This, as many other aspects of this module, is a very individual thing. First of all, the important thing to remember is that, for fat loss at least, your total calorie intake over the course of a week or month is key (muscle gain is a little different; it’s probably best to just eat in a relatively linear fashion with the same or at least similar energy amounts each day). If during a 28 day period you eat meaningfully fewer calories than you burn, at the end of the 28 days you’ll weigh less than you did at the start, but that doesn’t say you have to eat the same amount every day.
Eating the same amount every day is a safe, simple and effective means of controlling your diet and a tried-and-tested formula for fat loss. Find how much you should eat, eat a bit less than that every day, enjoy success – simple… but also boring.
It doesn’t need to be that way though, and when we again look at the individual factors which play in to dietary adherence we can start to create a picture of why. Progress can be slow, you’re hungry pretty much every day and things can get monotonous – let’s look at some alternatives.
One common method of setting up a diet in a non-linear fashion is to take one’s average estimated calorie needs per day (TDEE as calculated previously, minus whatever you’re subtracting per day in order to lose fat) and multiply that by 7 to work out approximately how much food you need to eat that week. You can then distribute those calories unevenly across the days of any given week to account for days where you are especially busy and therefore don’t mind eating less, or days where you are training particularly hard or often bored and tempted by snacks. By having low or high days you can achieve the same calorie deficit by cutting your energy intake a lot when it’s easy to do so and then increasing it some more when it’s not. This is by far and away not the only means of unevenly distributing calorie intakes though.
Some people may have one day per week which is spent travelling, or which is extremely busy – what if they speed their fat loss up by eating very little or fasting on that one day per week?
You could have a week where you eat very little followed by 3-4 weeks of eating a little more as a little ‘boost’.
You could have one low day then two moderate days, one low day then one high day, then one low day then two moderate days, repeated, equalling fewer calories than if you had a more linear approach, but offering one day per week of eating quite a bit more, maybe on a social occasion.
You could have a stretch goal and a conservative goal, aiming for a 5% or 15% deficit every day depending on how hungry you feel.
These approaches may be harder to stick to for some, and may seem overly complicated for others, but there are many people who will be happy to eat as little as possible for a week if that’s then followed by a day of eating quite a bit, then 3 weeks of eating in a more sensible calorie deficit. The result will be the same as a linear calorie intake, but this might be easier to stick to. After all, it comes down to the individual, their context, and their ability to adhere to a dietary approach.
For example, a person needing 2500 calories per day to maintain their weight could eat 2000 calories per day to lose weight, totalling 14000 calories per week. Or they could do:
Totalling 13500, but with days of eating quite a bit more. The 1000 calorie day may be tough, or it could be easy because it’s followed by a day of more. There are a lot of ways to skew someone’s calorie intake, the point is to not be afraid to mix up the way you achieve a calorie deficit – it can be even and for many people this is easiest, but it doesn’t need to be that way.
As a final note on this point, for anyone who will be losing weight for a prolonged period of time, full diet breaks are a very good idea. This is a week or two which is intentionally spent at a maintenance calorie level, and it serves a number of important psychological purposes.
Firstly, it makes the whole process easier. Much like your year at work is a lot easier to handle when you have holidays to look forward to, it’s a lot more do-able to stick to a diet for 4-8 weeks followed by 1-2 weeks of eating more food and not being hungry, than it is to look at 18 or more months of constant dieting.
Secondly, this makes transitioning to the ‘after diet’ a lot easier because you learn how to eat at maintenance which is important. Many people will spend their life eating poorly, and then when they decide to remedy this the first thing they do is to eat in a deficit until they reach a goal. At this point the person only knows how to eat badly or eat to lose weight, and when they don’t want to do the latter anymore they revert to the former and gain the weight back again. By spending pre-planned periods intentionally learning about cooking and eating to maintain your weight, when the time comes it then becomes the norm, and you’re far more able to handle it. Transitional dieting will be covered as the last section of this module.