The amount of time you should give yourself for contest prep depends mainly on the amount of weight you’ll need to lose. Always give yourself more time than you need. In general, people tend to underestimate the amount of weight they’ll need to lose to be stage ready and overestimate how easy it will be for them to lose that weight.
Longer diets are also beneficial in that:
Your calorie deficit can be smaller, reducing your risk of losing muscle, impairing training performance, and succumbing to overwhelming hunger and urges to binge.
They allow more flexibility in unforeseen circumstances. For instance, if your weight loss stalls for a few weeks, a longer prep will provide a safety net that allows you to compensate for those few unexpected weeks and dial things in by contest time.
You may reach your stage weight early and have time to experiment with different peak week protocols.
You eliminate extra stress and the need to crash diet to reach stage weight at the last minute
To determine the length of time you should diet for your contest, we recommend doing the following:
Figure out how much weight you’ll need to lose.
Choose a weight loss setting that aligns with the amount of hunger you are willing to experience on the diet and see how much weight you are projected to lose each week on this setting.
Divide the total amount of weight you’ll need to lose by the projected weekly weight loss of your chosen setting.
This will provide an estimate of how many weeks you’d need to diet. Go ahead and add 2-3 weeks to this to allow for any unforeseen weight loss stalls or setbacks.