Diet Break To A Successful Fat Loss
What Is A Diet Break and When Should You Incorporate One!
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A diet break is a tracked and calculated period of time where you raise your calories to your maintenance to offset and or reduce any metabolic adaptations that may occur when in a deficit for a prolonged period of time. It is NOT a free for all where you take a break from dieting.
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Basically while in a deficit your body will start to become efficient at running off what you are doing. For example if your maintenance is 2000calories and you begin your deficit at 1500cals, the longer you spend at 1500cals the more efficient your body will become at running off those calories and begin to plateau. What a lot of people do is plateau, reduce calories increase activity, body becomes efficient off new protocol and another plateau occurs, so you reduce calories increase activity and keep repeating until your activity is maxed and your calories are pathetically low and you’ve got no where to go with no results occurring.
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This is where diet breaks come in handy. By periodically raising your calories back to maintenance for a minimum of three days (usually for longer) this can reduce the effects of being in a deficit and can minimise plateau’s for a more successful fat loss phase.
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When it comes to how often and for how long you should diet break for it comes down to first of all where you’re starting from, generally someone with a higher body fat % can go longer with out a diet break, but someone with a much lower body fat % seem to get the adaptations a lot faster. The second thing to consider is how aggressive your deficit is, no surprise the more aggressive the deficit the quicker the adaptions will occur. And thirdly how long you have been in a deficit for. So I can’t really give you a exact answer on for how long or for how frequently you need to diet-break as you will need to assess those three things.
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