What if everything you've heard about fasting and your metabolism is wrong? And what if the real secret to losing fat faster while protecting your strength has nothing to do with fasting longer?
Lyle McDonald, longtime fat loss, muscle building, and sports nutrition expert, breaks down what intermittent fasting actually does and where most of the claims fall apart.
Learn the key difference between fasting and time-restricted eating, why protein matters for preserving muscle, and how Lyle’s Intermittent Modified Fasting approach combines aggressive Rapid Fat Loss (RFL) days with maintenance days.
We also cover how to match your nutrition and macros to your strength training schedule, when aggressive weight loss starts to backfire, why maintenance days can improve adherence, and how leaner lifters and women can approach those stubborn last 5 to 10 pounds.
Get Lyle’s Intermittent Modified Fasting book for his full system, with weekly patterns for fat loss, recomp, and gaining, and support the show at this link:
https://witsandweights.com/lyle
Timestamps:
0:00 - Fasting claims and the IMF book
3:43 - Fasting versus time-restricted eating
13:14 - The RFL day and scaling protein
16:53 - Protein for older lifters
17:55 - Feast days versus maintenance days
26:05 - IMF versus a daily calorie deficit
34:26 - IMF versus carb cycling
37:55 - Choosing a weekly pattern for your goal
46:49 - Lifting first thing in the morning
51:10 - When someone else cooks dinner
55:55 - Listener question: when to end a hard diet
1:04:21 - Listener question: losing the last 5 to 10 pounds
Episode resources:
Lyle's website: bodyrecomposition.com
Intermittent Modified Fasting and Lyle’s other books: https://witsandweights.com/lyle
Body Recomposition Facebook group: facebook.com/groups/810890695609053
YouTube: @lylemcdonaldisright
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Fasting claims and the IMF book
Philip Pape 0:00
If you've tried intermittent fasting, skipping breakfast, eating in an eight-hour window, maybe the 5-2 thing where you barely eat two days a week, because you heard all of these things burn more fat, then this episode is for you. Maybe it worked for a few weeks and then you were hungry all the time, your performance suffered, maybe it wasn't sustainable for you, maybe you even lost muscle mass. My guest today is the Lyle McDonald, expert on fat loss and body composition, who just released a new book on intermittent modified fasting. He'll be the first to tell you most of the claims associated with fasting don't hold up. So today you're going to learn which fasting claims actually do, why the way most fasting days are set up to negatively impact your lean mass and performance, and how to set up your weekly calories, macros, and food choices so you lose fat as fast as you'd like while still training hard and without losing lots of Welcome to Wits & Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness device under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that it does work. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're going to discuss how to use fasting to your advantage to lose fat and improve your body composition. Not because it does magical things to your metabolism, as many claim, but for other very legitimate and very practical reasons you'll learn about today. I'm very excited to invite on the Lyle McDonald to break this all down with me. Many of you know his work, but if you don't, Lyle's been writing about fat loss, muscle gain, and sports nutrition at bodyrecomposition.com since the 90s. They actually did have the internet back then. It's a very different one than it is today, but he's written a ton about rapid fat loss, his rapid fat loss handbook, A Guide to Flexible Dieting, and of course his latest book, Intermittent Modified Fasting. We're going to talk about that today. He coaches everyone from endurance athletes to power lifters to physique competitors. I want to give a shout out to our mutual friend Brandon DeCruz, who introduced us. And you guys talk all the time on Chase Clarity and Brandon's right. He's a great guy. And thank you, Brandon, if you're listening. I'm sure you are. I'm sure you're listening to every episode. I'm glad we can make this happen. So today's episode is built around Lau's new book, as I mentioned, which takes the fasting research and applies it to people who train. He's going to explain which claims about fasting hold up, maybe some definitions versus all the nonsense on social media for how he structures fasting, aka RFL days versus I think he calls them maintenance days and not feasting or three feeds. Yeah. And how to pick a weekly pattern for your goal. This is the nerdy stuff that I like. How do you make the combination work, whether you want aggressive fat loss, lean gain maintenance? And then maybe if we have time, we'll get into his own diet at 55 and what he recommends for older lifters. And then Lau, we do have some listener questions if we get to it. Fantastic.
Lyle McDonald 2:55
Welcome to the show, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm glad Brandon had put us together and I'm glad to be here. He had a lot of good things to say about you. So oh, that's good. That's good. He and I can always nerd out for as long as usually when we talk, he has to cut it in half because we we go too. So uh definitely super like I love the details, I love the science, but at the same time, like it has to be applied. Like it's great to just, I'm sure you and I could sit down for hours and just get into the the weeds with the physiology, and that's great. But at the end of the day, you know, I want to try to come up with ways that it can be applied. Yeah.
Philip Pape 3:30
So let's do that for the listener, right? Because we could go really deep. I'd rather be like moderately deep, but a little bit more and hit the thing. So I went through your book several times. It's a great reference. And there's key points in there, and there's also some like little
Fasting versus time-restricted eating
Philip Pape 3:43
mind-blowing things that people may not be aware of. So let's start with definitions, right? You spend a couple of chapters just talking about fasting versus time-restricted eating. Right. And listeners have heard of the gamut, like intermittent fasting, alternate day, lean gains. I did lean gains. That's another fasting, right? So, and then there's all the claims we can get to, but just define those terms for us.
Lyle McDonald 4:02
So actually, so it's even though I've been using a lot of the ideas in this book with consultation clients for years, what kind of stimulated me to write that was the first chapter I looked at this absolutely horrible paper that it was a consensus on fasting terminology, which I highly recommend you don't read unless you know about sleeping problems. But kind of to your point, so back in the 2000s, which is really the first time I remember intermittent fasting as a term being used, it was really referred to what we now call time-restricted eating, where you limited your eating to what's usually called an eating window of it can be anywhere from four to eight hours. Like I think there were some one meal-a day stuff. There was Ori Hoffmeckler's warrior diet for the real old sters who might remember that. And certainly I think the most popular version of this in the fitness industry was Martin Birkin's lean gains. And just as a fun fact, I had a forum way back in the day. And he, along with uh Borschwagerly and Alan Aragon, were on my forum before anyone knew who they were. So I saw sort of the early, early versions of that. The problem with that now is that over the last, you know, 10, 15, 15 years or so, the term intermittent fasting has become this umbrella that can include so many different approaches. And you already mentioned some of them. And you know, there's a five-two, there's a five-two where they do, you know, five, two fasting days, and we'll define what that is in a minute. And you know, five. They call them feasting days in the literature, and I'll touch on why I don't like that terminology. We've got alternate day fasting, which is exactly what it sounds like. Fasting, feasting, fasting, feasting. A term that I think I might have come up with. I don't know if this is in the literature. I call it intermittent caloric restriction, which is where you can string multiple fasting days together before a feasting day. And that, and really, so this chapter looked, or this paper rather looked at that. They got a bunch of experts together to argue about what these terms mean from the simplest, most generalized terms to extremely detailed, because otherwise, if someone says, I'm intermittent fasting or fasting, what does that mean? Or if we tell someone, you know, or they read it, read an article, or we tell, you know, I want you to to use intermittent fasting, that doesn't really mean anything anymore. And so without going through the paper, again, I highly don't recommend it. They defined a lot of terms and really the big ones relative to my book is complete fasting, which is you eat nothing or consume nothing with any calories, water, you know, you can have water, non-chloric fluids, but no food, things of that nature. And then they got into short-term fasting and long-term fasting and uh total fasting. The one that uh now there may or may not be health benefits to that in humans. There's a lot in animals, and animal research doesn't always seem to translate, let's just put it that way. But I've been more interested in body composition, fat loss, muscle gain, performance for my whole career, because I come from an athletic background. And I will say without hesitation, there is no goal that the readers of my books have that will ever be facilitated by total fasting. Whether or not it has health benefits, and I even talk about that. Like maybe it does, and you see terms, you know, hormesis and autophagy and mitophagia and all this other stuff that may or may not have happened. I'm pretty convinced that it probably happens with caloric restriction and fat loss anyway, but that's neither here nor there. I'm focused on performance and body composition, and like I said, extended total fasting. There is no goal in that sense that will be benefited from that.
Philip Pape 7:41
You know, let's hit on that real quick, right? Because let's say it were true. Let's say all those things were true. Do they outweigh the same benefits from just maintaining good body composition? I don't personally think so.
Lyle McDonald 7:52
And I don't know that the data's really been done on that. Okay. But like invariably that you you tend to see all those benefits. And I'm not convinced they happen in humans, or if they do, it's usually over extended fasting periods, something that got lost. Like a lot of this is animal data because it's easy to do. But mice and rats run, you know, a mouse lives for two years. So like one day for a mouse is like 14 days, it's like seven days or something in a human. Same thing for rats. So, like, yeah, they do, you know, an eight-hour fasting period for a mouse is the equivalent of multiple days of total fasting for a human. And really, my big issue, and we're going to touch on this when I talk about how I set up the fat the fasting days, which we'll get redefined, is not eating dietary protein for long periods of time is always a negative. I don't care what benefits total fasting has, we know the disadvantages of muscle loss and sarcopenia and all of that. There is the same problem with the early caloric restriction for longevity stuff, especially when they started doing protein restriction. I don't care what the potential health benefits are because I know the negatives of that in the long term, which is muscle and performance loss.
Philip Pape 9:02
Yeah. So two things come to mind with that. One is understanding digestion, right? Because a lot of people don't think about that. You put the food in your mouth and we're like, okay, it's this binary thing, my macros, you know. So kind of like, because when we look at the time-restricted feeding or eating stuff, that's where the the distinction between that and fasting, I think, comes into play is like how long things take to digest, where when you're truly fasting or not.
Lyle McDonald 9:23
But then protein specifically, when you have, I think, is it the alternate day stuff that where we saw, like muscle loss or uh I you know it one issue that comes up, and this was also related to me, me, you know, the way I've modified this approach, is most of this work is done in people with overweight and obesity. And we know the dynamics are different. We know that they lose less muscle loss, lose less muscle, lose more body fat. They're back in the day, I don't know if they're talking about it so much now, but as you develop overweight, you tend to gain both lean body mass, by which I mean glycogen, water, connected tissue minerals, but also muscle mass. I used to joke, and it's not. People go, how do I get big calves? Go just bulk up to about 400 pounds. Just get fast. You will never see someone because it is progressive overload for the cow, you gain muscle. And some of the muscle that people with overweight and obesity are losing is what they gained developing that. So it may not be as important, right? And we have that famous case study of the guy that was fasted for what, 382 days on water and multivitamins. And in that case, yeah, it may not matter, but that's not the population I exclusively write for. I know factually that someone, a male at 15% who doesn't eat protein for extended period, they will lose muscle mass. And that that is always a negative in my book.
Philip Pape 10:41
Yeah.
Lyle McDonald 10:41
So getting back to that paper, then they defined modified fasting. Now, in the research, that typically means 25% of maintenance calories or less. And that's fine. I don't like dietary percentages for a whole bunch of reasons. Again, I get why they use that, although I don't know where that value derives from. So someone that had, you know, a maintenance intake of 2,000 calories would eat no more than 500 calories a day. And honestly, we used to call that a very low calorie diet. The difference being that in the research, they typically give it in one meal a day, presumably to spend a longer period in, like we call it the fasting phase. This gets into your point about digestion. People tend to think that you eat, and then after that meal's over, you're fasting. Well, you're you are in the sense that you're not eating, but physiologically, until that meal finishes digesting, which depends on the form, the nutrients, the size, you don't enter the fasted state, what is called the post-absorptive state, is when you've finished absorbing the nutrients. So, and I made this point, I did some real, some, some estimated math in the book. Like if you were to have, say, a thousand calorie meal at 10 o'clock, you might think, oh, I ate for an hour. I'm spending 23 hours fasted. No, no, no, no, no. That thousand-calorie meal might take 10, 8 to 10 hours to digest. You're actually spending roughly 14, you know, 12 to 4, 14 to 16 hours. If you're eating lean gain style, where you have multiple meals, the total amount of time in the post-absorptive state is probably not significantly different from a spread meal pattern, which is also why the research finds that when they compare time-restricted eating, and I'll explain why I'm distinguishing those, to a spread pattern, there's not really a difference. And that's because physiologically, your body is getting nutrients for about the same.
Philip Pape 12:32
And conversely, the the study that came out about the 100 grams of protein, it's kind of like the inverse of that. It's like that is potentially why you can rely on total protein more than anything and get a lot of better.
Lyle McDonald 12:42
Because in in the paper you're you're referring to, they gave 100 grams of casein protein, and at 12 hours it was still digesting. Because protein digested about, depending on the type, between six and 10 grams per hour. Whey will do about 10 grams an hour, and casein is much slower. So, yeah, if you were to eat 100 grams of protein at 10 o'clock, it is still releasing amino acids into the bloodstream at 12 hours plus later. So you don't instantly enter the fast. And that's again part of the difference between animals and humans. Anyway, so that's modified fasting. Now, as I wrote
The RFL day and scaling protein
Lyle McDonald 13:14
about my rapid fat loss handbook back in 2005, good grief. Jeez, 21 years ago. Total, you know, the very the old very low-calorie diets where they would set it at 400 calories and they would usually set it by percentages, and they say all this muscle loss, and they couldn't, and they farted around with carbs and fats, and then they finally re this is in the 70s, and they didn't really know that protein requirements went up. And then someone was like, hey, if their body is losing protein, maybe let's try giving them more protein, which it seems obvious in hindsight. There was probably a reason for it. And that led to the development of what's called the protein-sparing modified fast, where if they gave people with overweight about 1.5 grams per kilo of ideal body weight of protein, they stopped losing body protein. And that was about double. Like for someone, when you do that, when you math it out, it's about 100 grams of protein versus 50. So I originally took that and built that into my rapid fat loss handbook. I wanted to create a fat loss approach that gave the maximum fat loss per day while provide while preventing muscle loss. Again, athletic background, that was a key, while providing all essential nutrients for health, and also while hopefully providing an off-ramp. And towards that, I set protein intake and scaled it based on leanness, because we know that as you get leaner, you need more protein. Also on activity, we know that weight training and cardiomaerobic activity increases protein. So I scaled it up because I wanted it to apply to everyone from the person at 35% plus body fat down to 12. And then tried to limit taglon carbs and fats, except for the essential fatty acids. And they used whole food, which was very different than the PSMFs of the day, because it helped teach reteach people to eat. So that was the basics of RFL.
Philip Pape 15:02
And just so the listener knows, because I want to tie that to your early comment about not using percentages off of maintenance, or you basically build it up instead of coming down. Like in other words, you add in the protein you need, a little bit of the vegetables, maybe some fats and carbs, and then you can kind of scale beyond that if you want. Right. But that's your minimum.
Lyle McDonald 15:18
Yes. And basically, rather than starting with a calorie goal, it's a really good point, and working backwards, I started with a protein target, and the calories just fall where they may. And what you see, and I don't know that this was deliberate, it just kind of worked out this way. Someone who's carrying more body fat needs less protein per pound of lean body mass, because I scale it that way. They end up at less calories with a bigger deficit. They lose more fat per week, but they have more fat to lose. That makes complete logical sense. As people get leaner and their protein requirements scale up to a maximum of about 1.5 grams per pound of lean body mass, their daily deficit shrinks, their weekly fat loss, it's still double what the average diet will get, but they have less fat to lose. So it kind of like automatic automagically fixes it. Like the calories just fall where they fall.
Philip Pape 16:06
So yes, that's from the same point, just to paraphrase, right? The leaner you are, the more you need. And so you're going anywhere from the rock bottom sedentary overweight 0.7 grams in the literature, all the time.
Lyle McDonald 16:20
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and so yeah, so the calories just fall where they fall. And basically, if you're gonna set up, if you're gonna try to the the parameters that I said, if you're going to do try to set up a day that has the lowest calories to generate the fastest fat loss with no muscle loss, RFL is kind of the it's the only right way to do it. Now we can quibble. I know people that have used all liquids, usually because they have really well-established eating habits, and they're usually doing it for short periods of like that's neither here nor there. I still generally emphasize food. Okay, so let's now move back forward. Oh,
Protein for older lifters
Lyle McDonald 16:53
sorry, one more question.
Philip Pape 16:53
Does it scale up any further based on age, anabolic resistance, and all that? No.
Lyle McDonald 16:57
Okay. No, at that, well, since the time I wrote it, that data didn't exist. And I don't know that, you know, even in older folks, 1.5, I think 1.5 grams is what's being thrown around. And I haven't looked at the data in a while, although I'm getting old enough to start to care. I think when you throw weight training into the mix, some of that anabolic resistance, you might know better than I do. I think some of that anabolic resistance goes away. So no, the the 1.5 grams per pound of lean body mass seemed more than enough. And I've had people of all ages use it without problems. So moving back to the the the definition of the papers, okay, so they had the modified fasting day. They set it at 25%. I, as you can probably guess, anyone listening to this, I make that an RFL day. Because that to me is, and yes, the calories might be above 25% of maintenance. I don't care. The protein requirements are primary, the calories fall where they fall. Then they went further and they, of course, defined,
Feast days versus maintenance days
Lyle McDonald 17:55
like you could do short-term modified fasting, long-term modified fasting, or as you might guess, intermittent modified fasting, which is exactly what it sounds like, where you do modified fasting for some period, alternated with I don't remember, I'd have to go back and look at the paper, and I really don't want to, but basically with what in the research they were calling a feasting day. So they had a fasting day, them 25% of maintenance, me rapid fat loss, and then a feasting day, which in the research is ad libitum, it means without limits. Now, and I discussed this in some detail in the book. In the research, when you do that, what they find generally is that people eat about maintenance, plus or minus about five or 10%.
Philip Pape 18:40
Just naturally.
Lyle McDonald 18:40
And often, and often a little bit low. And the thing is, you and I have worked with enough people in the real world to know that that isn't what usually happens. No. And for a number, and I go back again, my flexible dieting book that I wrote with rapid fat loss. At the time, I did have what I was then calling refeed days, which are high calorie, high carbs. Let's try to raise leptin metabolic rate. We know now that that doesn't work that way. And refill muscle glycogen, et cetera. But we saw in the real and God forbid, the cheat day in cheat meals, where people, I don't know, there was a paper that looked at like calorie intakes. They they went and looked at Instagram for posts, hashtag cheat meal. They were seeing 9,000 calories.
Philip Pape 19:21
I was gonna say seven, but wow, nine. Okay.
Lyle McDonald 19:23
In some cases, although in Canada it was only about 1,500. So Canadians apparently eat different than the average person. Okay, that's not a meal, that's a binge eating episode. But that's and that's why it changed a lot. So I had the refeed. As I saw what was happening in the real world, probably five or 10 years ago, I started using maintenance days. So in the research, yeah, the feasting day, and I get it, fasting, feasting. It has a nice ring to it. And people love to hear, oh, I get to feast. The problem is in the real world, you tell someone to feast, it often turns into a gorge. So I change that. The target is simply maintenance on average. And that can be calculated. In some cases, you go a little bit lower. That helps some people with food control, some gaze a little bit higher to support training adaptations. If people are weight stable, I say just eat a normal day and don't worry about it.
Philip Pape 20:14
That's an interesting one, Lau, right? I saw you talking about that. How some people, and it's like psychological for the for a lot of people, will want to be slightly under that maintenance to kind of feel like they they're still dieting. Yeah. And others, like I I love to be over. I love to just overshoot and be like, I'm filled up, I'm trained. You know, it is a psychological thing, yeah.
Lyle McDonald 20:31
And yeah, and it really does. But if you're the person that in going over ends up like a thousand, you know, really just loses food control, that is a very individual effect. And I think that is also something that over the last 30 years of my career, I've really kind of come to appreciate is there are so many differences. Some people, once they start eating, they do not stop. I've known people, and you probably have too, that eating makes them hungrier. So, anyway, so what we ended up with after I looked at this horrible paper was really the only definitions that mattered were modified fasting and intermittent modified fasting, which is still an umbrella term. They were a little more specific than I was. We'll talk about the patterns that I kind of developed. But like five, two is an intermittent modified fasting. You have five, in their terminology, ad libitum feasting days and mine maintenance days, and two in their terminology, fasting days, mine RFL. I'll quit, I'll quit being boring that way. There's alternate day fasting in RFL maintenance, RFL maintenance. We work in a seven-day week, so two are going to be doubled up at some point. I then, for some people, and we'll talk about when and why, might do two maintenance days a week with three RFL days in between and then another two. So it might be, they might end up with rather than five maintenance, two RFL, two maintenance, five RFL. And there's all these different patterns depending on goal. Now, what was interesting, and then we can move on from terminology, they did not consider time restricted eating. As a type of fasting. They considered it totally separate. And the reason for this, which is interesting because that was, so far as I know, where that terminology started, but their reasoning was that in most of the time-restricted eating studies, there is no explicit calorie restriction. They considered that, they called it to be nerdy, a chronobiological eating pattern. I'm going to call it nutrient timing because it's easier. They're, they said it's not necessarily calorie restricted. Now, in the studies, some people spontaneously eat less and some people spontaneously eat more. And you and I have both seen it, how I've done it. And so they really didn't, since fasting by its very definition implies some sort of restriction, whether it's calories, a certain type of food, the research on now you can, you can do a calorie-restricted time, a calorie-restricted, time-restricted eating pattern, but it's not inherently part of the it is a mat time-restricted eating says when you eat, not how much you eat.
Philip Pape 23:02
I think that's important, Lyle, really important to hit on because the traditional intermittent fasting is purely time-restricted feeding for not thinking about calories or protein or anything, really. Right. Eat in this window, you're going to lose a bunch of fat. Absolutely.
Lyle McDonald 23:16
And that's, and again, when it works, it can work really well. And I'm not, I don't want listeners to mishear me. I'm not in any way critical of TRE. It can be hugely beneficial for many, many goals, especially, and I've been writing about this for years, when people are on very low calories, whether it's like my rapid fat loss, which can end up, like it depends on it, may anywhere from like 400 to 1200, depending on the size and the leanness and stuff like that. But well, if if you're a big lean dude with a lot of muscle mass, 1200 calories is pretty low. But even for smaller women or smaller men that are on what you know we call poverty calories in the fitness industry, trying to divide that up across six or even four meals is not fulfilling. And certainly the time-restricted eating stuff when you're in that situation, like, or if you just look at people's normal daily lives, well, pre-COVID anyway, is you typically, you know, you're at work or school during the day and you can power through on just caffeine and willpower. When do people typically have food control? Is when they're at home and they're bored and watching television. They also, if you typically train in the evening, there's a logic to compressing your calories during that period. So it can be a fantastic food control approach. If you're on low calories, what would you rather do if you're on 1200 calories, eat two, 600 meals calories? 600 calorie meals, which is two bites of food, four 300 calorie meals, which is a little better, three 400 calorie meals, at least maybe that's a meal, two, 600. And I know people that'll just do one meal a day, do 12. I I can't, I can only eat so much chicken breast at a time. And we'll talk about when I did my sort of pseudo-RFL, pseudo-imf last December, the way I approached it. Because in that sense, it can be absolutely a massive benefit. But at the same time, I have seen it also can backfire if you're someone with a large calorie requirement. Like if you're a big dude trying to get 3,000 calories, time restricted eating can completely backfire. Can eat enough. And they saw that in the research. They gave it and they're like, well, the spread pattern was better for muscle gain, but the TRE was better for fat loss. And it wasn't a magic of the nutrient timing. It was a time-restricted eating people spontaneously ate less. The spread pattern where they ate multiple meals across the day, were able to actually hit their calorie target. So it can go either way.
Philip Pape 25:44
Yeah. And the theme you're hitting on, which you do with everything here, is the practical nature of this as a tool, not the magic metabolic effects or anything. It's like it's a scheduling tool. Yeah. Well, listen, by def by going through the definitions, you covered a lot of the things already in your approach and protocol. So kind of a good segue is probably into the patterns a little bit.
IMF versus a daily calorie deficit
Lyle McDonald 26:05
One thing I do want to just briefly comment on is there is an interesting, and I spent a couple chapters on this. So people ask, well, what are the benefits? Now, if you look at the research, they aren't as profound as you'd expect. You mean benefits of intermittent approach versus fixed calories every day. Yeah, yeah. So there's been a ton of studies like that, and they'll do some sort of intermittent approach, and then they'll compare that to a straight caloric deficit. And they, depending on how they set it up, they'll usually math it out so that the net weekly deficit is about the same. And a couple things come out of that, which is that one, given the same calorie intake, there doesn't seem to be any inherent weight or fat loss benefit. And that's, and I wouldn't expect there to be, right? Even in the time-restricted eating studies, even in all of these, if fat loss is the goal, it still comes down to the net deficit at the end of the day. What's more interesting to me is that the dropout rates aren't any different in the short term, which on one level I would expect because it seems like a lot easier approach to it. The thing is, I think that has more to do with the population being studied. It's about 30%. Like if you look at enough diet studies, dropout rates are about 30% across the board. I think that says more about human nature than it says about the approach per se. Then there was one recent paper that over a year did see longer-term benefits of an inner, I think they used alternate day fasting, just in some questionnaires and binge eating and stuff like that. But so then people like, well, if there's no, like the research doesn't show benefits, Lyle, why did you write a whole book about it? Well, that's very context-specific. They're looking at it in people with overweight and/or obesity who are not training. And there are other, again, my background, other considerations. I've worked with enough people, and I'm sure you have as well, that often if performance is a goal, whether it's aesthetic, you know, weight room performance for aesthetics, athletic performance, long-term, they, you know, they have to lose fat for whatever reason. Long-term sustained, like daily caloric deficits often start to harm performance. I've had a lot of powerlifters report that, that like they either do really short extreme diets, or they find because you're always underfueled, you're always underrecovered, you're always underspeded. And so, with me, the way I approached it, because I had so many people in that situation, like, well, with this approach, we can keep by putting the maintenance days on your training days, whether it's maintenance, five, you know, 5, 10% below maintenance, like 200 calories, doesn't add up to much, or a couple hundred, we can support your training and we're gonna create the entire deficit on however many RFL days you use. So, as an example, years ago, several years ago, I had a powerlifter come to me and they got a little sloppy in the offseason, and they weren't gonna be able to make weight with the normal peak week shenanigans, but they they couldn't cut their training. Because, like my my original rapid fat loss, which is just straight RFL days for quite a long period of time, you had to cut training to the bone because you just could not survive. But they didn't have that option. So I'm like, all right, this is the solution. I gave them four maintenance days to cover training, three RFL days, which actually generates a greater, fast, greater fat loss than even a standard moderate deficit. And however many months later, luckily they started early enough, they made weight, they lost zero strength, and it worked. So a lot of it for me was coming from if someone can cut their training back or is willing to, like I am, because I don't like being in the gym anymore. Like when I'm again, we'll talk about my diet. Cut as in from what to what? Four to five minutes. Sorry, like reduce like like reduced volumes and/or frequency. Of reduced volume and frequency? Oh, yeah. Well, at least volumes. Like I've been for 20 some odd years, I've been pointing out that you can maintain strength and muscle mass on like two to three hard sets twice a week as long as you maintain intensity. That's really which here I'm using that to mean weight on the bar and proximity to failure. And there is this idea that's left over from the drug days that you should increase your volume on a diet, which is just asinine, right? Your recovery. Now, how much your recovery falls depends on the diet. If you're on a moderate deficit, not so much. But if you're on rapid fat loss, you're on, you're not gonna survive a lot. So you have to cut it back. Not everybody can, because they have performance goals. And some people just aren't willing. That's a personal, like that's a them issue, but like whatever. I have to, again, that that's their psychology.
Philip Pape 30:36
It's all compromise. What are you compromising, right?
Lyle McDonald 30:39
Yeah, exactly. If they don't want to do that and they're willing to accept slower fat loss, I had to come up with a solution to that rather than trying to convince them that that my way is better. So what you end up with, well, so okay, so that was one of the benefits in from the way I was applying the intermittent modified fasting. It allows you to sustain training, create a deficit with the non-training days, with just straight RFL days. Because, like on average, and it if you're looking at sort of like say a hundred and eighty-pound male, you may be looking at a 1500 calorie per day depth. So you're looking at nearly half a pound per day, not per week, per day. If you look at the early PSFM studies, PSMF studies and people with obesity, they saw true weekly fat losses of three to five pounds a week, which scales with that. Now, when you're smaller and leaner, you don't get that. But if you can get a pound and a half a week fat loss with three diet days and sustain performance and get to eat normally, that seems pretty beneficial to me. Like I'd rather do that than just not than to debit 500 calories a day every day.
Philip Pape 31:49
Okay. So so for like somebody with a 2500 calorie maintenance, that might put you around 800 to 1000 calories a day, and you divide that by four, and that's your well-over protein needs if you're less than 200-pound person. Okay. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Got it.
Lyle McDonald 32:02
So that was one potential benefit, certainly was to just support training. Well, and there are other goals that are taught. Like the book has fat loss is one of them, but there is, you know, the magic of body recomposition, trying to gain muscle while losing fat, which can happen in certain conditions. There are ways to apply this system to gain muscle or performance while limiting fat gains. So, but it and it just has to do with how many maintenance days and how many RFL days and how many training days you're doing. So it gave a lot of flexibility in that regard. Another one that that again, I you have to deal with in the real world is that unless you're dealing with neurotic obsessive athletes. And let me make it clear, I'm not using that negatively, because I used to be one of them, right? I get it. They're the folks that are not going to break their diet, they're the ones that take Tupperware to Thanksgiving. Like, look, you Hey, I'm a college football fan.
Philip Pape 32:53
I'm glad that they're obsessive. And yeah, right, because to reach extreme goals, extreme wins.
Lyle McDonald 32:58
Their goal is to lose. You do what you have to do. You make compromises. When I was speed skating, you know, I we I remember going to the the oval one day because the weather was bad and and there was and it was Labor Day or July 4th. And I and I asked them, they go, Look, the Olympic trials are in six months. I've got every Labor Day picnic I'll ever want to do after I'm retired. But right now, it was the same thing. But anyway, so most people have lives. They may have, whether it is, whether it's family dinner night, date night, if you're from an ethnic family, which I am, every person I've ever consulted or talked with knows that if your grandma or aunties cook dinner, you do not tell them, sorry, I'm dieting, because that will shame both your ancestors and your descendants on too many generations. It's just not done. So this sort of pattern and the early stuff in my flexible dieting with free meals and what I used to call refeeds, the maintenance days, achieved the same thing. It allowed you to be able to eat higher calories and normally, because people have lives. People who are not professional, full-time psycho athletes trying to achieve the utmost goal. They need and the system gave so it had benefits that the research simply wasn't considering. They weren't considering training. So that's a big part of, you know, that that was hence the genesis of why, despite what the research had found, it hadn't looked at the endpoints that I particularly was concerned with.
IMF versus carb cycling
Philip Pape 34:26
Yeah. So when you synthesize all that from what I get from your book, is you've got the two types of days, you've got the RFL and the maintenance, and you have all of these patterns. That's pretty cool. Actually, I created my own summary where you already talked on cyclical and alternate day and like one to six, which I think is what you used, and so on, which is pretty cool. So, two questions related to that. Do you always start by anchoring on your training days? Because then there's deviation off of that, I imagine. Besides changing your training, there's deviation. And then how does that compare to carb cycling? Is this really a is carb cycling the same thing or is it different?
Lyle McDonald 35:00
It is similar in concept and different in application. So you go back, you know, carb cycling has been around for decades. I think I remember reading about it, at least by the 80s. And what you tended to see, or at least what I saw, was what seemed to me like almost random variations in carb, calorie, and fat intake. I never were like some days you would do lower carbs and maybe higher fats and then do higher calories. And I think the idea even then was like, you know, to keep the metabolism from adapting. We know it's not, that's not how that works in humans at all. And for whatever seeming reasons, but I never saw there was never any coherent pattern. Because also the the guys of the day that were doing that, they're trying to five, six days a week high volume. There couldn't be any really sort of logical, you know, combination of the two. You also didn't see really the extremes. There is a misconception that very low-calorie diets and rapid fat loss causes muscle loss. And it is contextually true if protein isn't sufficient and/or if you don't understand the difference between lean body mass and muscle mass, which a lot of people in the industry don't. Oh, yeah.
Philip Pape 36:09
GLPUL and discussions reveal that.
Lyle McDonald 36:11
So I yeah, good grief. So I think Duchesne, I think that's, you know, when he did his body opus diet, which is really a in the in the 90s, was really a big part of why I am whatever I have become today, pointed out that those dietary manipulations, whether low carb, moderate carb, high carb, work much better when they are integrated with the training. Now, this is in the context of the original ultimate diet. Well, then I wrote my first book on ketogenic diets and the old cyclical ketogenic diets, where it was five days of very low carbs but higher fat. That's the difference. All a rapid fat loss day is a ketogenic diet without the fat at a fundamental level. So, but it was five days of low carbs with higher fat into one or two high carb days. That was kind of like one of the earliest, but it was synchronized with the training that was being done, using training during the low carb days to facilitate fat loss and then having, you know, more muscle growth anabolic days when you were fed. The IMF patterns are so like I said, so in carb cycling, you you see more random patterning with no, at least no pattern I could ever discern. You don't see the extremely low calories. I simply took that to what I felt was is like, no, it makes more sense to sync, you do not want a rapid fat loss day on leg day, unless you're only doing a couple of sets, because it will not, you will not have a good time. So it was more about, so yeah, similar in concept, different application. And I've always thought it's better, like let's synchronize the eating with the training. With the training, because you just get better results.
Philip Pape 37:46
So how the one question always comes up is what if I train at 5 a.m. You know, does the the eating day become the day before, or does it overlap somehow, or what?
Choosing a weekly pattern for your goal
Lyle McDonald 37:55
In this case, actually, this comes up a lot in my group, is coming out of a of a previous rapid fat loss day. So actually, hang on, put a pin in that real quick. I want to go back. You asked a question that I didn't quite get to, which is when I choose a pattern for something, there are really there are several considerations. One is their goal. Is it because in the simplest sense, the more RFL days you have, the faster the fat loss will be. But the less training you will be able to support and or do, the more training you need andor want to do, the more maintenance days you will need to support that. And the compromise is less fat loss. If you have a different goal, said, you know, if your goal is to gain muscle while limiting fat gain, you might only have one RFL day per. So there's a goal issue. And let's face it, fat loss is probably the major goal either of us ever run into.
Philip Pape 38:48
That is really I I can't wrap my head around ever like being in a deficit while I'm trying to gain muscle. That's just me personally.
Lyle McDonald 38:55
I'm like, I use that time to just always overeat. Sure. And it's not for everyone. And I even talk about that. I put a couple theoretical patterns at the back, and I'm like, you know what? This probably won't work, but try it and let me know. And when you're at that point when you are, you know, lean and trained and have good eating habits to go back to, it's probably easiest to just do a gaining phase and then do a mini-cut than to try to use these various machinations. But there are folks that are either super neurotic about their body fat, maybe they're an actor model, they need to stay leaner, and they so they might, anyway, but let's just focus on fat loss. So, really, it comes down to do you want the maximum fat loss per unit time? I mean, for that, use straight RFL. Just use do that every day until you crack. And it's funny, some people three days that they can't. I had one guy do it for seven months straight. It's there is no, there are no, he had a lot of fat to lose. And he was.
Philip Pape 39:53
Okay, so he was technically not in a death.
Lyle McDonald 39:55
He was starting three at 300 pounds. Like he was, it was very different. But he got into the groove. He felt great. Guys like eating protein and veggies. Like, what's not to like? And he, and when the fat's dropping off daily, it's pretty rewarding. Yeah.
Philip Pape 40:08
Touch on that real quick because that's indistinct from what we're going to talk about with with the intermittent, just pure rapid fat loss, like the old school approach. Dr. Bill Campbell, you know, he was on the show a couple of times. I think he first got me into this, and then I found you through his stuff because he was looking at rapid fat loss as well. Like, I think the pro protocol he ended up with using in his research was like four on one off, four on one off.
Lyle McDonald 40:29
Yeah, yeah.
Philip Pape 40:30
For like three or for like three weeks. Yeah.
Lyle McDonald 40:32
And that, yeah, which is essentially, you know, even the RFL book. So that year I wrote Rapid Fat Loss and Flexible Dieting. I published them both in the same year. And in a sense, I wrote two books that year, but in a sense, I actually wrote one and a half because both books had the same second half. But the first half was, but anyway. And if you were to include again what I used to call refeeds within a rapid fat loss pattern, which you might do, you would end up like it was a proto-IMF pattern before the terminology even existed. Just because that's what so you might end up with six RFL in one. There were some at the, you know, for leaner people, you might have two higher calories.
Philip Pape 41:09
It's almost like a two five-ish.
Lyle McDonald 41:11
Yeah. So you kind of, you know, you sort of end up, you end up at the same place through a different RFL is coming at it from the RFL days, and IMF is assuming that there will be some number of maintenance days. Like you couldn't do that. On a weekly basis. On a weekly basis. Yes, in general, generally speaking. And something I'll just only mention is some again, something I use with consultation clients frequently. And there's usually folks starting out more fat to lose, usually have some long-term eating habits that they need to let's just say modify. And believe it or not, I've talked about this with Brandon. Shockingly, surprisingly, when you eat a very restrictive diet, actually crave it, food cravings and things like that tend to go down. Taste buds change, the brain changes, you break what are actually just Pavlovian associations. But what I often do with folks, especially if they're just starting training where they don't have a lot to support, I'll be like, look, just use straight RFL for somewhere between two to four weeks. Just it's easy. The first couple weeks, you're gonna lose, you know, you could lose six to 10 pounds of fat in two weeks on top of the water. Then you can start introducing maintenance days. It may be frequent, it may be like, okay, I'm gonna start doing once a week. It may be just catch as catch can. Okay, if I don't have a normal eating day, I'm gonna crack. So you do one, go back to RFL for a few weeks, add another one, add another one. By this point, they're into three months of consistent training. Maybe, so you you just so I call it the progressive RFL, and it's just a sort of, but some people just want to start with IMF because it is. So yeah, so those would be, and again, and who am I talking to? Am I talking to a beginner with more fat to lose? Realistically, they're going to want to maximize fat loss. If I've got someone who's leaner with less fat to lose, who's training, who is training more intensely, I'm going to come at it from a different. But if they want to get the fat loss over with, I know there are a lot of people, again, in my Facebook group, they will do a rapid fat loss mini cut of two weeks between gaining phases. They know they can do it, they cut their training back. It's only two weeks. They get the, you know, you can they can drop three, four pounds of fat in that period of time, and they can get back to gaining sooner than spending two months doing it moderately. So it really just depends on the person. But the IMF book assumes that there will be at least okay, one maintenance day per week is right on the edge of the definition of IMF. That's me stretching it pretty far. I don't think there's any pattern in the literature that uses that. So that's one six, one to six. Yeah, I would probably say that at a fundamental level, a two five, two maintenance days and five RFL days would probably be the most aggressive ish. Well, yeah, it will be the most aggressive fat loss, but it will also is terms of fitting the actual definition. So a two five, you And then again, that's the intermittent cloak restriction. Maybe you train on Monday, maintenance day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, RFL days, Friday training, or whatever days of the week it is. Tuesday, it doesn't matter. And then Saturday, Sunday. It is nice because let's say Saturday, you've got a special event. Well, push your training a day. You can eat at maintenance. Don't have to worry about it. We know that that training gives those calories somewhere to go in a partitioning standpoint. It also provides that, like said that level of flexibility. If someone is training two days a week and they might be a ranked beginner, or they might be someone who's willing to cut back to two days a week because they want to get the diet over with. If someone's like, I'm training four days a week, like the power lifter, who is not willing or is not able to cut their volume, well, we're going to go with a 4-3. The fat loss will be slower, but that is, it's just all in life is a compromise and there's no getting around it. Now, I would probably say from a fat loss standpoint, anything, I would say three RFL days is probably the minimum. By the time you get to five maintenance days and two, two, you're looking at maybe a pound a week. And if that's all you need, you know, maybe the thing is if someone told me they're lifting five days a week, I'm going to strongly encourage them not to do that unless just for reasons that are a whole separate podcast. I think most people train too much. That's neither here nor there. So I think for most people, if they're looking, most maximum fat loss, two maintenance, five RFL. Moderate fat loss, three maintenance, four RFL. They might be training three days a week. Maybe it's a push-pull legs, maybe it's full body, maybe it's an ABA split up or lower, which is kind of my preference, especially for older folks whose recovery isn't there. Maybe, and at the least, maybe they've got four training days and they got three RFRL. And fat loss will range from a pound and a half at this at the least to maybe two and a half pounds. If they've got five five RFL, every RFL day is worth about half a pound. So you just have to, and that's it. Like that's really where it sort of comes from. Maximum fat loss, slower fat loss, the least fat loss. And by the time you get to one RFL day, you're not the fat loss is so insignificant that it won't matter. So, and that's when you get into the other patterns for other goals.
Philip Pape 46:16
Yeah, it's almost like a programming guide to your diet. Right. For those of you listening, we're gonna have a link in the show notes if you want to support the show. And I get a little cut if you use my special link. So we're gonna put that in the in the show notes. But chapters 19 through 28, there's a full like nine chapters going over these patterns. So it's worth like really digging in and just understanding what your goal is. But then you can always go back and say, all right, this is my goal now. So you're saying there's aggressive fat loss, then there's fat loss where you might want not want to change your training, then there's body recomp, and then maybe on the more performance and muscle building side, like the spectrum.
Lifting first thing in the morning
Lyle McDonald 46:49
Yes. So let's go back to the question we put a PIN in a little bit ago, which is what if you train first thing in the morning? Should you switch those up? And the answer is no. From an RFL day, you won't deplete muscle glycogen without training. Now you may wake up with low blood sugar, right? Your liver glycogen will certainly deplete overnight. But there is no, because people ask that, like, well, if I train, you know, first thing, you know, do I need to work? Do I need, should I have the maintenance day the day before? And to me, the answer is no. Like you just need to get your blood sugar up, which takes about five, 10 grams of carbs. Have and some people train fasted just fine, just depending on them. And from a physiological standpoint, in terms of recovery from training, we know that that happens after the workout anyway. So I would want the maintenance day calories, you know, to come after training anyway. So I wouldn't flip anything in the case that someone is try to get some, even if it's just, you know, a banana, a half a protein bar, you can even just do like carbo drink during the just something. It takes so little to get blood sugar up. There's even that weird date. I told someone was telling somebody about this for reasons I forget now. Like, and I don't know if I've ever seen anybody do this, but but the carbo swishing research, I'm sure you're familiar with it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Where basically you swish a carbo drink and then spit it out, and it gives the same performance benefits because there's glucose receptors in the tongue that basically trick your brain. It makes you think you've eaten. And I'm convinced it's raising dopamine and neurochemistry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Different podcast. But yeah, I wouldn't do anything different. Try to have something before or during, and then eat most of your then then make the maintenance day, I think, should almost always come after training day.
Philip Pape 48:30
Okay. So I've I have two tangential questions that come up from this. What one is we'll start with this one is that, you know, a lot of guys report, and I've felt this myself sometimes, if I do have a big carby dinner, I tend to perform better on like the bigger lifts and the heavier lifts, not necessarily on the higher volume or the higher rep six to 15 stuff. And I know in your book you do talk about how, you know, large leverage-based lifting can decline. And that shouldn't be your gauge for strength maintenance and muscle maintenance, like correct. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that is a really good point.
Lyle McDonald 49:03
And you could, in that case, if you found that to be the case, because you will, RFL days, the very low carb nature, you do tend to drop some body water. And on those big barbell lifts, when leverages change, power lifters always lamented that when they did weight cuts, that their bench press cratered, they had less water and glycogen. Like honestly, I think part of their chest and back was just smaller. Their range of motion went up. One of my lifters, we found out early on, she would have to compete where we would train in her singlet towards the end. Because with women, a tight singlet will compress them, and her bench range of motion increased enough for it to make a difference. So in that case, yeah, you could, and I do present this in the book as kind of a very sort of atypical pattern where you kind of like do RFL most of the day, and then you do have like the maintenance, like you have your first maintenance meal at dinner time, and then it you roll around, and then you would basically, you know, essentially eat at maintenance for, and then you would start with an RFL meal. Because even though we tend to think in 24-hour terms, we tend, and this isn't it's not correct, it's just practical, is we tend to think of like, okay, the 24-hour deficit is sleep to the next sleep. It is that day. And that's really not what's going on physiologically, right? It is this just continuous pattern. So I tend to break it up just because, in a practical sense, people are like, this is an RFL, but you make a good point. If you've got a big deadlift, well, if you've got a big deadlift work out at 5 a.m., I did that in my 20s. Oh, it was awful. So yeah, if you've got that because of your work or life schedule, I would make that change. Make the previous day RFL up into the final dinner meal. If you can eat something before the workout just to get your blood sugar up, do that and then make your final meal of that of the training day on RFL day. You're just rather this, you're just shifting it that way by like one meal. So yeah, I think that is, I think that's a very good point worth
When someone else cooks dinner
Lyle McDonald 51:10
making.
Philip Pape 51:10
And then the other thing is on the RFL day, one of the most common questions is when I don't control the food, right? So my spouse cooks because she's a great cook and I love her food and I don't want to insult her either. But now you're asking me to eat like whitefish and egg whites, you know. Yeah. What's your recommendation as a marriage counselor on that?
Lyle McDonald 51:29
Yeah, on that one, I think this is a place where my own myopian and proximity bias, because I'm a single male who lives alone, that doesn't have to worry about that. I don't have an answer for that. You mentioned a family, you probably know better than I would, which is I don't, I mean, that might be a case where you could do similar to what we're talking about, where it's like, or maybe like, is it are you talking about is this a nightly thing? Is this a special dinner event? Like Yeah, yeah.
Philip Pape 51:56
Let's say it's just a routine every day, you know, you you do division of labor just works out that way.
Lyle McDonald 52:02
Sure. One of the things about RFL that I think often gets forgotten is the wrong word, but when the deficit is so enormous, like even if you were, like, let's say, okay, you ate RFL most of the day, or even just like, let's say you did, say normally, just for math, like let's say your normal offer would be 150 grams of protein, some veggies, whatever, it's gonna come out six, eight hundred calories by the time you count tag longs under normal conditions. Okay, eat two of those during the day. Have one at three, one at six, have a normal dinner to so that you know, as I joked, I think I joked about in the book and I've said other places like, look, if you are in a relationship and are not able to either do that or go out on date night, you're gonna end up single, which make no mistake. Then you're like me and you can control every food more you put in your mouth. But probably not the goal for most people is if you then have, you know, a quote unquote normal meal at dinner. And I don't mean, you know, binge what like your calorie intake is probably gonna end up pretty close. Like if you've only had if you've had 100 grams of protein or if you've had 400 calories, right? And you have, you know, a four or five hundred calorie dinner, you're gonna end up, and even if you don't, let's say you end up at 1200 calories, your deficit is still monstrous. Yeah, so it won't really, and I even recommend that. And later in the book, I also talk about long-term maintenance and how these patterns can really facilitate that for a lot of people. And the short version is keep a couple RFL days in, even at maintenance, and you don't have to be a crazy person every day. It's nice, it's really easy. But one of the things, and I recommend like let's people have the worst time on vacations and holiday and stuff like that. And I'm like, look, if you can, like, let's say, whatever, you're on a cruise, you know you're gonna have a big dinner meal, because that's just usually when it happens. Well, have a couple of small RFL meas meals during the day and essentially save up the calories.
Philip Pape 54:01
Yeah.
Lyle McDonald 54:02
And same sort of strategy here that I think will be uh certainly workable and and will probably, because we could make a hand-waving argument. Does that low calorie day have to be truly RFL with the protein? No, if you end up a couple hundred calories, something else I've I've used that's related to this. I know people that want to do straight RFL, but know that they crack, but they don't handle maintenance days well, they lose food control. So what I developed was I call it the relaxed RFL, which is like, look, you're on RFL, maybe you allow, because they're like, can I have a half a cup of fruit just for sanity reasons? Or I like milk in my protein, like protein drinks are way better in milk or yogurt. And I'm like, yeah, look, if you've got a 1500 calorie deficit already and you add a couple hundred calories of fruit and dairy, still it's still 1300, yeah. And if that gives you better long-term adherence, yeah, long-term adherence, long-term consistency outside of those very specific situations, always beat short-term intensity. Always for people. It's not in if adding if shrinking the deficit by one seventeenth a pound of fat loss per day, which is what 200 calories is worth, keeps allows them to sustain it longer, that's better. Period. And the same thing, same thing, what you're saying, on top of keeping everyone in the household.
Philip Pape 55:25
I mean, it's your tendencies too, right? Like when I do a deficit, I will go very aggressive on the number on the target, knowing I'm almost never going to hit it. I'm fine doing that. Yes, exactly. You're backing up to a still a really big number. So stretch goals, as they say.
Lyle McDonald 55:39
Yeah, so yeah, so so same thing here. That would be an absolutely and like, you know, again, make sure get plenty of lean protein, have some veggies. But if it's, you know, if part of dinner is a serving of starch or whatever, it's gonna add a couple hundred calories. Big picture stuff won't matter.
Listener question: when to end a hard diet
Philip Pape 55:55
Yeah. So we got a couple listener questions left that tie into some of what we've been talking just now, anyway. The first one is from Sonny. Sonny's a really cool guy, he's in a mail truck all day, and he's he's a strong guy who lifts. He's over 50, intermediate lifter, and he's done your PSMF a bunch of times in the past. He's done really well. But his problem is when he stays aggressive for too long and he gets depleted, low energy, yeah, fatigued, mentally, he's like cracked, like you said. Like, when do you call it a win versus, you know, because if you're just going for numbers, that can be a problem, as we know for some people. They're trying to hit this target, they're not there, and then all of a sudden they're something. What's your thoughts on like, you know, how do people put that guardrail on? Like, I I've gotten there, I take a break. Here's an objective way to figure that out.
Lyle McDonald 56:42
Yes. And some of it, unfortunately, can just be you learn the hard way. I find this especially in a training context. Because like kind of like with dieting, pardon me. I find that people push their training cycles too long because they're like making progress, making numbers, or they want to hit their like, I'm so close to that, that number. And often people just crack overnight. I just I can't explain why. They're just like, it doesn't even, it just sneaks up on you. And all of a sudden they crater. And I go, well, look back at your I had a guy I consulted with. I will tie this back in. And he was like, I looked at my training logs 12 weeks without fail. That's when I break. I said, Cool. On your training log, I'm like, from here on out, your training cycles are 10 weeks. Do not, I used to do that in my own training. I would get super excited and making progress, and I would blow myself up endurance training. And I looked back at my logs and I was like, yep, 12, 13 weeks. That's it. That's when I blow up. So from that point on, my training cycles ended a week early. And and people do the same thing, I think, with fat loss. They want, everybody wants the diet over. I get that. I do too. And but they get so close. They're like I'm only three or four pounds away. Now, in some cases, I will just tell back when I use really formal, like longer diet breaks, like two-week diet breaks, which I don't really use in that in that type of context anymore. I'd be like, look, if you're two pounds away, do not take a two-week break to go back and diet for two weeks. I'm like, just suck it up, put your head down, and go. That's a very specific situation. What I tell people now is, because that's the mistake they fall into, is they're like, but if I take a break, I'm losing dieting time. No, you're not. Because if that break, even if it's a few days, prevents you from rolling off the rails for a month, getting hurt, regaining body fat, you didn't lose a week. You saved a month. And it's so hard to wrap your head around that for the longest time. So what I would tell, you know, and and there with that stuff with diet stuff, there's usually there are signs that you're coming up on cracking, which tends to be a lot of it is you start to just get as someone in my group again, they were just like, I'm just obsessed with food. I'm like, yep, that's a neurochemical sign that your brain is something called neuropeptide-wide, that makes us very attentive to food. That's when the physique competitors look at food porn. They go to Instagram and look at all like your brain, that's all you want to do, and they're fighting that. That starts to happen. You start to start slipping in adherence, you're having those little snacks, those little treats, things of that nature. That's really your body telling you that you're, or you start getting that excessive fatigue. You know, diet fatigue is very real. Whatever it represents physiologically, also training fatigue, eventually it catches up with you, really, no matter what. Although the IMF patterns, it it really doesn't. It is, I kid you not, is like the easiest fat loss diet you'll ever do, whether it's a 4-3 or a 3-4. But when you start to get those that sense that you're coming, and and I think Sonny, probably if you look back, you go, yeah, it's probably about the same time. And then I tried to push through, paid the price. Is when you start to sense that, go, okay, if I just I'm gonna take a break, of by which I mean raising calories to maintenance, eating more. Now the question then becomes, how long should it be? And again, in the old back in the day when I hoped that it had a metabolic benefit, the full diet break from my original book was two was two weeks. Because that's what Wing did, and that's what some of the papers have done. And we know now it doesn't really improve metabolic rate, or certainly not enough to be significant. You know, just the one paper is a hundred calories a day. But so what I tell people now is like, look, when you need to go to maintenance, just to avoid in-between fat loss phases, which is what we're talking about here, eat at maintenance until you feel ready to go back. Like until you feel like you can actively go back to. And I tell people the same with training. I no longer give really formal cycles for most people, because most people's lives can't accommodate them, unless, again, you're a college kid or just a crazy person with no life. And like, like I used to be, I am not criticizing, is I just tell you, like, look, push hard. And when you start to feel those first signs, the little joint pains, the little, the heavy muscles, that loss of motivation, losing a week to a D load beats getting hurt and losing a month to injury. And it's so hard to do that. That is often a maturity thing. Or you said so, it means I would give the same general advice. When Sonny or anyone is starting to just they can you can tell you're coming up on the crack, whether it's because that's when you do do it or you're just really struggling to adhere, you're better off taking some number of maintenance days. Now it might only be a few. Like you maybe you need three, maybe you need a long weekend. This is something I've talked about in the context of the IMF patterns. Let's say you're doing maintenance days Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or just Monday, Friday. And you've been doing that for a while, and you're like, okay, I'm really starting to struggle. Well, make Friday's maintenance, make Saturday maintenance, Sunday maintenance, Monday a maintenance. If you feel good, go back to RFL and just continue until you need it again. If you need longer, take it. Again, long-term. The only there are the weird exception that I think we can learn a lot from competitive physique athletes, but they have a couple of specific requirements that are relevant here, and then we'll move on to the other questions, which is one, they are typically striving to reach the extremes, at least in bodybuilding. Like I know some of them, one of the some of the 137 divisions that currently exist don't have those. But if you're trying to get to 4% body fat, you you it sucks. You do what you have to do. But more importantly, they have to be in shape on an exact day at an exact hour. They don't have the option to fall behind. They don't have the option, unless they've planned it in to take that break. That is the minority case. And yeah, there might be athletes. Again, if I've got a weight class athlete, they have to be within five to 10% of their weight class a week, like by some point. That's the minority exceptions. If you're looking at Gen Pop fat loss, whether it's from a high body fat percentage or just a dude who wants to get abs, fine. He's like, Why have spring break? Okay, I get it. Like that's there may be time restraints, but for everybody else, said losing four days or a week, or taking however long it takes is better than cracking for a month or getting exhausted or having job problems or whatever it is. One of the things, this is something I've I've I think realized more in recent years. One of the benefits of taking those breaks during active fat loss is it gives you a chance to practice maintenance. Because let's face it, that's the hard bit. IMF does that inherently. Every week you have a couple of maintenance days to learn to eat normally. People and I learned the hard way. Coming out of something like a strict RFL and bringing calories to maintenance causes a lot of people to lose food control. And I take a much slower. I actually use sort of a modified IMF pattern. If they're coming straight out of RFL, let's add a couple maintenance days. You're still technically diving. Even if they go off the rails, you're not going to re fat and gradually do it. This is it, it would give someone the chance to go, okay, for four days, let's try to just eat normal daily amounts, whatever that is. That's how I would approach it. Is Yeah.
Listener question: losing the last 5 to 10 pounds
Philip Pape 1:04:21
No, and I like how you ended that because it comes full circle to, you know, I don't think Sonny had your book yet or uh looked into IMF yet. He was doing straight up, you know, RFL. So trying to introduce those maintenance days in a pattern like this could be exactly what he needs. And we encourage you to try that out. All right. We'll we'll do one more question. We've actually got three that came in from Carol, but I'm gonna focus and kind of paraphrase it. She wants to know about the the lean woman experience. So I know her personally, she's you know, over 40 and maintains, lifts weights three or four days a week, about good muscularity. And what often comes up is how do I get that last five to 10 pounds? As well as while things happen like your expenditure keeps dropping and things like that because you're lean. That's generally why, right? It's because you just weigh less. There's other reasons. But how do you deal with that experience of like, is it gonna be a lot harder for those five to 10 pounds? Is there a special pattern you would recommend in that exact scenario?
Lyle McDonald 1:05:19
I don't think it's necessarily harder. It's simply slower. Is that a smaller female or even a smaller male, but generally women are gonna have just because they're they're lighter and you know, 114 pound, 120 pound female is not losing fat rapidly, no matter what she does. And this is something, again, I've I've had people come in my group, they're like, well, I did the math on RFL, and like it's only two pounds a week. I'm like, yeah, it's rapid by it's it's rapid in a relative sense. Relative. Because a typical, if you look at the typical recommendations to lose, you know, half a percent of body weight per week, that's you're looking at 0.6 pounds, right? Or whatever it is for that, the person's body weight. Like it's rapid just by comparison. So the smaller female is absolutely going to lose fat more slowly than a larger male just because they cannot, but by the same token, they have less total lean body mass. So their total protein intake, you know, that that if you've got, let's say you've got a woman at, you know, 120 pounds, let's say she's just 18%, just for the sake of it, you know, that she's got 100 pounds of lean body mass. At most, she's looking at, you know, 150 grams of protein, like at the absolute maximum. And, you know, so she's that's you know, 400 calories. She's gonna get a couple hundred of tag along, 600. If her maintenance is 1500 to 1800, if she's training intensely, it will be, you know, it'll be probably 13, 14 calories a pound, depending on step count, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, she's looking at a thousand calorie per day deficit on the RFL days. So if she's got four of those, yeah, it's only gonna be a pound and a quarter per week, but it's still gonna be twice what she'd get. So yeah, I mean, yeah, it it is harder in the sense that it's just gonna be slower, but the the math always kind of works out the same. And one really interesting thing is that yes, so we know as people, you know, get leaner, you've got reductions in energy expenditure, most of it is body weight. There's also that adaptive component that is massively variable, can range from very small to very large, depending on, and that's why you have to either keep reducing calories or raising cardio, because you have to maintain the deficit. And I think that's another potential drawback. Traditional dieting approaches. Calories just, you know, if you're trying to eat a straight deficit every day, right? So she starts at whatever, 1800 calories, and then she loses so much, and now she's at 1600 and 1400 and 1200 every day, or she's having to ramp cardio, you know, to an hour, hour and a half, two hours back like it, you know, used to have to do. There is no study ever, well, I guess Minnesota, but the the metabolic adaptation to both weight loss and the adaptive level can never completely offset an RFL size deficit. Ever. It cannot be done. Okay, again, the Minnesota study, they dropped 50%, but they were 4% body fat. Like that is the weird exception. So, and I presented this one thing I put in this book that was like, look, how to use this for contest prep, because that's how most contest preps go. You start with your deficit, and every two weeks calories come down and cardio, and you just do that forever until you either get to the point calories can't come any lower or cardio can't go any higher. And that's when you crack. But with the IMF patterns, A, you've got your training is supported, so you don't lose performance there. The diet is created all on the three days per week. And but what I presented was as fat loss slows, cut a training day and add an RFL day. Boom, you just added another 12. You know, you could you could bring calories down 150 every day of the week, which rapidly becomes self-limiting, or just add another RFL day.
Philip Pape 1:09:08
So instead of adding like more cardio on a maintenance day.
Lyle McDonald 1:09:11
Sure. I mean, both like they all work, right? Make no mistake, people have gotten into shape. You have to maintain the deficit, but given there's a limit, you can only usually do so much cardio in a day, you can only handle so much training in a day, you can only bring and smaller females usually have that awful combination of it of bringing, you know, that's that's where poverty calories. I'm pretty sure that's where that terminology came from. You know, a again, a smaller female. I I prepped a one one of the earliest bodies, she has like 114 pounds. She was, and I was trying to prep for a bodybuilding show and a powerlifting competition at the same time because she was she was nuts and I was too to do it. But we got to the point, like she was on, you know, 1400 calories a day, still having to do, you know, 45 minutes of cardio morning and evening just to maintain the deficit. Whereas honestly, you know, cutting training down by a day, which is not a bad thing when you're facing exhaustion from dieting and just adding another RFL day, that will keep the fat loss moving. And you still get to have two to three maintenance days to keep you sane, support training, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, just to make it so you will be yeah, it will be slower.
Philip Pape 1:10:21
And one real quick thing I want listeners to realize is Miles talking about protein, it's per pound of lean body mass, like you said. So it's even more than like what's often talked about per pound of total body weight.
Lyle McDonald 1:10:32
And and you actually scale the numbers, that's the big difference. Yeah, is like if you look at some of the studies, they're like, oh, 1.6 grams per kilo or you know, 1.6 to 1.8, that's total body weight. And if you go look at the body fat percentage of the subjects, it's about 20%. And if you scale to lean body mass, it ends up in about the same place. And I do, I I've always tended to, I would always rather see a little bit too much protein than too little. And we do know, we have the data that as people get extremely lean, Eric Helms did a review on that a bunch of years ago, and I think there's been more data. We know that protein requirements do go up. So that, but it is scaled. Too lean, and that's it's arguably more important for people carrying more body fat, right?
Philip Pape 1:11:15
Awesome. Well, I think we hit on most of the big points. There, there's a couple other things listeners can check out on the book, like tracking. There's a whole section on tracking, which which is amazing. But where do you want people to find you, Lyle? You know, first place to find you, yeah.
Lyle McDonald 1:11:28
So my website, which I've had since like the earliest days of the internet, I think like 96, is bodyrecomposition.com. There's something like 400 articles on just about anything you could care to name. That will take you to my store, store.body recomposition.com. I've written, I don't know, 14, 16 books on all kinds of different topics, including the new one, the Intermittent Modified Fasting, which we weren't recording, but but you made a really good point that it's certainly the most current synthesis of like it brings together a lot of ideas that I've written about kind of in isolation. And I actually did. There are three chapters that are like, okay, where do these flexible dieting concepts, the free meal, the maintenance days, the like, where do those fit in this pattern? And the answer is it's all kind of included, right? On a maintenance day, you can have what I used to refer to as a free meal, where you could have, you know, one serving of a non-diet. It fits. The maintenance days are built in. Diet breaks are almost obviated unless you need, and you certainly don't need it. So I I that's all discussed in there, my most current thoughts about it. Long-term maintenance, the rules of maintenance I use now that I have never written up for. Anyway, that book is there along with all of my other ones. I have a very active Facebook group, again, body recomposition. I'm there daily. A lot of questions, a lot of really smart people in my group. There are experts in every topic. It's amazing to me. I will see questions that I don't even know what they're asking. And we will have three clinicians and six people that have dealt with it. Like I learn from my people every day. And if you've got questions about my books, that's the best place to find me. Lately I have been putting up YouTube content. I believe smugly the name of my channel is Lyle McDonald is right. It's something like that. Just search my name. So those are the places to find me.
Philip Pape 1:13:13
All right, everybody, you heard that. They'll be in the show notes. Go to bodyrecomposition.com. You could also grab any of Lyle's books at witsandweights.com/ Lyle. If you also want to support the show at the same time, just go to witsandweights.com/ Lyle and you'll find intermittent modified fasting. I'd definitely pick that up. It's very, very comprehensive, dives into all of this stuff. Thank you, Lyle, man. It's been a pleasure. It's an honor to have you on. Thank you for coming on the show.
