Can Diet Breaks Fix Your Metabolism? | Educational Video | Layne Norton PhD

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Do Diet Breaks Enhance Metabolism?

The concept of diet breaks began gaining popularity around 20 years ago with the concept of refeed days or calorie cycling. The idea that instead of eating the same amount of calories every day on a diet, you could do periods of lower & higher calories & perhaps this would help improve fat loss, muscle retention, & perhaps stave off metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation refers to the slowing of metabolic rate beyond what is expected that occurs with weight loss. A study in 2018 called the “MATADOR Study” showed a significant attenuation of metabolic slowing using 2 week diet phases followed by 2 week diet break phases where people ate at maintenance. The diet break group also had better fat loss efficiency & lean mass retention. Subsequent studies however, failed to replicate some of these results

This leads us to the meta-analysis being discussed today that attempted to come to a consensus of the literature examining people utilizing diet breaks (periods of eating at maintenance or more during a fat loss diet) vs those following continuous energy restriction (CER). PMID: 38193357

The researchers found that on average, utilizing diet breaks led to about a 50 kcal per day reduction in metabolic adaptation compared with CER & this was a statistically significant effect. However, there were no differences between CER & diet breaks for fat free mass retention or fat loss

What is the take home? Diet breaks may help reduce metabolic slowing compared to normal dieting, but the effect is relatively small at ~50 kcal per day. So if you don’t like using diet breaks & prefer to just eat the same way every day, it’s probably not worth trying to force yourself to do diet breaks. But if you like diet breaks, then the attenuation of metabolic adaptation might be a nice bonus

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