Speaker 1: 00:00

Good morning you hooligans. How are you doing today? I'm back with a study of course, study week. I'll try and do as many of these as possible. Sun is out in London so can't wait to go for a walk.

Speaker 1: 00:13

But here we go. Okay. So there's a study and you want to look at do you need a break from your diet? Is it beneficial to have diet breaks? Okay, so they had a study, looked at people, they were like right.

Speaker 1: 00:27

One group you're just gonna have a deficit every week for fifteen weeks and you're gonna try and lose one pound of fat a week. That's what we're gonna do with you. Your protein is gonna be 2.3 grams per kilogram of body weight so relatively, relatively high. Fat was 20% of calories and then carbs the rest, right. But don't worry about that.

Speaker 1: 00:50

So they wanted those to just be in a consistent deficit. The other group they were like right, so the first four weeks, other group they're gonna say every four to six weeks, right. Sorry, every three weeks they would go on a one week diet break, right. So three weeks in a deficit and then a week of maintenance, right. That's what their goal was.

Speaker 1: 01:19

And these are fifteen weeks both of them. People tracked using MyFitnessPal. They were accelerators to assess physical activity. So it is self monitoring and as we know we are terrible at that in some cases so that is a limitation of the study, in that regard. But you know it's kind of like real life to me and everyone's using my fitness pal or a food tracker so it's kind of there with what we're all doing.

Speaker 1: 01:46

What did the study find guys? What do you think happened? So a group was doing deficit for three weeks, maintenance for a week, deficit for three weeks, maintenance for a week. The other group was just deficit for the fifteen weeks. Well, here's what happened.

Speaker 1: 02:00

Both groups lost weight and reduced their body fat percentages with no big difference between the groups. On average participants ended up losing 0.81 pound per week during the twelve weeks of energy restriction. That's just a little short of the target but suggest diet consistency was pretty good. Overall the participants reported eating an average of eight fifty two fewer calories per day on the weeks they dieted compared to how much they said they were eating before. Both groups experienced similar declines in resting energy expenditure.

Speaker 1: 02:34

There was no difference in muscle strength or endurance. Right. The most dramatic difference though, this is really the only change was the subjective appetite score. So on a scale of one to hundred with hundred being like I need to eat, I'll eat, I'll eat, I'll eat rat, I'll eat the cow, the horse, and then I'll eat Ryan, whatever let's do it. That's hundred, right?

Speaker 1: 03:00

Zero is obviously the opposite of that. So here's what happened on week subjective appetite week zero both similar, right? When it got to the end week fifteen or week twelve, so they both dieted for the same amount of time twelve weeks, but the group that would did a break went on for fifteen weeks. Okay, so they had three week break, does that make sense? So at the end of it intermittent energy restrictions, three weeks dieting, one week maintenance, their subjective after this goes 34.8.

Speaker 1: 03:31

The continuous appetite was 62.4, nearly double right? Nearly double. Their desire to eat at the end, the group that had a break 41 and then the one continuously dieting was 64. Right? So even our results at the end of the day are not gonna be different because the deficit is the same over you know basically the same amount of time just with a few breaks is gonna take you slightly longer taking those breaks.

Speaker 1: 04:04

But it does seem that it's a more enjoyable experience in it. Like, do we wanna be feeling double as hungry? Not really, do we? We wanna be enjoying. And if we do if we if you think of the risks involved with feeling hungrier and hungrier as time goes on, what that's gonna lead to is, yes, you might be able to do go twelve weeks in a row.

Speaker 1: 04:26

But what happens in week fourteen, fifteen when your level of subjective hunger or a subjective appetite goes up to 75, you can have a binge in you. You can have a binge week, maybe a binge two weeks. And we know what happens when we start bingeing. One day turns to two, two turns to three, before we know it three turns to three weeks. It's really difficult to flip that around.

Speaker 1: 04:48

So this is what we're doing as well with the macros app is and I mentioned a study about this before, it's like when you preplan your diet break, we call it diet because obviously it is restricted food in some way. When we go on when we go to maintenance, right, that does is resets obviously the subjective appetite which is great. It can help us and we're gonna do this in the app as it can help us we can do something as well if people are trained for something called refeeds where you increase your carbs higher and that's got many positive benefits. Right, so that's probably something that you if you've still got a lot of weight to lose say or say now you are lean and you really do want to drop weight get leaner, refeeds are gonna be important for you. Very important to keep going.

Speaker 1: 05:49

And I'd say that the dieting breaks and again I mentioned the study before it's like when we do plan it ourselves we don't go off the wagon, right? I'll go over this study again. There was another one that showed when research told people, Hey, take two weeks off your diet, right, or take four weeks off your diet, take one week off your diet. What they thought would happen was when the people took time off their diet they would just go back to old habits and they would struggle to get back on. But the opposite actually happened.

Speaker 1: 06:22

When they were in control of when they took the diet break, when they were in control of when that happened, One, didn't have they felt motivated to stay on track when they did go to maintenance. And the second thing happened, they just got straight back to it when the time came. So you're gonna take a diet break at some point, right? It's inevitable it's gonna happen. It's either you're gonna take control of it and go to maintenance yourself and plan it or your body's gonna do it for you and it's gonna be a binge.

Speaker 1: 06:52

So it's up to you when you wanna do it. It's like that's the choices you got. So I think if any of you have been continuously dieting now for say eight weeks, other than a week, take a week at maintenance. If you're on the app, right, you can do this. You can just increase your macros to maintenance.

Speaker 1: 07:13

And we'll have a setting on there as well where you can just tap a button maintenance week and you go to maintenance for the week, right? That's it. And that's all you're gonna do. If you're on the eight weeks max, please consider doing it on your check-in with the emails if you're a turtle member as well just get in touch with us and we can help you do it. So yeah, that's an interesting study.

Speaker 1: 07:33

Results are similar but probably not a not a better not not the best way to live being really really hungry all times. Like if you go shopping in a supermarket when you're really hungry it's the worst thing to do in it, you just buy everything and you're like why did I just buy all these sweets? Don't do it guys, don't do it. I learned that the hard way but we're back tomorrow with more studies hopefully this one was helpful. Have a good day.

Speaker 1: 08:00

Remember, was in one day at a time of course, of course. But also remember we got our new turtle journals coming out. It's based on it's a daily page, right? It's one page, A Force boot. It's stunning, it's absolutely It's gonna be in your desk.

Speaker 1: 08:17

So A Force and you're not gonna carry this around really, that's being planted in every morning, you can open her up. You're gonna write your ninety day goals in health and professional and relationships whatever family. Then you're gonna schedule your day because this is proven to be good like management, time management. Then you're gonna be doing two stoic exercises, two questions to ask yourself based on the stoic reflections. Then you're gonna do write down your one big thing, actually what's your one big thing today just get that done.

Speaker 1: 08:49

And you got your evening flexion and this is gonna ground you every day. Can't wait. They should be with us in about three weeks, maximum three weeks. So they'll be on the website for sale. So happy days.

Speaker 1: 09:05

But in the meantime, enjoy yourself and I'll see you tomorrow.