The Dieting Dilemma: Why Finding Your Sweet Spot Matters
From Director of Health Alex Maples
The Rush to Results
Many of us approach dieting like ripping off a bandage – the faster, the better. I get it, I'm guilty as well. Intentionally depriving ourselves is hard, and the thought of doing so longer than necessary is maddening. So the faster the better…right?
Well maybe. There’s a common theme when thinking about fat loss: Aim for sweet spots, not extremes.
The Slow-and-Steady Struggle
Dieting slowly might be the healthiest move on paper (and for your body), but maintaining a tiny deficit for months can be excruciating. The margin for error is small, meticulous tracking gets tedious, and progress is slow enough that it’s difficult to tell if anything’s changing.
The Danger of Drastic Deficits
The other end of the spectrum is to go hard and rush to the finish line. Tempting, there can be some pretty nasty tradeoffs.
A deep caloric deficit is stressful on our bodies. We’re literally taking away the substrate our bodies use to function and asking our bodies to access the energy we have stored as body fat. Do that at a slow to moderate pace, no big deal. Do that quickly? The body starts to worry. From a survival perspective, an extreme dip in the calories coming in spells big trouble.
Your Body’s Priorities: Survival First
Humans, like all living creatures, have two fundamental drivers:
Survival
Reproduction
When survival is taken care of, we can put resources towards the second (grr baby). But when survival feels threatened, the body reroutes resources toward finding food and away from, well, everything else.
Even when, intellectually, we know that we’re not at risk of starving while dieting, our bodies don't. The deeper and more sustained the restriction of energy, the more generations of biological hardwiring think our survival is at risk. That means the less we’re going to spend resources on anything that doesn't immediately work towards us surviving this (artificial, self-imposed) famine.
In men, testosterone will drop – and with it sexual desire. Women will stop menstruating, and their bodies will no longer prepare for pregnancy each month.
It's a genius design. Without enough available resources around to ensure survival, our bodies put the kibosh on reproducing because the likelihood of offspring surviving in a real resource-scarce environment drops dramatically.
System-Wide Conservation: Body and Mind Under Siege
Sex drive isn’t the only thing affected by the hormonal cascade resulting from a (again, artificial) resource crisis. The perceived threat of starvation triggers a comprehensive energy-conservation strategy across your physiology – including both physical and cognitive functions.
Physical Energy Conservation
Reduced Basal Metabolic Rate: Your body becomes remarkably efficient with calories by lowering your BMR (the amount of energy needed just to keep your organs functioning). The upshot is that you burn significantly fewer calories, even at complete rest.
Decreased Physical Performance: Strength, endurance, and recovery capacity dip as your body diverts energy away from muscle tissue maintenance. Workouts that once felt manageable become increasingly difficult.
Fatigue and Lethargy: Your brain actively generates feelings of tiredness to discourage movement, reducing what scientists call NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) – all the small, spontaneous movements that typically burn calories throughout your day.
Cold Intolerance: Body temperature regulation requires a lot of energy. When resources are scarce, your brain reduces circulation to extremities and lowers core temperature slightly, making you feel perpetually cold.
Cognitive Prioritization
While these physical changes are occurring, your brain, which normally consumes about 20% of your total energy despite being only 2% of your body weight, undergoes its own resource allocation strategy:
Impaired Concentration: Your brain rations glucose to essentials, making concentration on anything unrelated to food or immediate survival harder.
Decision Fatigue: Complex decision-making and your capacity for nuanced thinking and willpower dramatically decline, explaining why dietary compliance becomes progressively harder.
Cognitive Narrowing: You hyperfocus on food as your brain prioritizes finding nourishment. Hence why most people on a diet become preoccupied with meals, recipes, and eating.
Memory Issues: Working memory and cognitive processing speed decline as your brain directs limited energy to more survival-critical functions.
Mood Disturbances: Serotonin/dopamine balance can be disrupted, triggering increased irritability, anxiety, and depression. (At least these mood changes aren't character flaws but direct biological responses to perceived threat?)
All these adaptations occur through precise biological mechanisms. Stress hormones like cortisol increase (promoting fat storage and muscle breakdown), while thyroid hormones decrease (slowing metabolism). Blood glucose is carefully regulated to ensure your brain receives adequate, if limited, fuel. Your entire endocrine system recalibrates to preserve your life – at the cost of your quality of life.
The Fat Loss Pendulum: Why Diets Break
Rebound is common. 80% of people who lose a significant amount of weight regain the weight. 30-60% of them end up heavier than before.
Think of a pendulum: the harder you swing in one direction, the more the momentum is going to swing back against you on the return trip. If you’re super aggressive and restrictive with your diet, when you let your foot off the gas your appetite and hunger will be through the roof.
Part of making a sustainable approach is about creating less momentum. That means either reducing the total force, or shortening the distance the pendulum travels.
Finding Your Sweet Spot
I don't like the low and slow approach. I would rather be more uncomfortable for a shorter period than be a little uncomfortable for a long period. But, I also recognize that if I am too aggressive, my mood, thinking, training, and, yes, sex drive all suffer.
Two strategies that balance results with sanity:
Strategy 1: The Undulating Deficit
The undulating deficit is pretty straight forward:
5 days of an aggressive deficit (e.g., 500-750 calories below maintenance)
2 days of maintenance or slightly above maintenance
Real-world example: If your maintenance calories are 2,500, you might eat 1,750-2,000 calories Monday through Friday, then 2,500-2,700 calories on Saturday and Sunday.
This approach allows me to go hard when I'm going, and then take a breather and recharge a little before I go back in. I personally like to do this approach with my weekly schedule. Dieting hard during the week, when I am occupied with work and other responsibilities, and then eating more on the weekends, when I am less busy and more likely to have social events like date nights or family gatherings.
The tricky part is not viewing this as a license to eat anything I want, but rather just having more room for some pleasurable foods or things outside of my typical diet. For example, having that glass of wine with dinner or enjoying dessert after a meal out.
Strategy 2: Diet Sprint/Minicut
If you want to “rip the bandage,” another option is a diet sprint or minicut. Unlike with the undulating deficit, here we’re aiming to keep our calories level through the entirety of the diet. It’s just shorter.
Instead of maintaining a moderate deficit for 12 weeks, aim for a more aggressive deficit for 3-6 weeks. After that, there’s an equal amount of time at maintenance. If you still have more you’d like to lose, do it again.
Real-world example: A 4-week sprint at a 750-calorie deficit (for someone with 2,500 maintenance calories, that's 1,750 daily), followed by 4 weeks at maintenance (2,500), then another sprint if needed.
Both of these approaches allow for a more aggressive approach, but they put limits on the amount of time your body is under higher stress. The idea is to mitigate the stress of dieting by not being chronically underfed. Instead your body gets time to cool off and recover. And, you get a mental break.
The Long Game Approach to Lasting Results
Fat loss is a long game whether we like it or not. Sure it's physiologically possible to lose a ton of weight quickly. But the harder we push, the harder the body tends to push back.
It's okay to be aggressive, but you have to plan for the pendulum: build in breaks, watch your recovery, and adjust when signals (sleep, mood, training quality) slide.
Sustainable progress, even if it's slower than you'd like, beats rapid results that quickly reverse themselves. Find your personal sweet spot between aggressive deficits and strategic breaks, and you'll build a healthier relationship with food while achieving the body composition changes you're after.
Try one of these approaches for the next month and see how your body responds. The most effective diet isn't usually the most extreme one; it's the one you can actually stick with long enough to see lasting change.
