Using Biometrics to Time Diet Breaks

how do you feel about what going on And then what are the symptomatic things Your sleep getting disrupted You waking up 10 times a night to pee You can't think straight. You're losing things. Short memory's going. You're irritable all the time. You notice that you're not having, like, your fingernails aren't growing like they used to. Your hair's not growing like it used to. Your hair looks dull and not shiny. Your skin's getting flaky. You're cold all the time. You get cold hands and feet. those are the symptomatic things that we look at first. Now we need to line up those symptoms with some type of value. So it needs to have a number that can be attributed to it. So for instance, if I get a baseline body temperature from somebody, like let's say mid afternoon, two o'clock and you're sitting at 36.8, okay. On average, that's normal, right? And then you've been dieting for say three months and all of a sudden you tell me, man, I'm freezing cold all the time. I haven't pooed in three days. I'm super snappy at my partner, man. I'm just not feeling well rested. Cool. Let's do another body temperature. And they find that they're at 35, eight. Okay, cool. We need to go on a diet break because your body temperature is associated with metabolic rate. If you drop a one degree, that's going to have a massive effect on your metabolic rate. Now, can you push forward and push through it? Yes. But what's the point? Because you're struggling to stay compliant, you're struggling to get your workouts and you're not sleeping well, you're probably going to end up in a divorce. Is it worth abs to divorce the person you love? Your kids are miserable because you're miserable. Why not just take a three week diet break or even longer and then work on a recomp? Maybe go back to maintenance, less 10 percent, keep your protein high, get more sleep. You're still going to lose fat and gain muscle. It just you might not may not lose fat as quickly, but at least you'll feel normal. And then when you feel normal and all your metrics look good, cool. Okay. Now we'll go into three weeks, six weeks. We know based on history, how long you can go before the shit hits the fan. So we're going to go that length of time minus maybe one week. And so that might be six weeks and then we take another diet break. Okay. Really interesting. Yeah. And the thing is too, the longer you push yourself into the hole, the longer the diet break has to be. Cause I know like, um, the guys at Renaissance periodization, whatever time you spent dieting, they want you to spend two thirds of that time in a maintenance phase. So here's the thing. If you push it for 20 weeks, okay, now you're going to have to take a maintenance phase for like 12 to 14 weeks. Are you willing to do that? If the answer is no, then maybe you shorter blocks of dieting and shorter blocks of maintenance. So that maybe it's four weeks of dieting with two weeks of maintenance phase. Great. So you make this big drop, you maintain and chip, make a big drop, maintain and chip. And that's going to be a longer, some more sustainable approach for most people. But a lot of it comes down to your psychological state too. Like what is your reason for wanting to do this? If you have an extrinsic motivator that pushes your intrinsic motivation high enough, you can power through it. So, and I'll give you an example. When I decided to start competing in jujitsu, I was sitting at like 112. And I said, okay, I don't want to be one. Because honestly, I don't feel fast at this position. I don't feel well conditioned. And I don't I don't want to I don't want to roll with dudes that are like 140 kilos and have to compete against them. So I took six months and dropped down to about 93 kilos. And then I ate back up to 97, which is the weight class that I compete in. And I found I performed really well and then i had to fight against 140 kilo people anyways because my competition coach is a fucking insane serbian guy that's like you get to compete with everybody i thought i was gonna do the masters with all the old dudes like me he's like no you do younger older all weight class and i'm like okay fuck but luckily it panned out because of the conditioning being more Condition sometimes helps when your technique sucks like mine. So in that time, I mean, I lost about 20 kilos. And the thing is, like, 20 kilos in six months, and somebody who's already kind of lean, I was sitting around 23% body fat, which isn't too lean, but got down to, like, 8% body fat and then ate up to 97. And it sucked. It did. It sucked. But there was a motivational aspect that I wanted it that bad enough to power through it. Most gen pop people don't. Wanting to wear a one-piece bathing suit at the beach because you're embarrassed to take anything off is not a big enough driver for you to be able to push yourself into the hole as much as somebody who has a competition coming up or a photo shoot. so when you looking at context of things if you have an athlete somebody getting ready for a bodybuilding show they willing to suffer because they going to get on stage joanne from next door is not going to do that just because she wants to wear a fucking one piece at the beach yeah okay yeah i get you and having that again bringing that back to that deadline having that date for a bodybuilding show where you have a jiu-jitsu date or something in mind and i think it allows the motivation to be a bit higher because you know it's just for that period of time yeah as if everyone's just doing it to be lean all the time it's just it's never going to have that and never going to have that effect and one little question i did have was around the kind of topic of calorie sensitivity and sometimes that i've seen or i've heard and with clients myself when we diet for prolonged periods of time and our kind of our calorie sensitivity obviously gets a little bit much well much lower when you run it and that bring it back to that diet break then taking it out and even back staying in a surplus or in a deficit or bringing it right back to maintenance how long are you trying to run those kind of diet breaks for is there a length of time i know that you said that that was actually a really nice um thought process i can't remember the guys you you said did it but two-thirds of your dieting uh should be that and i actually just put up a post the other day about that the longer you diet the longer you need to get out of that dieting phase in a diet break for is there kind of would you run off those kind of two-thirds of time dieting into a yeah on the person of course i think i think if you're not using any biometrics then that's a that's a pretty good it's very generalized but it's a very good place to start um i think like looking at your symptoms and it really like writing a log down weekly of how i felt this week and then you're going back and seeing how you're declining oh shit man man i'm really screwed up and then then coming out of the diet going on a diet break more of a recomp and then keep journaling and you can see like how you went and how you started going up and you're like okay i've been diet breaking for five weeks i actually feel pretty good let me see how because you're gonna forget how you how bad you felt yeah let me go back seven eight weeks ago oh my god what who is this person that's writing this shit that's not me oh that was you at that time then you're like okay cool so now i i know how long i can diet and then how long you need to diet break But if you're using metrics, I think the body temperature is brilliant for that. And I've gotten a lot of flack with other evidence-based colleagues about this. Well, that's not shown in literature. But, yeah, fuck off. Here's the thing. I can tell you right now, evidence is not just in the literature. It's also what we see in the field. It's a total, yeah. We push somebody down. We have people that lose 25 kilos in 12 weeks, and we see them go from, like, 37 degrees to, like, 35, 6. We pull them out and give them a diet break for a few weeks. within say five six days they're at 36 8 37 we hold that for another week and then now we do another big drop and then we we figure out how long they can go and before we need to diet break and we try to stay ahead of that curve if you stay ahead of it you don't have to diet break as long but i think yeah sorry one last thing i think one of the things that the misconception is that you're going to go on a diet break and get fat. If you stay ahead of the curve and you go on a diet break and you don't go crazy and binge and do dumb shit, you should be able to keep losing body fat. Or you might not lose body fat, but at least you're putting on muscle because you might be in a slight surplus with high protein. Both of those are great things. Whether you barely chip away fat and you're putting on muscle or at least you're holding on the muscle and holding on to fat, you can always do another hurrah and drop back into a deficit. Brilliant, man. Yeah, I really, really like that. And that analogy, I don't know if you know, he's actually an American trainer, Nick Gloff. Have you heard of him? No. Oh, man. If you love watching people train heavy, it is just crazy, crazy strength. Like squatting 600, 700 pounds for reps. Like he's 21 or something. Nick Gloff, an unbelievable, really, really high. He works under Camp Jansen, a coach. anyone who is listening as well please go watch some of his videos just unbelievable motivation but i was listening to a podcast recently on him he talks about this red line understanding how far you can push and noting like we can maybe go over that red line a little bit every now and again but then we know how we know how to pull it back and that analogy that you said there about let's die it hard and now we can almost predict oh when we've done it for this long or this rate of losses speed up sped up or this period of time then we know then let's pull it back out i think that was a really really nice analogy absolutely like i i love cars i love fast cars right and and computers so i do use a lot of analogies like that and