Diet Breaks and Refeeds: The Science of Strategic Overeating During a Cut

Four Words That Get Used Interchangeably and Should Not Be

Most of the confusion around this topic is vocabulary, not physiology. Four different practices get called by each other's names, and because they have different durations, different calorie ceilings, and different purposes, mixing them up leads people to run the wrong one at the wrong time and then conclude the whole idea is useless.

A refeed is one to two days of deliberately raised intake inside a cut that is still running. The extra calories come almost entirely from carbohydrate, protein stays where it was, and the deficit resumes immediately afterward. A refeed does not pause the diet. It is a scheduled bump in an otherwise continuous line.

A diet break is a longer planned stretch, typically seven to fourteen days, spent at estimated maintenance calories. Fat loss is expected to stop. That is the point. The cut is on hold, not slowed, and it resumes on a date you picked before the break started.

A cheat day is neither of those. It has no calorie ceiling, it is usually reactive rather than planned, and the intake is often large enough to erase several days of deficit in a single afternoon. A refeed at 500 calories over your deficit and a cheat day at 3,000 calories over are not the same intervention wearing different clothes.

A reverse diet is a fourth thing entirely, and it is the one most often confused with a diet break. A reverse diet happens after a cut is finished and involves raising calories gradually over many weeks to arrive at a new maintenance. A diet break happens in the middle of a cut, jumps straight to maintenance rather than creeping toward it, and ends by going back down. We covered the reverse diet evidence separately in our guide to reverse dieting, and the distinction matters because the two have different exit conditions. A diet break that never ends is a stalled cut. A reverse diet that never ends is just eating.

The Comparison Table

What a Long Cut Actually Does to You

Energy restriction sets off a coordinated set of responses that all push in the same direction, which is toward eating more and burning less. Trexler, Smith-Ryan, and Norton laid out the full picture for athletes in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition in 2014, and the components are well characterized: circulating leptin falls, ghrelin rises, thyroid hormones drift down, sympathetic nervous system output declines, mitochondrial efficiency improves in the sense that the same work costs fewer calories, and non-exercise movement quietly decreases.

The piece that gets the most attention is adaptive thermogenesis, meaning the portion of the drop in energy expenditure that is larger than what the loss of body mass alone would predict. If you lose 20 pounds and your resting expenditure falls by more than the tissue you no longer have to carry would account for, that gap is the adaptive component. It is real, it is measurable, and it is also frequently exaggerated into a story about a metabolism that is permanently broken.

Two things are worth holding onto here. First, the size of the adaptive response scales with how large and how prolonged the deficit is, which means an aggressive crash produces more of it than a moderate cut. Second, the behavioral side of the response, which is increased hunger and decreased spontaneous movement, is usually the larger practical problem. A few hundred calories per day of extra appetite pressure breaks more diets than a 100-calorie drop in resting expenditure ever has.

That distinction is the frame for everything that follows. The case for diet breaks was originally built on the metabolic argument. The evidence in trained people supports the behavioral argument instead.

The Leptin Story, Told Straight

Leptin is produced by fat tissue and acts as a signal of energy availability. When you eat less, it falls, and it falls faster and further than your actual fat loss would predict, which is why the hormone is better described as an intake sensor than a fat gauge.

The numbers are striking. Mars and colleagues put 44 men on four days of a diet providing 36 percent of estimated energy requirements and measured a 39.4 percent drop in fasting leptin, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 34.9 to 43.6 percent. Four days. Nobody lost 39 percent of their body fat in four days. The decline also tracked with self-reported hunger, and the relationship between the two got stronger as the restriction continued, which is the mechanism working exactly as the theory says it should.

The recovery side is just as quick. Kolaczynski and colleagues, publishing in Diabetes in 1996, tracked leptin through short-term fasting and found it beginning a steady decline after 12 hours and hitting its low point around 36 hours. When normal food intake resumed, leptin rose promptly and returned to baseline within 24 hours. Their infusion work also showed that small amounts of glucose were enough to prevent the fall, while infusing ketones did nothing, which points at carbohydrate availability rather than energy in general as the lever.

That is the entire basis for the carbohydrate-led refeed, and as mechanism stories go it is a good one. Here is where it stops. Dirlewanger and colleagues overfed ten lean women for three days and found that carbohydrate overfeeding raised plasma leptin by 28 percent and 24-hour energy expenditure by 7 percent, while fat overfeeding moved neither. That looks like the smoking gun until you read their own conclusion, which is that there was no relationship between the change in leptin and the change in energy expenditure. The two things went up at the same time without one causing the other.

Ghrelin is the appetite-stimulating counterpart and it moves in the opposite direction, rising during restriction and staying elevated after weight loss. The same caution applies. Ghrelin explains why you are hungry. It does not by itself establish that any particular feeding pattern fixes the problem.

MATADOR: The Study Everyone Cites

MATADOR stands for Minimising Adaptive Thermogenesis And Deactivating Obesity Rebound, and it is the trial that put diet breaks on the map. Byrne and colleagues published it in the International Journal of Obesity in 2018, and it was well designed for the question it asked.

Fifty-one men with obesity were randomized to 16 weeks of energy restriction delivered one of two ways. The continuous group did 16 straight weeks. The intermittent group did eight two-week restriction blocks alternating with seven two-week blocks at energy balance, which stretched the calendar to 30 weeks but delivered the identical 16 weeks of restriction. During restriction, both groups ate about 67 percent of maintenance requirements. Forty-seven men started the intervention after a four-week baseline phase. The intermittent group averaged 39.8 years and 110.2 kg. The continuous group averaged 39.4 years and 111.1 kg. Body mass index in both groups sat around 34.

Among the 19 continuous and 17 intermittent participants who completed per protocol, the results were:

Five extra kilograms of weight loss and four extra kilograms of fat loss from the same number of restricted days is a large effect. The adjusted resting expenditure figure is the mechanistic centerpiece: after accounting for the fact that the intermittent group had lost more tissue, their metabolic rate had fallen roughly half as much. The authors also reported better weight loss retention at six months. And the 0.0 kg average change during the energy balance blocks is a useful piece of evidence on its own, because it shows that a well-set maintenance intake does exactly what it says.

So why is this not the end of the discussion? Because of who was in the study. These were men carrying a great deal of fat, restricted to 67 percent of maintenance, with no prescribed resistance training. Every one of those conditions maximizes the room available for a compensatory metabolic response to show up and therefore maximizes the room for an intervention to prevent one. A lifter at 14 percent body fat running a 20 percent deficit while training four days a week is a different physiological situation in every respect that matters.

One further caution about the wider literature. Most meta-analyses on this topic are answering a related but distinct question. He and colleagues pooled 11 randomized trials covering 850 people in Obesity in 2021 and reported a small advantage for intermittent restriction, with a weighted mean difference of -0.95 kg and a confidence interval from -1.63 to -0.27. But their inclusion criterion was intermittent restriction of two to three days per week, meaning 5:2 style protocols rather than the multi-week block structure MATADOR used. Those are different interventions that happen to share a category label.

ICECAP: The Study Almost Nobody Cites

If MATADOR is the study that gets quoted in every article about diet breaks, ICECAP is the one that should get quoted alongside it and usually does not. Peos and colleagues designed it specifically to test whether the MATADOR finding transfers to trained athletes, and they published the main result in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise in 2021.

Sixty-one resistance-trained adults, 32 of them women, average age 28.7 years, average weight 77.2 kg, average body fat 25.5 percent, were randomized to one of two arms. The continuous arm did 12 weeks of moderate energy restriction. The intermittent arm did four three-week restriction blocks separated by three one-week diet breaks at energy balance, for 15 weeks total. Same restricted days, 25 percent more calendar time.

After accounting for baseline differences, intermittent restriction did not produce lower fat mass, lower body weight, or greater fat-free mass than continuous restriction. At the end of the study there were no significant between-group differences in fat loss, fat-free mass, muscle strength, muscle endurance gains, or resting energy expenditure. The metabolic protection that MATADOR found did not appear.

Siedler and colleagues reached the same place in resistance-trained women, publishing in the Journal of Human Kinetics in 2023. Thirty-eight trained females, average age 22.3 years, received either six weeks of continuous 25 percent restriction or an eight-week schedule with one week of energy balance after the second and fourth weeks of restriction. Both groups trained three supervised sessions a week on a volume-matched program and both averaged 1.7 grams of protein per kilogram per day. Fat mass fell in both groups, from 15.9 kg to 14.7 kg across all participants, and fat-free mass did not change in either. Resting metabolic rate did not change over time in either group and the group-by-time effect was not close to significant at P=0.99.

That trial also produced the most useful reassurance in this entire literature for anyone nervous about taking a break. Across the two diet break weeks, average body mass rose 0.53 kg from day one to day seven, and the change in weekly average body mass from the week before the break to the week of the break was a gain of 0.13 kg for the first break and 0.24 kg for the second. That is a third of a pound to half a pound, and it includes the water. A week at maintenance does not cost you your progress.

The one signal that did separate the groups was psychological. Disinhibition, measured on the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire, showed a significant group-by-time interaction, drifting up in the continuous group and down in the intermittent group. No individual pairwise comparison reached significance, so this is a pattern rather than a proven effect, but it points in the same direction as the ICECAP appetite data.

Why the split? The most likely explanation is the one already flagged: the magnitude of adaptive thermogenesis is proportional to how much fat you are carrying and how hard you are restricting. The MATADOR participants had far more fat, ate at a steeper deficit, and were not resistance training. Resistance training is itself a strong protector of fat-free mass and resting expenditure during a cut, which may leave a diet break with very little left to protect. That is a hypothesis, not a demonstrated mechanism, and it deserves to be labeled as such.

What the Refeed Trials Found

Refeeds, meaning the short one to two day version, have been tested less often than diet breaks and the single most cited trial comes with a published objection attached, which makes it a useful case study in reading fitness research.

Campbell and colleagues randomized 27 resistance-trained men and women to a roughly 25 percent calorie-restricted diet for seven weeks alongside four days per week of resistance training. The refeed group ate two consecutive days of elevated carbohydrate followed by five days of restriction each week. The continuous group restricted all seven weeks. Both groups lost body mass and fat mass with no difference between them. The authors reported that fat-free mass, dry fat-free mass, and resting metabolic rate were better maintained in the refeed group, and concluded that a two-day carbohydrate refeed preserves all three.

Peos, Brown, Vorland, Allison, and Sainsbury published a formal comment in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology arguing that on reanalysis only dry fat-free mass differed between groups. Their objection is methodological and it is a good one: comparing within-group changes from baseline separately in each arm, rather than testing the between-group difference directly, is a known way to manufacture an apparent effect where none exists. Bland and Altman have written about this specific error more than once.

What survives that exchange is worth stating plainly. Dry fat-free mass, meaning fat-free tissue with the water subtracted out, may have been better preserved with refeeds. Total fat-free mass and resting metabolic rate probably were not, on the stricter analysis. And fat loss was the same either way in both readings. One small trial with a contested analysis is not a foundation for a strong recommendation in either direction.

What a Diet Break Actually Buys You

Here is the part that gets buried. The ICECAP team ran a pre-specified secondary analysis on 26 of their athletes, measuring what happened during the one-week diet break rather than at the end of the restriction blocks, and published it in PLOS One in 2021. The main trial had standardized measurement timing to the end of restriction periods in both arms, which is correct for the primary comparison but means the primary paper never looked at the break itself.

During the one-week break, energy intake was raised to predicted maintenance by increasing carbohydrate. The results:

Notice the shape of that table. Fat mass did not move. Body weight and fat-free mass went up by amounts consistent with glycogen and the water bound to it, not with tissue accrual over seven days. Strength was unchanged but leg muscle endurance improved, which fits a glycogen explanation, since a 25-repetition maximum-effort set is exactly the sort of work that depends on muscle glycogen while a one-repetition maximum does not. And every single subjective measure moved in the direction you would want.

The authors' own practical suggestion follows from this: coordinate diet breaks with training blocks that demand leg muscle endurance or mental focus, and with the later parts of a cut when rising appetite is most likely to threaten adherence. That is a much narrower and much more defensible claim than "diet breaks preserve your metabolism."

There is one more signal worth mentioning with appropriate hedging. In the main ICECAP trial, dropout from the intermittent group was roughly half the dropout from the continuous group. The difference was not statistically significant, and the authors attribute that to the small number of dropouts overall rather than claiming an effect. But if diet breaks have a real advantage for lifters, adherence is the most plausible place for it to live, and this is the kind of result that would show up first.

How to Structure a Diet Break

The protocol below follows the trial designs where they exist and states clearly where it is filling gaps with reasoning.

Set the calorie target

The target is estimated maintenance, not "eat normally" and not a surplus. This is the step most people get wrong, because their sense of maintenance is anchored to what they ate before the cut started, and after eight or ten weeks of dieting that number is too high. Your current maintenance is lower than your pre-cut maintenance for two reasons: you weigh less, and your expenditure has adapted somewhat.

A workable estimate is your current cutting intake plus the size of your deficit. If you have been eating 2,100 calories and losing about a pound a week, your deficit is roughly 500 calories a day, so maintenance is near 2,600. That is the number for the break. Adding "a bit more because it is a break" is how a maintenance phase becomes a small surplus.

Set the macros

Protein stays exactly where it was. There is no version of this where cutting protein to make room for carbohydrate is the right call, and our protein intake guide covers the targets in detail. Take the additional calories mostly from carbohydrate, with a modest amount from fat if your fat intake had been driven very low.

The splits above put roughly 80 percent of the added calories into carbohydrate and 20 percent into fat, which matches how the trials did it and also happens to be the split that best restores muscle glycogen. Round these to numbers you will actually hit rather than treating them as precise.

Set the duration and the end date

Seven to fourteen days, decided before day one, written down somewhere you will see it. ICECAP used one week. MATADOR used two. Below about five days you never get past the glycogen refill phase and you learn nothing about what maintenance actually feels like. Above about three weeks you have started a maintenance phase, which is a defensible choice but requires its own plan.

Keep training the same

Do not add volume to "use" the extra food, and do not cut volume because you are not in a deficit. Hold the program. If anything, the ICECAP secondary analysis suggests this is a good week to schedule your highest-volume or most mentally demanding sessions, since leg muscle endurance and alertness both improved.

Keep tracking

A diet break is a period of deliberate eating at a specific number, which means it needs the same tracking discipline as the cut. The failure mode here is not eating too little. Our calorie counting guide covers the mechanics, and a break is exactly when loose tracking turns a planned maintenance into a two-week surplus.

Plan the return

Go straight back to your previous cutting intake on the scheduled day. Do not taper down over a week, because that just extends the break. Recalculate your deficit off your new weight if you have lost a meaningful amount since you last did the math.

How to Structure a Refeed

A refeed is smaller, faster, and easier to get wrong because the line between it and a cheat day is thin.

• Duration: one or two consecutive days. The Campbell protocol used two, placed on weekends.
• Calories: maintenance, or up to about 10 percent above it. This is a ceiling, not a suggestion.
• Carbohydrate: take essentially all of the increase here. A practical target is 4 to 6 grams per kilogram of body weight on the refeed day, which for an 80 kg lifter means 320 to 480 grams.
• Fat: keep it at or slightly below your normal cutting intake. Fat does not refill glycogen, and the Dirlewanger data found fat overfeeding moved neither leptin nor energy expenditure.
• Protein: unchanged.
• Placement: before or on your hardest training days, so the glycogen has somewhere useful to go.
• Food choices: mostly the same foods you already eat, in larger amounts. Rice, potatoes, oats, fruit, bread. Swapping to low-fiber carbohydrate sources on refeed days makes hitting a large carbohydrate number physically easier, which is one of the few cases where deliberately lowering fiber for a day makes sense. Our fiber guide explains the density trade-off you are making.

Frequency: When to Use Which

There is no dose-response trial for diet break frequency, so everything in this section is extrapolation from the protocols that have been tested plus the general principle that compensatory pressure builds with both cumulative deficit and falling body fat. Treat it as a starting framework to adjust, not as a finding.

The single most useful rule is that the trigger should be symptoms rather than the calendar. The calendar tells you when a break is probably due. Hunger that will not go away, training performance falling across multiple sessions, worsening sleep, and a shortening temper tell you it is due now.

Reading the Scale During and After

The scale will go up. Knowing why in advance is the difference between finishing the break and abandoning it on day three.

Muscle stores glycogen, and each gram of glycogen is stored with roughly three grams of water. Add several hundred grams of carbohydrate a day for a week on top of depleted stores and the associated water accounts for most of what you see. Add a larger volume of food sitting in the digestive tract and some sodium-driven fluid shift, and two to four pounds over a few days is entirely normal. This is the same mechanism that makes the first week of any cut look spectacular in reverse.

The ICECAP secondary numbers show this cleanly. Over one week, body weight rose 0.6 kg and fat-free mass rose 0.7 kg, while fat mass did not change significantly. Fat-free mass on a body composition scan includes water, so a rise in fat-free mass that exceeds the rise in total weight across seven days is a water and glycogen signature, not new muscle.

Practical handling: weigh daily, ignore individual days, and compare the seven-day average from the week before the break to the seven-day average from the week after you resume. That comparison tells you what actually happened. Comparing the morning you started to the morning you finished tells you about your glycogen stores.

On the MATADOR side, the mean weight change across each two-week energy balance block was 0.0 kg. That is the benchmark. If your break produces a sustained gain beyond the first few days of water, your maintenance estimate was too high, and the fix is to adjust the number rather than to end the break early.

Where the Evidence Is Thin

This topic is unusual in that the popular recommendations are considerably more confident than the literature supports. Here is an honest accounting of what is not known.

Optimal frequency has never been studied. Nobody has compared a break every four weeks against every eight weeks against every twelve. Every frequency recommendation you will read, including the table above, is an extrapolation.

Optimal duration has never been studied. One week and two weeks have both been used. Nobody has compared them head to head, and nobody has tested three days or four weeks against either.

The refeed evidence in lifters is one small contested trial. Twenty-seven participants, seven weeks, and a published methodological objection from qualified critics. That is a preliminary result.

The mechanism is assumed rather than demonstrated. Leptin responds to feeding. Whether that response produces any outcome you care about has not been shown in humans.

Long-term outcomes are largely unstudied in trained people. MATADOR followed up at six months and found better retention. No equivalent follow-up exists for lifters.

The adherence effect is suggestive, not established. The lower dropout in the ICECAP intermittent arm was not statistically significant, and the subjective improvements were measured over a single week rather than tracked to a completion rate.

Common Mistakes

Treating a diet break as a metabolism reset. A week at maintenance does not undo adaptive thermogenesis. The ICECAP resting energy expenditure rise was about 200 kJ per day, which is roughly 48 calories, and it was measured during the break while extra food was being eaten. Nothing suggests it persists afterward.

Estimating maintenance from your pre-cut intake. You weigh less than you did. Your maintenance is lower. Use current intake plus current deficit.

Running a break with no end date. This is how cuts quietly end. Pick the date first.

Letting protein fall. The extra calories are carbohydrate. Protein does not move, in either direction.

Taking a break in week two. Compensatory pressure has not built yet. You are interrupting momentum and getting nothing for it.

Reacting to the scale on day three. Glycogen and water. Every time.

Using a break to avoid a hard conversation with the data. If your cut stalled for four weeks, the problem is more likely to be tracking drift or a deficit that no longer exists than a metabolism that needs resting. Verify the arithmetic before you conclude you need an intervention.

Confusing this with a reverse diet. The exit conditions are opposite. A diet break ends by going back down. A reverse diet ends by staying up.

Stacking a refeed onto an already large weekend. Two planned refeed days plus a social meal on the third day is most of a week at or above maintenance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a diet break and a refeed?

Duration and intent. A refeed is one to two days of raised intake, almost always driven by carbohydrate, inserted inside a continuing deficit. A diet break is a longer planned stretch, usually seven to fourteen days, at estimated maintenance calories, during which fat loss is expected to stop. A refeed is a nudge inside the cut. A diet break is a pause of the cut. The research uses the same split: the Campbell 2020 trial tested two consecutive higher-carbohydrate days each week, while the MATADOR and ICECAP trials tested multi-week blocks at energy balance. Neither one is a cheat day, because both are planned, both have a calorie ceiling, and both keep protein where it was.

Does the MATADOR study prove diet breaks work?

It supports the effect in the population it studied, which was 51 men with obesity, average body mass index around 34, doing no prescribed resistance training. In that group, Byrne and colleagues reported 14.1 kg of weight loss with intermittent restriction against 9.1 kg with continuous restriction for the same total dose of dieting, plus a smaller drop in resting energy expenditure once body composition was accounted for. Those numbers are real. They were also produced in men with a large amount of fat to lose, which is the condition under which adaptive metabolic responses have the most room to move. Generalizing that result to a lean lifter shaving off the last five pounds is the step the evidence does not support.

Do diet breaks help lifters keep muscle while cutting?

The best trial in trained people says no. The ICECAP trial randomized 61 resistance-trained adults to either twelve weeks of continuous moderate restriction or four three-week restriction blocks separated by three one-week diet breaks. After accounting for baseline differences, the intermittent group did not end up with less fat mass, less body weight, or more fat-free mass, and resting energy expenditure did not differ either. Muscle strength and muscle endurance gains were also equivalent. The intermittent arm took 25 percent longer to deliver the same result, which is a real cost to weigh.

How long should a diet break be?

One to two weeks is what the trials used and what the practical logic supports. ICECAP used one week. MATADOR used two. Shorter than about five days and most of the scale change is still glycogen and water refilling, so you never actually see what maintenance looks like. Longer than about three weeks and you are no longer taking a break from a cut, you are running a maintenance phase, which is a legitimate choice but a different one with a different exit plan. Set the end date before you start it. A diet break with no end date becomes a stalled cut.

Will a diet break undo my fat loss?

The scale will move up and your fat mass almost certainly will not. In the ICECAP secondary analysis, a one-week diet break raised body weight by a mean of 0.6 kg and fat-free mass by 0.7 kg, with no significant change in fat mass. That pattern is glycogen and the water bound to it, plus a fuller gut, and it is exactly what should happen when carbohydrate goes back up. In MATADOR, the average weight change across the seven two-week energy balance blocks was 0.0 kg, which is what a properly set maintenance intake looks like. Expect two to four pounds of scale movement in the first few days and do not read it as fat regain.

How often should I take a diet break during a cut?

There is no dose-response research to answer this precisely, so any specific frequency is a reasonable extrapolation rather than a finding. The two schedules that have actually been tested are one week off after every three weeks on, and two weeks off after every two weeks on. A defensible default for a lifter is one week at maintenance after every six to twelve weeks of restriction, moved earlier when hunger, sleep, training performance, or mood start deteriorating, and moved later when they are all fine. Leaner dieters and longer cuts justify more frequent breaks, because the compensatory pressure builds with both cumulative deficit and falling body fat.

Does a refeed reset leptin and fix your metabolism?

Leptin does respond quickly to feeding, but the chain from that response to meaningful fat loss has never been demonstrated in humans. Kolaczynski and colleagues showed leptin falling through 36 hours of fasting and returning to baseline within 24 hours of normal food intake, and Dirlewanger and colleagues found three days of carbohydrate overfeeding raised leptin 28 percent and 24-hour energy expenditure 7 percent, while explicitly reporting no relationship between the two changes. So a refeed does move the hormone. What it does not do is produce a metabolic rate that outlasts the extra food. Treat the leptin explanation as a mechanism story rather than as the reason to run a refeed.

The Bottom Line

The strongest claim made for diet breaks, that they preserve your metabolism and deliver more fat loss per restricted day, has been tested twice in resistance-trained people and failed both times. ICECAP found no advantage in fat loss, fat-free mass, strength, endurance, or resting energy expenditure, and the companion trial in trained women found the same. MATADOR's large effect is real, but it was produced in men with obesity eating at 67 percent of maintenance with no resistance training, and that is not the situation most readers of this site are in.

What held up in trained people is smaller and more useful than the marketing version. During a one-week break, hunger fell, irritability fell, fullness and satisfaction and alertness rose, and leg muscle endurance improved, while fat mass did not move. Dropout from the intermittent arm ran at about half the continuous arm, though not significantly so. That package is an adherence tool. Cuts fail because people stop doing them, and an intervention that makes the process tolerable is worth having even when it does not make the process faster.

So: use a refeed as one to two carbohydrate-led days inside a running deficit, placed before hard training. Use a diet break as seven to fourteen days at a maintenance number you calculated from your current intake plus your current deficit, with the end date set in advance. Keep protein fixed. Keep training the same. Weigh daily and compare weekly averages. Expect a few pounds of water and do not flinch at it.

And do not expect either one to repair a metabolism. The reason to take a break is that dieting is hard and it gets harder the longer it runs. That is a good enough reason on its own, and it has the advantage of being true.

References

1. Byrne, N.M., Sainsbury, A., King, N.A., Hills, A.P., & Wood, R.E. (2018). Intermittent energy restriction improves weight loss efficiency in obese men: the MATADOR study. International Journal of Obesity, 42(2), 129-138. doi:10.1038/ijo.2017.206
2. Peos, J.J., Helms, E.R., Fournier, P.A., Krieger, J., & Sainsbury, A. (2021). Continuous versus Intermittent Dieting for Fat Loss and Fat-Free Mass Retention in Resistance-trained Adults: The ICECAP Trial. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 53(8), 1685-1698. doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000002636
3. Peos, J.J., Helms, E.R., Fournier, P.A., Ong, J., Hall, C., Krieger, J., & Sainsbury, A. (2021). A 1-week diet break improves muscle endurance during an intermittent dieting regime in adult athletes: A pre-specified secondary analysis of the ICECAP trial. PLOS One, 16(2), e0247292. Trial registration ACTRN12618000638235.
4. Campbell, B.I., Aguilar, D., Colenso-Semple, L.M., Hartke, K., Fleming, A.R., Fox, C.D., Longstrom, J.M., Rogers, G.E., Mathas, D.B., Wong, V., et al. (2020). Intermittent Energy Restriction Attenuates the Loss of Fat Free Mass in Resistance Trained Individuals. A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 5(1), 19. doi:10.3390/jfmk5010019
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8. Mars, M., de Graaf, C., de Groot, C.P.G.M., van Rossum, C.T.M., & Kok, F.J. (2006). Fasting leptin and appetite responses induced by a 4-day 65%-energy-restricted diet. International Journal of Obesity, 30(1), 122-128. doi:10.1038/sj.ijo.0803070
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11. He, S., et al. (2021). Intermittent Versus Continuous Energy Restriction for Weight Loss and Metabolic Improvement: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review. Obesity, volume 29. doi:10.1002/oby.23023
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13. Bland, J.M., & Altman, D.G. (2011). Comparisons against baseline within randomised groups are often used and can be highly misleading. Trials, 12, 264. doi:10.1186/1745-6215-12-264
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