What I do think is an implication is this, and this idea has been around forever: the simple fact is that if youre not ready a week out, you won’t be ready. So the diet should effectively be over 7 days out (maybe 5 at the most). At which point start setting up for a carb-load (if you do one) or at least bringing calories back towards your new (low) maintenance so the body can release water. It’s trying to diet to the Thursday before the show, then looking great Tuesday 3 days too late that you wan’t to avoid.

You are so right in saying that sometimes “less is more”. I have learned that the hard way over the years. I started bodybuilding in the decade where the saying was “no pain, no gain”. I’m still an advocate of training hard but these days, this bod needs a shorter workout that is intense and under an hour – I do very well on a 4 day split program. I’ve made better gains and improvements in my 50′s than I did in my 30′s. Of course, when you are younger, you don’t want to listen to such advice and just train balls to the wall, all the time.

The research you are doing in nutrition is fascinating and I can’t wait to apply what I’ve learned from your books which I have recently ordered. Also very intrigued by the intermittent fasting concept as well as I’ve seen on the Lean Gains website. Just like we have to cycle our training regimen, so too we also have to cycle our nutrition because we can get “stale” consuming the same macronutrients all the time.

I feel that body composition or recomposition should be a lifestyle and lifetime goal of everyone who pursues living a more healthy lifestsyle and staying lean for life.

Thanks for being here to open people’s eyes and minds to what really works!

I’ll try to shoot for your 100-150 grams of carbs a day recommendation over the next two weeks.

Of course that assumes that the person does the things needed to bring on the LTDFLE (and usually folks will counter a lack of results with HARDER dieting and training which usually only compounds the problem).

What I’m struggling with is not the diet breaks and re-feeds for short term stalls, it’s the thought that slightly reducing the daily deficit will create sustained and weekly loses versus a large daily deficit. But like you said…science, moderation and maybe a bit of magic.

Thanks for the advice.

And the sooner you accept the sometimes less is more, the better off you and your clients will be. More is not always better. In fact, in many situations, it’s far far worse. This is true of all types of training as well as dieting.

I had one friend who was creating a 7,000 calorie deficit each week who was plateauing. She was trying to get the last 5 or 6 pounds off of a pretty lean body (for her genetics) and was just stuck. She was already eating so few calories that I couldn’t play with her deficit ratio of intake/exercise. Now, looking back, she was having 0 refeeds because at the time (7 years ago) I simply though that the advantages of “free days” or structured re-feeds were purely psychological and this chick had the dedication and fortitude to push through it.

Then some trainer at her gym, (who honestly knew nothing, he was one of those trainers who just spouted out the popular dogma of the time and made everyone do forced reps) told her that she needed to eat every 2 hours to “fix her metabolism” ugh. She asked me about it and I laughed and said try eating 5 or 6 times a day while staying around 1200 calories (this was .08 times her bw at this point). But she did it anyway and logged her food.

7 days later she was down…..6 pounds!!! WTF! I looked at her logs and she ended up eating like 2000 calories a day a freaking increase in 5,600 calories over the previous week….and..she..lost..weight. Her training logs showed stable strength and endurance so it wasn’t from doing more work. It made this shit head trainer look like a genius and it made me look like some schmuck. I’m still not over it obviously lol.

But even after this article, I still can’t figure this shit out. Ok I guess it could have been 6 pounds of water weight, but this chick didn’t look bloated, if that’s even a reliable indication of water retention. It CANT be from an increase in work because she measured all her sets/reps and cardio machine settings and time. It seriously can’t be from an increased metabolism either, even if somehow she had a whopping 30% decrease in her RMR and she magically returned it to normal that still wouldn’t account for a 7 pounds weight loss. Not that that would ever happen. From that moment on she ate 1800 to 2000 calories a day (an addition of 600 to 800 calorie a day) continued to do her massive amounts of cardio and she reliably continued to lose 1 to 1.5 pounds a week.

So now I’m wondering if sometimes (and Lyle alluded to this at the end of this article) you can go too low on the caloric intake and/or too much expenditure via exercise sufficient to cause weight stalls in the susceptible. But is it really situation where it is mostly water weight that’s being retained and fat is continue being burned? In a situation like my example sure it can because it was a 2 or 3 week stall with a massive weight drop and no one could burn 6 pounds of fat in 7 days in her metabolic situation. But then you hear stories about the people on the biggest loser who find that increasing caloric intake maintains their weight loss and this is in a chronic setting. You also her about this in peoples P90X logs. The trend I see (and again Lyle mentioned this) is heavy aerobic exercise with a major caloric deficit. I personally haven’t seen as many stalls when people are getting most of their deficit via extreme caloric restriction.

But in the end, I still can’t let my mind accept that increasing calories=more fat loss.