 Question is from Laura Ashley. Do you think diet breaks are helpful for someone who has cut calories multiple times in life? I think diet breaks are helpful if they're not diet breaks. It depends how you use them, right? So if you're using, and this is just based off of working with lots and lots of people. So the studies will show that having a break in your diet, in other words, rather than always being, let's say you wanna lose weight, right? So you're at a calorie deficit. That means you're eating less calories than you're burning. That's essential for fat loss. So let's say you're doing that for three weeks and then every three weeks you do one to three days where you bring the calories up so that it's at maintenance. So you're eating as much as you're burning or maybe even a little bit above that. So you're eating a little bit more than you're burning. Then you go back down to your deficit and you repeat that cycle. Studies show that you'll burn more body fat and lose less muscle or no muscle if you do it that way. It seems to have a better effect on the metabolism because the metabolism tends to wanna slow down when you cut your calories. So less of that happens when you do diet breaks. Now, my experience as a trainer tells me this, when they're scheduled diet breaks, they encourage binging when the break comes around. So I'm restricting for two weeks and I know, oh my God, in 10 days I got my diet break. Uh-oh, in five days I got my diet break. Two days I got my diet break. Boom, I get to the diet break and it becomes, I tend to lose control. This is more speaking to like cheat day mentality. Exactly, that's exactly what the diet break is. I was reading it more like they've been, in a restricted calorie deficit for a long period of time. And at that point I would say yes. A longer. Yeah, if it was like in a long gated period of time where you need to interrupt that by bumping up your calories, I would see a lot of benefits. No, that's a good point. Yeah, it's a little bit of a loaded question because of that. Because I don't know exactly who I'm talking to when I answer this. I would be very careful answering it because I wouldn't want to encourage somebody to, yeah, you should take a week off and they plan that when they go to Cabo or Hawaii and then they drink and eat like crazy and like, yeah, I'm on my diet break because my pumps is it's good for me. Like, no, I don't think that's a good step. But what we talk about on the show a lot, I feel like, is the benefits of running mini cuts and mini bulks. And if your main goal is to lose body fat and to reduce, you would spend more of the time in cuts and less time in bulks, but no matter what your goal is, you should weave in and out of them and more frequent than not. Like the biggest mistake I think I see with people that are trying to lose body fat is they go on these six, eight, 12, 24, week long diets where they're in a calorie restriction. And yeah, it doesn't take very long and in fact the studies show that it takes about two to four weeks before the body really starts to adapt and slow down to this new calorie maintenance. So to keep that from happening, one of the best things that you could do is to go back to like what Sal said, as you move back into a maintenance to a surplus for a little while and then move back. And we could sit here and talk all day long about what is the most ideal? Like how long should I be dieting for? How long should I be bulking? Well, there's gonna be an individual variance with everybody, but typically if I have a client who wants to lose body fat, I'll never let them really run longer than four to six weeks tops. That's a long time of a pure calorie restricted diet before I at least give them one week of surplus. And when we do that, it's a very calculated surplus. It's not, I tell a client, oh, you've been good for four to six weeks dieting. You get a week off to be off the diet. You know, it's okay, you've been eating 1500 calories for the last four weeks consistently. I want you to run a surplus for this week. What does that look like? Well, instead of 1500, I want you at 17 or 1800 calories every single day for a week long. So, and we do that for a week and then we go back. And so I'll intermittently do that. And you can do that as frequent as every two weeks or so for somebody's trying to do that. I probably wouldn't stretch longer, like I said, than about four or six weeks consistently in a diet, before I at least give you some surplus days in there. Yeah, but, you know, doing the whole like, you know, Thursday is my diet break, or you know, next week I'm off the diet, that way I can go back on it. It promotes bad behaviors. It does, it promotes bad behaviors, which is the most important thing you want to consider when you're trying to eat healthy. Here's the other thing too, I see people doing these cheat days or diet breaks and that's the way I'm interpreting it, right? I see people doing that. The same people that do that are the same people that eat the same amount of calories every single day. Whenever you're trying to eat healthier and you're counting macros and calories, one strategy that I've used in the past that makes it more long-term effective is to try to mimic real life a little bit more closely. And real life rarely looks like 1,500 calories every single day. Typically it looks more like 1,700 calories this day, 1,300 calories this day. Right, fluctuates. Yeah, so you might want to do that if you are tracking your food or whatever. Try fluctuating throughout the week and really at the end of the day what you want is the total weekly calories should look the way you want them to look but allow yourself some fluctuations because at some point you're gonna go off counting all these calories and when you do you don't want it to be such a big shock that I went from eating the exact same food all the time with the same calories every single day to no guidance at all or no parameter. You wanna know how to weather the storm. That's it.