Jonathan Steedman (00:01.28)
Okay, okay, a question I get asked a lot is how long should I be in a deficit for? Or how long should I try and lose weight for? And I've talked about this in another podcast about how you can break things up, but I don't remember. Maybe I did. So maybe I'm repeating myself. But if I don't remember, you almost certainly wouldn't remember. it's okay. I don't remember if I talked about what things go into influencing how long you should be in a deficit.

because it's quite a few different things, which is why I can't just tell you, you should be in a deficit for 12 weeks or three weeks or whatever. And it kind of sums up why nutrition is so awesome and so horrible at the same time is because you can really, really personalize this stuff and you should be really, really personalizing this stuff. That also means it's hard to just find good blanket advice other than, you know, eat your fruits and vegetables and stuff like that.

I wanted to go through the things that you need to consider if your goal is weight loss and the variables that will be influencing how long you should maintain that deficit for. Savvy? Sick. So probably the worst way, just as a side note, to do a deficit is for as long as you can, to a degree. I think you should always, you might need to push a little, but you should always have a predetermined timeframe.

and depending on how much weight you have to lose.

that timeframe may not get you to where you wanna go and that's okay. It just needs to get you closer. And so I guess what I mean by that is there's no hard and fast rule, but most people I know shouldn't diet longer than like 12 to 16 weeks. That's a long time, even if you're doing it mildly. And so in that time, you're unlikely, again, I'm making some generalizations, but 15,

Jonathan Steedman (02:08.097)
kilos in that time would be a huge, huge achievement. But some, for some of you listening, your weight loss goal might be bigger than that. And that's okay. What you would just need to do is do a block of that, move to something else, which we'll talk about, and then have another block of weight loss. Right? So if, as I go forwards, I'm mentioning things that indicate you should

diet for a shorter amount of time and you're like, well, Johnny, you're kind of telling me that for me, it sounds like six weeks is the longest I should diet, but I can't get my goal sorted in six weeks. That's so fine. Just do multiple blocks of six weeks. That's the way to do it. So in absolutely no order whatsoever, because I'm not that organized, here are the things that influence how long you should be in a deficit. The first, actually, this is probably the biggest one, but anyway, the rest aren't in any order, is the size of your deficit. So,

A general rule is the bigger your deficit, in other words the less you're eating, the shorter you should maintain that for. Which makes sense, right? It's more aggressive. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that if you're doing it the right way. There's ways to aggressively diet extremely stupidly and ways to do it that are safe and sensible. Inside the group we have an approach called the sprint phase which helps people diet a little bit more aggressively. It doesn't help everyone do that because not everyone

is allowed to do it because it's very much a good approach for some people and a terrible approach for others. And of course we talk through who it's for. in the sprint phase in the group, it is a bit more of a push than the standard weight loss approach that we start with. And so for people doing the sprint phase, they do it in smaller blocks because it is a larger deficit. And again, just like running, if we think about our normal weight loss phase being a jog, you can maintain a jog and the quality of that jog for longer.

Whereas if you're sprinting, yeah, you go faster, quicker, but you can't maintain that speed and that quality for as long. So that's okay. You just do multiple sprints with rests in between. And that's something we do. So the bigger the deficit, probably the shorter your phase of diet.

Jonathan Steedman (04:20.044)
The next thing is gonna be something like your current body fat levels. You don't even need to know the number. I'm not gonna give you, if you're 20%, you should blah, blah. It's generally just the leaner you are, the shorter those diet phases will be, right? So if you've got 20, 30 kilos that you feel you wanna lose, you can maintain a deficit for a while. You would be a good candidate for that 16 to 20 week block if it's all working.

But if someone's trying to lose three to five kilos and they're already quite lean, then dieting for 16 weeks is hell and it's gonna get you in a whole host of trouble. So the leaner you are, the shorter that phase should be.

The other thing is life. And I think we forget this a lot, which is weird because you have to live it and it is going to happen to you. But it's easy to put our blinkers on and forget that life is going to happen. And so if your life is particularly chaotic, if your work is particularly stressful, if your kids are particularly hard, or maybe they're just going through a phase at the moment where they're extra, you know, they're teething or they've hit the daycare stage where they're catching a germ, new germ every two weeks or

If you're like me, my son has just started prep, so the very first year of school, my daughter's just gone back to year three and they are struggling in the evenings, the emotional blow ups, they're not sleeping as well, they're stressed, because the poor little brains are in overdrive. So now would be a really bad time for me to diet for as long and as hard as I can, because I've got to show up as a dad more than normal. And so...

You want to take life into account and let that influence how long you maintain your weight loss for as well. So it makes more sense for me right now to maybe even pause, right? To intentionally maintain my body weight because that lets me show up better as a dad. Right? And you need to be careful because life will always be chaos. I talk about this a lot and you can very easily be like, Oh, life's too chaotic. can't do it right now. And before you know it, you're 70 and life's finally calmed down.

Jonathan Steedman (06:32.098)
But on the flip side, there's probably going to be periods of time where it just is a bad idea. So have a think about that too. Is now normal chaos? Great. You can probably be in a deficit for longer. Is now just total chaos? Yeah, maybe just do shorter bursts of a deficit or maybe just pause that body fat goal. There's times, right? And so the other thing I would think about is training. So any kind of physical

Jonathan Steedman (07:04.334)
What am I trying to say? Any kind of performance related goals. If you've got a half marathon or a 10K or a powerlifting meet or you've got some kind of data that you're working towards where you need to perform at your peak, again, longer deficits will eventually start to hurt performance. So it might be worth doing shorter deficits or once again deciding not to do it at all. And so what we do in the group is we use something called the escape plan.

where we intentionally bring your calories back to maintenance. And so in a lot of situations, that is the right approach, right? You either should be doing a shorter deficit than that escape plan slash return to maintenance, or maybe a slightly longer deficit, but always broken up with those breaks. So in summary, the bigger your deficit, the more aggressive your deficit, the shorter that weight loss phase should be.

the more important training goal you have, the shorter that deficit should be or potentially non-existent. The lower your current body fat levels, again, not a hard science, I'm not saying below 15%, but the lower your current body fat levels, probably the shorter that deficit should be. And depending on where your life is at and what chaos is going on, potentially the shorter or once again, maybe just for a little while non-existent, that weight loss phase should be.

I've ignored things like medical conditions because, you know, and certain medications, that's a whole other rabbit hole. And I don't really like talking about that stuff to the general public. I would deal with that, you know, person to person. So if you're like, well, my doctor said, yeah, good, listen to them. Don't listen to a podcast over your doctor. But for people who aren't managing medical conditions and don't have any medication complexities, those are the variables that I would be considering when I'm deciding how long I should.

maintain this deficit.

Jonathan Steedman (09:06.585)
Cool, on that note, get out of here and I'll chat to you next week. Thanks, team.