Today, we put two diets to the test to see what’s best. Will it be Calorie Cycling or a normal calorie restricted diet?
We know that a calorie deficit is needed to shred unwanted body fat (hopefully this should not be new news to you). As most of us know, dieting is hard and can suck at times, therefore making diets tolerable is absolutely vital when it comes to dieting success.
I.e. if your life sucks from dieting, you won’t stick to it for very long. So, Davoodi et al (2014) looked into the two types of diets to see what’s most effective for fat loss and which is least miserable.
As a quick overview, both diets were trialed by 37 obese females (not athletes I’m afraid) and were put to the test for six week.
Diet 1 (BLUE LINE): Linear approach consisted of eating the same amount of food every day.
➡️ Calorie restriction: 51% from maintenance.
➡️ Daily calorie intake = 1,186kcal/day (fml).
Diet 2 (RED LINE): Calorie cycling consisted of 3 x blocks of 11 days of calorie restriction followed by 3 days near maintenance.
➡️ Calorie restriction: 11 days at 45% from maintenance followed by 3 days with zero restriction.
➡️ Daily calorie intake: 11 days at 1,365kca/day followed by 3 days at 1971kcal/day.
So, what did they find? Both diets induced weight loss, however the calorie cycling diet:
✅ Lost slightly more weight over the 6 weeks: 6.3kg weight loss verses 5.4kg of weight loss (not hugely significant).
✅ Maintained a higher metabolic rate, which caused far less fat regain after the dieting phase. Yay!
✅ A decrease in; triglycerides, total cholesterol and plasma glucose.
✅ Decreased hunger and Increased diet satisfaction.
After the six week dieting period, both groups returned to a maintenance phase for another month. The calorie cycling dieters gained 0.9kg, where the calorie restricted dieters gained 2.2kg despite the calorie content of the diets being almost exactly the same.
This is highly likely because the calorie cycling group’s resting metabolic rate didn’t become as suppressed during the 6 week period. It would appear that the three days at maintenance calories at the end of every fortnight was enough to reverse any adverse any adverse effects of metabolic adaptation. Pretty cool, right?
And finally…Every 2 weeks, they had a 3 day ‘fuck yeah I’m not dieting period’ which would explain why the ‘diet satisfaction’ score was better and that adherence post dieting was better. I.e. 37% of the linear dieting group dropped out after the testing period where only 15% of the cycling diet group did.
So, if you’re going to diet for a long period of time as you have a decent amount of weight to shift….perhaps calorie cycling is better and more enjoyable?