Ep. #177: Should You Have a “Refeed Day?” A Simple Science-Based Answer

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series where I answer one common question quickly and simply, because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less.

And that’s what I do in these episodes. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Most Full Life and Legion Athletics. And if you want to know how to use a special type of controlled overeating to make your dieting more enjoyable and more effective, then you want to listen to this podcast. And as the topic at hand here is refeeding and what is refeeding?

Well, a refeed is where you increase your calories in a controlled in planned [00:01:00] way. And when you do this right, it can benefit you in several ways. It can reduce the risk of binging, which of course always gets in the way, regardless of what you’re trying to do with your diet, whether you’re trying to. Cut, bulk or maintain, binging is always bad and it can also increase your motivation to stick to your diet.

And that’s obviously particularly in the context of cutting because it will raise the levels of certain hormones like testosterone, dopamine, and leptin. Now, chances are you have heard of the first two hormones. You’ve heard of testosterone and dopamine, but probably not leptin. And in the context of dieting, leptin actually has more powerful effects than testosterone and dopamine because it is a hormone that is produced by body fat and it helps your body regulate hunger.

It helps it regulate the metabolic rate. it helps regulate appetite, motivation, libido, and other important functions. And when you restrict your calories, your leptin levels [00:02:00] naturally decline. One of the reasons being because body fat produces it. And as you are losing body fat, there is less fat in your body to produce leptin.

And as leptin levels get lower, So that tells your body that it is in a energy deficient state and that it should take measures to correct this. So it should take measures to try to increase energy intake and decrease energy output to erase that deficit. And it does this through various mechanisms that are collectively known as adaptive thermogenesis.

And on the flip side, when leptin levels are high, when there’s an abundance of leptin in the body, that tells your brain that there is an abundance of energy available and that it can expend energy at a normal rate and that it can eat food in normal amounts and that it can engage in physical activity in normal amounts.

And it can also expend additional energy on metabolically expensive processes like muscle building for example. And that’s why one of the primary reasons why you should incorporate refeeding [00:03:00] into your cutting in particular, it’s less important when you’re maintaining and bulking, I’d say it probably is not important at all when you’re bulking, possibly when you maintain, because ultimately maintenance means you’re in a deficit some days and you’re in a slight surplus on other days.

And over time, it just out, but who knows when you’re maintaining, you might accidentally be in a deficit three, four, maybe even five days in a row because you can’t calculate your energy expenditure or really your intake either with absolute precision. You’re just guesstimating on both sides of that equation, but when you’re cutting, at least when you’re doing it properly, you are in a deficit pretty much every day.

So that means that over time your leptin levels are just getting lower and lower. And therefore one of the primary benefits of incorporating refeeds is you can temporarily spike your leptin levels up, which will not only just make you feel better, but it actually can have positive effects on your body’s fat burning mechanisms, so to speak.

So it can help your body continue to burn body fat more efficiently is one way to think about it.[00:04:00] 

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. So now let’s talk about how to refeed properly. First, let’s talk about frequency.

So if you’re a guy over 10 percent body fat, if you’re a girl over 20 percent body fat, Yeah. You don’t really need to refeed all that frequently. One refeed day every two weeks would be fine. But if you are a guy under 10 percent [00:05:00] wanting to get very lean, or if you’re a girl under 20 percent wanting to get very lean, then I would recommend that you refeed at least once per week and you may even need to do twice per week.

You have to see how it goes with your body. Some people do just fine. I do just fine with one refeed per week, but I know some people. really see noticeable benefits by upping it to two refeeds per week. The next point is how many calories should you eat on a refeed days? You definitely need to be paying attention to your calories.

You don’t want to just go, Hey, it’s a refeed day. I’ll just eat all the carbs I can find. So when you’re cutting, I recommend that you increase your current daily intake, not your current daily calories. energy expenditure, but your current daily intake by 20 to 30%. So enough of a surplus to reap the benefits that we’re after, but not so much that we are significantly hindering our fat loss.

And in terms of macros, you want to keep your protein around 0. 8 grams per pound of [00:06:00] body weight for your refeed days. You can go up to one if you’d like, and you want to keep your dietary fat as low as possible. So I myself try to get it down to 20, 30 grams for the day. And there are two reasons for that.

One is we are trying to eat as many carbs as possible on these refeed days because research shows that high carbohydrate meals spike leptin levels much more than high protein or high fat meals. And the other reason is that research shows that high fat meals. Result in more immediate fat storage than high carb meals.

And the reasons for that need their own video. But the long story short is that the body is not good at converting carbohydrates. into body fat because the glucose in carbohydrates, which is ultimately what carbohydrates turn into when you eat them, regardless of what kind of carb eating, it ultimately turns into glucose and glycogen is just a form of glucose.

So [00:07:00] the process whereby the body turns glucose into body fat, which is known as de novo lipogenesis rarely happens under normal dietary circumstances. Research shows, you have to eat a shitload of carbs to really have DNL. Significantly impact total fat mass. I’m talking like 700 to 900 grams of carbs per day.

Now, dietary fat on the other hand is converted into body fat very efficiently because it is chemically very similar. And remember, that’s one of the reasons why we have to eat dietary fat is to replenish our body’s fat stores because our fat is an organ. It produces hormones. It’s vital. If we lose too much body fat, Anyway, I don’t want to get off on too much of a tangent here, but if you want to learn more about this specifically, just watch the video I posted on cheat meals.

And I go into a bit more of the physiology of fat burning and fat storage and how it relates to [00:08:00] carbohydrate and dietary fat intake. But for the purposes of our video here, just follow the recommendation of keeping your dietary fat as low as possible on your refeed days. And what that means then is you have a lot of calories to a lot to carbs.

And that’s what you want to do is use the rest of your calories for carbs. And if you’re wondering how to possibly get your carb intake so high while keeping your fat intake so low, you just have to make good food choices. So like my personal favorite choices when I’m refeeding our pancakes pasta with some sort of marinara type of sauce, low fat sauce bread.

Potatoes, sweet potatoes, things like that. Hey there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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