From T-nation
Misapplying Dietary Digressions
I'll start off by explaining the differences between the three types of dietary digressions: cheating, loading, and refeeding.
Cheating means eating a meal (or several) consisting of foods that are outside the realm of what's acceptable on your diet, and the centerpiece is usually sugary junk.
You have planned and unplanned cheats. I touched on the later earlier (eating some crap on a day you're not supposed to); these should be avoided as much as possible.
Planned cheats refer to giving yourself a moment in the week where you can eat the bad food you've been craving. This moment is always on a given day and comes at the conclusion of a week of solid dieting.
Loading, like cheating, means eating a meal (or several) consisting of foods that aren't a part of your daily plan. Contrary to cheating, though, loading uses clean, high-carbohydrate foods like yams, potatoes, rice, whole-wheat pasta, fruits, etc. On a loading day, you want to refill muscle glycogen, so your daily intake of carbs will fall between 200 and 600 grams depending on your size and goals.
Refeeds still consist of increasing your food intake for a day, but you do so by respecting your regular diet. You simply eat more of the foods that you normally ingest. A small amount of clean carbs (15 to 20 grams per meal) is also acceptable.
Now that we understand the difference between these three, let's explore the logic behind dietary digression days.
Such days serve three main purposes:
1. To prevent the ill effects of dieting, mainly metabolic slowdown and rebound binging. Calorie and carb restrictions decrease the release of the hormone called leptin. Leptin is important because it sends a message to the body that it's well-fed, so your body can keep up its metabolic rate.
If less leptin is produced, your body will likely think it's starving, and it'll react to the situation by slowing down your metabolism and increasing hunger.
As leptin drops, the risk of dietary failure increases.
It's been shown that increasing food intake drastically, even for a short period of time, will prevent the drop in leptin that occurs when dieting. This is especially important in the later stages. Unless you use a stupidly high energy deficit when dieting, your leptin levels aren't likely to drop significantly during the first few weeks. It's only after you've lost a significant amount of fat, or have been of the diet for several weeks, that it'll become necessary to prevent the underproduction of leptin.
2. To reload glycogen stores. Glycogen (the carbs stored in the muscles and liver) is the primary fuel source for intense physical work. When your glycogen stores are low, you won't be able to train as hard as when you're fully loaded.
The main purpose of weight training when dieting is to preserve (or even gain) muscle mass. If you can't train hard, it'll be difficult to prevent muscle loss. For that reason, it's a good idea to periodically give the body a shot of carbohydrates to keep glycogen stores at least somewhat full.
Your body can actually produce glucose (and then glycogen) from amino acids via a process called gluconeogenesis. But this might lead to muscle loss if your calorie deficit is too great, so a weekly carbohydrate load can be a good way to prevent the eating away of your muscle to produce glucose.
3. To give yourself a psychological break. One of the toughest aspects of dieting isn't so much the deprivation, but the fact that you know that you won't be able to satisfy your cravings for weeks. A lot of people stop their diet in the first few weeks because they can't see themselves being deprived of the foods they love for such a long period. For these people, having a once-a-week mulligan can help them maintain the diet over the long run.
But it's a double-edged sword. While it can provide you with some much needed mental relief, it can also increase the frequency and intensity of your cravings. If you can get through the first few weeks without eating any forbidden foods, your desire for them will gradually fade.
But if you constantly remind yourself of how good these physique wreckers taste, you'll always have to fight craving attacks.
So, yes, it can help if you're able to shut the door for the whole week once the cheat is over. But if you can't, it'll ruin your efforts and make your life miserable.
If we look at the three benefits of getting off of your diet for a short period of time, we can decide whether a cheat, load, or refeed is beneficial or if it'll screw up your progress.
Cheats, loads, and refeeds all have a positive impact on maintaining leptin levels. They also have an impact on glycogen storage. Generally, the loading strategy has the greatest impact on glycogen stores. Cheats also have a positive effect on glycogen stores, but if the carbs are mainly from high-fructose corn syrup, you'll store much less than if they were from another form.
Additionally, the high glycemic load of the cheat food versus the cleaner carbs can increase the amount of carbs stored as fat.
Refeeds can also work for glycogen loading, but since you'll normally be consuming no more than 125 to 150 grams of carbs, you won't be able to get a supercompensation effect.
When it comes to the impact on leptin, at an equal caloric intake, all three strategies are fairly similar. I'd like to tell you that eating clean foods in excess is more beneficial in this regard than eating bad foods, but it isn't so. The total amount of calories and carbs is more important than the quality of the food when it comes to leptin manipulation.
This doesn't mean that you should eat crap, simply that for the purpose of leptin manipulation, crap will be as effective as other items.
As far as the psychological aspect is concerned, we have a pretty variable response to all three strategies. Some people love fast food, others crave sugar and pastries (like me), and then there's those who are attracted to things like pasta, breads, and fruits. So, the food that'll give a dieter some mental relief is really dependent on personal preferences.
In an ideal world, our cravings would be for yams, potatoes, pasta, and fruits. Eating those on your dietary digression day will be superior to pizza, burgers, and donuts. But some people need their crap. As I mentioned earlier, if cheating opens the door to falling off the dietary Radio Flyer, avoid it.
It should be fairly obvious now that you don't need to cheat. Loading and refeeding with quality foods will do the job just as well. The only time cheating with bad food is superior is when you absolutely need a fix to stay on your diet.
Remember, your body has absolutely no physical need to eat junk. It's only our psychological side that's a slave to this.
So, my rules of digressive eating are:
As much as possible, opt for clean alternatives.
You don't need to load or refeed every week. Unless you're excessive, leptin won't be a problem until after several weeks of dieting, and glycogen stores can be kept relatively loaded even when dieting. You should have a loading or refeed day when your metabolism is starting to slow down (your morning temperature drops by one or two degrees) or when your glycogen stores are low (you'll feel flat and have problems getting a pump).
The leaner you are, the more often you'll need to load or refeed. When you're getting leaner, you're producing less leptin, thus continuing to drop fat will become harder. Furthermore, the leaner you are, the better your response to excessive eating. Because of better insulin sensitivity, you'll store more of the nutrients in your muscles and less as fat.
Once your load, reefed, or cheat is over, go back to your regular diet ASAP.
Don't go overboard. Go with the minimum amount needed to do the job. You don't need two pizzas, three burgers, and a dozen donuts to refill glycogen stores, boost leptin, and give yourself some mental relief. (Remember the flat tire analogy?)
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