbs?….You are out of ketosis.
• Want to eat some healthy, ripe fruits that are in season?….You are out of ketosis.
• Too much protein in that delicious steak or baconyou just ate?….You are out of ketosis.
• Want to have a glass (or two) or red wine, a few beers, or cocktails?  You guessed right….You are out of ketosis. 

Bottom line:

Permanent ketosis is not healthy, fun, OR realistic for anybody to follow long term, which is exactly why there’s a new, upgraded version that produces rapid results in only 14 days

It’s called, The “Targeted” Keto Diet and people have used it to drop pounds of unwanted belly flab, WITHOUT avoiding carbs, desserts, or alcohol

It all started by eating the 4 SUPER FATS below at the right time over a very short 14 day period (a few of them are probably in your kitchen right now)…

References:

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28925405

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12582226