Research
Adherence
A 1-week diet break improves mental alertness and reduces hunger, irritability, and prospective consumption in athletes undergoing energy restriction.
Use your diet break to reset your mental relationship with food. You will likely feel less hungry, less irritable, and more alert. Use this mental clarity to tackle your most demanding training sessions during this week.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Participants reported significantly lower sensations of hunger (P = 0.017), prospective consumption (P = 0.020) and irritability (P = 0.041) after the diet break, and significantly higher sensations of fullness (P = 0.002), satisfaction (P = 0.002), and alertness (P = 0.003).
Why this rating
Same study as N1, statistically significant subjective measures.
Source
A 1-week diet break improves muscle endurance during an intermittent dieting regime in adult athletes: A pre-specified secondary analysis of the ICECAP trial
Jackson Peos et al. · PLoS ONE · 2021
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0247292
rct · n=26Cited 6×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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