Coach HubRefeeds and diet breaks
Week-to-week levers handle the short game. Refeeds (a single higher-calorie day) and diet breaks (1–2 weeks at maintenance) handle the long game. They're the planned rest that lets a cut keep working past the point where more deficit would break it. New coaches under-use them.
Diet length follows symptoms, not the calendar
There's no fixed week limit on a lifestyle cut. A rigid 12-week cap with a forced break comes from contest prep. It doesn't fit a lifestyle client on a sustainable deficit.
The cut continues until the goal is reached, or until symptoms say step out. Consider a break when two or more of these stack for two or more weeks:
- Sleep getting worse
- Mood or training enthusiasm cracking
- Performance dropping across multiple sessions
- Adherence fraying: more off-plan days, late-night snacking, weekend creep
- Hunger that's disruptive, not just manageable
- For women: menstrual changes that weren't there at the start (step out and refer to a GP, Modules 3.10 and 7.7)
When to plan them regardless
| Situation | Plan it |
|---|---|
| First ~8 weeks of a deficit | Reactive only. Most clients won't need one if pacing is sensible. |
| Past ~8 weeks, very compliant, rarely eats out | Build in refeeds. The body has been in genuine continuous deficit. |
| Very lean clients | A 1–2 week break every 6–8 weeks of deficit |
| Losing 20 kg or more overall | A 1–2 week break every 8–10 kg lost, or every 3–4 months, whichever comes first |
Social clients are already refeeding
A client who eats out every week or two is already getting informal refeeds. The birthday dinner does the same physical job as a planned high day. Adding structured refeeds on top can eat the deficit. Save them for the meal-prepped, never-eats-out client.
Running a diet break
- 1–2 weeks at maintenance. A real number on the plan, not "eat what feels right."
- Same meal structure, just more food. Treating it as "off plan" leads to overshooting.
- Set a start and end date. A break without an end date is a diet that ended.
- Resume at the same deficit, not deeper to "make up for it." The break wasn't lost time.
- Predict the scale rise before it happens:
"Your scale is going to go up this week, probably 1–2 kg in the first few days. That's not fat. It's water, glycogen and more food in your system. The most common mistake is panicking on day three and cutting back. Hit the new target, keep the structure, and let the scale do whatever it does. Your hunger will settle, your training drive will come back, and the next phase will actually work."
Why we don't rush back into another cut
The body takes months to fully recover from a long deficit: hunger signals, energy, hormones and, for women, the cycle. Back-to-back cuts on an unrecovered system produce worse results, not better. That's also why the reverse should bring calories back up promptly (6.7). Teach clients this, so they stop asking for another cut straight after the last one.