When approaching very low body fat levels, spending more time at maintenance calories than in a deficit is advisable to mitigate lean body mass loss.

“when you get to those low levels of body fat the best way i can describe it is like if you have a wet towel when you start squeezing water comes out very easily this is this is actually almost almost a perfect example of adipose tissue because if you take somebody who's overweight obese what do you have you have a lot of free fatty acids getting released into the bloodstream you have very very expanded fat tissue so when you start you start ringing that rag out it comes off very easily but then when you get down to the ends and you're just trying to get that last little bit of water out to get the same amount of water out you have to put in monumental levels of effort compared to what you did at the beginning”

“as i approach as i would be approaching that lower level of body fat i would be starting to put these in more and more frequently so that's why i would give myself so much time even though i'd only need to drop about maybe 12-15 pounds from where i'm at right now i would probably spend more time at maintenance than i did in a deficit”

“i actually implement a lot of what's called diet breaks so those those would be periods of eating at maintenance so basically a level of calories where you're not going to add back fat tissue but you can eat more than you did previously”