Hence the reason for my caveat. The Venn diagram of “fitness” and “health” is mostly overlap but is not a perfect circle. Intermittent fasting MAY have health benefits that extend the health span and lifespan, but probably doesn’t have any benefit to performance, or going faster. So it may not be relevant for a TR athlete to practice intermittent fasting. But to dismiss it wholeheartedly as Nate did in the podcast is, at the least, a bit intellectually disingenuous.
They seem to have suggested something like this on a bunch of episodes in different ways and it has me shouting at my screen every time. It always feel like the ideas of output in a deficit and output at a lower weight get badly conflated. If you weigh 2kg less and you lost it with a 500kal deficit and you kept working out, you didnt loose much or any muscle. You just didnt. Will your ability to work hard suck quite a lot after 6 weeks of 500ish deficit, you bet.
Go back to maintenance calories and things will stabilize and bounce back in a couple weeks then decide what you want to do for weight direction. To me at least the idea of months and months (years? 1.5ish lbs per year loss?) at a 100 cal deficit vs 6 weeks at 500 and just getting it done and getting back to something less miserable is an easy choice.
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