Reverse Dieting Secrets: How to Safely Boost Your Metabolism and Transform Your Body

Reverse dieting is a strategic eating plan designed to gradually increase your calorie intake after a period of calorie restriction. This approach aims to help you transition from a weight loss phase to a maintenance phase, prevent rapid weight regain, and restore your metabolism. Often referred to as “the diet after the diet,” reverse dieting has gained popularity in the bodybuilding community and the general population as a way to segue between a low calorie diet and resuming normal eating. While it sounds promising, it’s important to understand whether this eating strategy works and how to implement it safely.

What is Reverse Dieting?

Reverse dieting is a strategic eating plan that involves gradually increasing your calorie intake over a few weeks or months. The goal is to allow you to eat more food after a diet while also increasing your metabolism and preventing fat regain. This style of eating was first popularized in the bodybuilding community as a way to prevent rapid weight regain after competitions, where athletes follow very strict and unsustainable diets to achieve their desired physique.

During bodybuilding competitions, athletes must follow very strict and unsustainable diets to achieve their desired physique. Once the competition is over, they return to more sustainable, higher calorie eating styles. However, quickly returning to a much higher calorie intake may lead to rapid fat and weight gain, since the body’s metabolism decreases during the restrictive periods. Reverse dieting was introduced to help bodybuilders slowly transition back from very low calorie diets to higher calorie diets. The idea was that doing it slowly would help them gradually restore their metabolic rates, allowing them to eat more while minimizing fat gain.

The idea of reverse dieting is based on adaptive thermogenesis, also known as metabolic adaptation. This is a protective process that alters the body’s metabolism to increase energy intake and decrease energy output in efforts to slow down weight loss.

How the Body Adapts to Calorie Restriction

When you follow a restrictive diet, your body engages several mechanisms to prevent drastic weight loss:

Hormone Changes: The body releases or suppresses various hormones, such as ghrelin, insulin, leptin, and peptide YY, to increase hunger and encourage you to eat more.
Decrease in Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR): Your body focuses its energy on vital organs to keep you alive, dedicating less energy to “non-essential” functions like hair and nail growth.
Decrease in Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT): You may feel like you have less energy to exercise or see a notable decrease in performance, meaning you’ll burn fewer calories during a workout.
Decrease in Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): NEAT includes any energy used for daily tasks, such as walking, fidgeting, and general movement. You may subconsciously choose to reduce walking, perform fewer household chores, or avoid random movements.
Slowed Digestion: During periods of calorie restriction, the body may slow down digestion to absorb as many nutrients and calories as possible. Plus, the thermic effect of food (TEF) decreases, since less food is being consumed.

The good news is that studies suggest metabolic adaptation likely isn’t permanent, and your metabolism can gradually increase as your calorie intake increases. In fact, it’s thought that most weight regain after a diet is the result of excessive calorie intake. This is where reverse dieting comes into play. By gradually increasing your calorie intake in a slow and thoughtful manner, you can support your body in restoring its metabolic rate, manage your hunger levels better, and potentially reduce rapid weight regain.

The Reality of Weight Regain After Dieting

The actual percentage of people that regain weight after a diet isn’t precisely known. That said, studies suggest that people lose an average of 5-9% of their initial body weight within the first six months. However, after five years, they only maintain an average weight loss of around 3%. Maintaining weight loss is difficult, especially as the years go on.

Common Reasons for Weight Regain

The reasons people regain weight after dieting vary depending on individual circumstances, such as the type of diet, the length of time they dieted, and whether sustainable habits were developed and maintained once they stop dieting.

Sense of Freedom: One of the main reasons for weight regain is the sense of freedom a person may feel after discontinuing a restrictive diet. Once it’s over, a person may overindulge on previously “forbidden” foods, leading to weight gain. This is quite common in diets that are very restrictive, such as those that physique competitors follow.
Lack of Sustainable Habits: Many diets fail to teach people healthy, sustainable lifestyle habits, such as learning to read nutrition labels, prepare nutritious meals, and practice mindful eating. Thus, once they end their diet, people return to previous habits that led to the unwanted weight gain.
Insufficient Support System: If a person does not have a sufficient support system (e.g., healthcare provider, coach, supportive friends) to encourage them to continue their healthy behaviors, their motivation may decline.
Decreased Metabolism: During long periods of calorie restriction, your metabolism decreases. Therefore, your daily calorie needs to maintain your weight may be lower than it was before the diet. If you resume your “normal” eating right away, you may be eating in a surplus.

Most health professionals recommend adopting lifelong habits that may help you lose weight in a sustainable way, such as eating more whole, nutrient-dense foods, limiting processed foods, being physically active, and getting proper sleep.

Why Avoiding Diets is the Best Choice

Following restrictive diets, which usually involve eating a very low number of calories, is hard long-term. Your body engages mechanisms to prevent drastic weight loss when it notices that you’re in a large calorie deficit. In addition, it’s very difficult to ignore feelings of deprivation and hunger. As a result, sticking to a low calorie diet, especially those that restrict many foods or entire food groups, is understandably tough. The unsustainable nature of these diets can lead to “yo-yo dieting,” where a person cycles between losing and regaining weight.

If you can avoid dieting in the first place, you’re setting yourself up for more success over time. Instead, it’s ideal to focus on adopting healthy lifestyle behaviors that you can successfully and happily do long-term:

Limiting sugary beverages and drinking mostly water or other low calorie drinks (e.g., tea, coffee)
Eating more vegetables and fruit
Eating more fiber, protein, and healthy fats
Limiting eating out and/or processed foods
Engaging in physical activity daily
Incorporating strength training into your workout routine
Getting 7-9 hours of sleep per night
Managing stress and finding positive coping mechanisms (e.g., meditation, therapy, journaling)

However, if you’ve followed a restrictive diet and are looking to “get out” of it without regaining weight, a reverse diet may be a good option for you.

How to Implement Reverse Dieting

Reverse dieting will look different for everyone, but it usually involves adding 50-150 daily calories per week for around 4-10 weeks until you’ve reached your pre-diet calorie intake or other goal amount. To put this into perspective, one tablespoon (16 grams) of peanut butter offers about 100 calories. Therefore, the amount of food that you’re gradually adding to your diet per week remains very small.

Choosing an Approach: Conservative vs. Aggressive

To begin, you’ll first want to decide whether you want to take a conservative or more aggressive approach. A conservative approach will take you longer to reach your calorie goal, but it may help reduce weight regain and digestive discomfort, since you’re giving your body more time to adapt. You may increase your calorie intake by around 5% each week.

A more aggressive approach may be more suitable for those who want to return to a highly active lifestyle and restore their energy levels quickly. You might increase caloric intake by around 15% right away and then increase further by 5% each week for the remaining time.

Read also: RD Credential Information

Sample Reverse Diet Plan

Here’s an example of how a reverse diet might work:

Let’s say you’re currently eating an extremely restrictive 1,200-calorie diet and want to increase your intake to 2,000 calories over 12 weeks. This is what your reverse diet may look like:

Week	Conservative	Moderately aggressive
0	1,200 calories	1,200 calories
1	1,200 + 60 calories (5% of 1,200) = 1,260 calories	1,200 + 180 (15% of 1,200) = 1,380 calories
1	1,260 + 60 calories (5% of starting calories) = 1,320 calories	1,380 calories + 70 calories (5% of 1,380) = 1,450 calories
2	1,320 + 60 = 1,380 calories	1,450 + 70 = 1,520 calories
3	1,380 + 60 = 1,440 calories	1,520 + 70 = 1,590 calories
4	1,440 + 60 = 1,500 calories	1,590 + 70 = 1,660 calories
5	1,500 + 60 = 1,560 calories	1,660 + 70 = 1,730 calories
6	1,560 + 60 = 1,620 calories	1,730 + 70 = 1,800 calories
7	1,620 + 60 = 1,680 calories	1,800 + 70 = 1,870 calories
8	1,680 + 60 = 1,740 calories	1,870 + 70 = 1,940 calories
9	1,740 + 60 = 1,800 calories	1,940 + 70 = 2,010 calories (roughly 2,000)
10	1,800 + 60 = 1,860 calories	2,000 calories
11	1,860 + 60 = 1,920 calories	2,000 calories
12	1920 + 60-80 = 1,980-2,000 calories	2,000 calories

Your reverse diet will look different depending on your starting calories, your desired approach, and your goal calorie intake. If you’re less concerned about a bit of weight regain, then you may wish to increase your calories more rapidly (e.g., 15-20% increase from starting). If you notice that you’re regaining weight quickly, you may want to double-check your portion sizes to ensure you’re actually eating the amount you intend to. In many cases, we overestimate the number of calories we consume. Keep in mind that you may gain some water weight or muscle mass during this period. That’s especially likely for physique competitors who may have dehydrated themselves prior to a competition. In many cases, weight regain is not solely fat regain.

Important Considerations

Calorie counting to the degree that reverse dieting requires can be laborious and problematic for many people, meaning reverse dieting isn’t for everyone.
Reverse dieting requires accurate measures of food intake over time, and the small changes necessary to make it work can easily get lost in the noise.
Consistency also matters. It’s possible that someone who eats more calories some days than others would be able to reverse diet.

Potential Benefits of Reverse Dieting

While research is limited on the effects of reverse dieting, proponents claim that it offers several benefits:

Sustainable Weight Management: Reverse dieting aims to minimize the effect of the body adapting to a lower weight by slowly increasing your calorie intake. This gradual approach is supposed to give your body time to adjust to the higher calorie intake, helping to maintain your weight loss.
Allows You to Eat More: One of the main reasons that people start reverse dieting is because it allows them to eat more food throughout the day. This is especially enjoyable for those who have been dieting for weeks or months at a time because it allows for a wider range of healthy meals.
Increased Energy Levels: Overly restrictive diets are often accompanied by symptoms like mood disturbances, difficulty concentrating, and decreased energy levels. Because reverse dieting focuses on slowly increasing your calorie intake, it could resolve several downsides related to restricted dieting.
Reduced Hunger: Cutting calories can alter the levels of several hormones that influence hunger and appetite. Slowly increasing calorie intake may balance levels of these hormones and reduce hunger levels.
Preserve Lean Body Mass: Some people believe reverse dieting can help preserve lean muscle mass. Research demonstrates that a high-protein diet combined with exercise can help preserve muscle mass during weight loss.
Restore Hormones: When you follow a calorie-restricted diet, hormones that regulate hunger and metabolism, like leptin, ghrelin, and insulin, are thought to shift to conserve energy and encourage eating more. Reverse dieting aims to gradually increase calorie intake, allowing your body to adjust and restore hormone levels to a balanced state.

Potential Drawbacks of Reverse Dieting

Reverse dieting may have several drawbacks:

Hard to Execute: Although many tools can estimate your prime calorie range, it can be very difficult to calculate precise needs. It can be even more challenging to increase your intake by small increments of 50-100 calories each week, as reverse dieting recommends. This plan can be time-consuming, as it requires you to meticulously track your daily calorie intake.
Focuses on Calories: One issue with reverse dieting is that it focuses solely on calorie intake without taking other factors into consideration. Weight loss is incredibly complex, with many components playing a role. Not only do various nutrients impact metabolism, hunger, and appetite differently, but factors like sleep, stress, and hormone fluctuations also affect body weight and need to be taken into consideration.
Weight Gain: Increasing calorie intake, even gradually, can lead to weight gain if not carefully monitored. Individuals may overshoot their maintenance calories, resulting in unintended weight gain.
Overly Complicated: Reverse dieting requires careful tracking of calories and weight, which can be challenging for some. This is especially true if you don’t track calories during weight loss.
Relationship with Food and Dieting: Engaging in a structured dieting approach like reverse dieting may reinforce a rigid relationship with food, particularly for those with a history of disordered eating. This can affect psychological well-being and lead to feelings of guilt or anxiety surrounding food choices.
Lack of Research: All in all, very little research supports reverse dieting. As case reports and anecdotal evidence are all that exists, it’s unclear if reverse dieting works - or whether it’s effective for the general population or just specific groups, such as bodybuilders or competitive athletes.

Is Reverse Dieting Right for You?

Reverse dieting has shown anecdotal benefits in athletes aiming to maintain performance while adjusting calorie intake. It may also appeal to individuals who have recently completed a calorie-restricted diet and prefer a gradual transition to weight maintenance. Reverse dieting is likely considered safe for most individuals interested in using it to maintain their weight. However, as with any dietary change, consulting with your healthcare provider or dietitian before starting is recommended.

Signs You May Benefit from Reverse Dieting

If you've reached a plateau or are finding it difficult to continue losing weight despite being in a calorie deficit
If you're experiencing fatigue, decreased energy levels, or difficulty concentrating
If you're looking to transition to a more feasible and sustainable eating pattern while still maintaining weight
If you've been eating in a calorie deficit for an extended time, especially if it's been a substantial calorie deficit
If your medical provider has indicated there may be issues with your hormones, thyroid, or inconsistent or loss of period
If you're noticing a loss of muscle/strength because your body is breaking down muscle to use for energy, as opposed to fat
If you're noticing an obsession with food, feeling deprived or guilty based on your food choices;
If you want to shift the focus from fat loss to building muscle, athletic performance, or increased energy;
If you're experiencing persistent and consistent fatigue, struggling with workout recovery or increased consistent soreness and joint achiness, and noticing a decrease in daily movement
If you are noticing big mood swings or are having a more difficult time being patient or managing emotions
If your sex drive or frequency in initiating sex has decreased

Ultimately, discussing whether a reverse diet is appropriate should be discussed with your coach.

Other Tips for Success

Here are some other tips to help you successfully maintain your weight, whether through reverse dieting or another approach:

Focus on Nutrient-Dense Foods: Eating mostly whole, unprocessed foods as part of a well-balanced diet will keep you feeling satisfied as you work on maintaining your weight loss.
Stay Active: Regular physical activity can help maintain lean muscle mass during the transition from weight loss to weight maintenance. Incorporate both aerobic exercise and strength training into your routine.
Track Non-Scale Victories: Pay attention to non-scale victories like changes in energy, mood, and physical performance to understand how your body responds to increased calories.
Seek Support: Involve your healthcare provider in your weight maintenance journey to ensure you're progressing safely and effectively. They can offer personalized advice based on your health history and goals.

tags: #how #long #to #reverse #diet #safely