The term "diet" often brings to mind strict eating plans. However, a "reverse diet" suggests the opposite. But does it mean eating whatever you want and magically losing weight? Sadly, no.
Reverse dieting is a strategy used to gradually increase calorie intake after a period of calorie restriction, such as a weight loss diet. It aims to help optimize metabolism and hormones that play a role in health and fat loss. These hormones include thyroid and sex hormones. While increasing calories, it is important to decrease stress on the body by addressing factors like excess cardio, poor sleep, and nutrient deficiencies.
What is Reverse Dieting?
Reverse dieting is a strategy that typically comes after a regular diet. It is a process of slowly increasing your calorie intake after a period of reduced calories or dieting. It’s a way to reach a point where you’re eating to maintain your weight loss.
Reverse dieting first gained popularity in the fitness community. Before a competition, bodybuilders often restrict calories to reach very low body fat. Then, they’ll use a reverse diet to slowly reintroduce calories to return to a more sustainable body composition and weight.
People who follow a restrictive diet for a short time, such as very low carb or calorie, may also use reverse dieting. A reverse diet can keep you from eating too many calories as you come off the diet. People who use a slow-and-steady approach to weight loss may also use reverse dieting to transition off their diet.
Read also: Sustainable Weight Loss Strategies
How Reverse Dieting Works
Reverse dieting involves gradually adding a small number of calories, usually 50 to 100, to your daily intake every one to two weeks. For example, if you were eating 1,600 calories a day to lose weight and have now reached your goal, you wouldn't jump straight to your maintenance level of 2,000 calories per day. Instead, you would add 50 to 100 calories each week until you reach 2,000 calories.
This gradual increase is claimed to help your body adjust to the higher calorie intake without gaining weight. The goal is to reach a maintenance level where your calorie intake matches your energy expenditure, keeping your weight stable.
Benefits of Reverse Dieting
Proponents of reverse dieting claim that this approach can make maintaining weight loss easier and boost your metabolism after dieting. However, these benefits are based only on anecdotal evidence and lack scientific support.
Sustainable Weight Management
After losing weight, many people find it easy to regain it when they start eating more calories. This happens because the body adapts to the lower weight and needs fewer calories to function. When you increase your calorie intake, your body is still efficient at using those calories, leading to weight gain.
Reverse dieting aims to minimize this effect 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.
Read also: Restore your metabolism with reverse dieting
Restore Hormones
Another claim is that reverse dieting can help restore hormone balance after weight loss. 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. However, there is no scientific evidence supporting reverse dieting as a method for restoring hormonal balance after dieting.
How to Implement Reverse Dieting
Implementing reverse dieting involves a structured approach to gradually increasing calorie intake after a period of calorie restriction. For this method to be effective, you’ll need to track your daily calorie intake and weight closely.
- Assess your current caloric intake. Begin by determining your current daily calorie intake (the amount you’ve been eating to lose weight).
- Calculate your maintenance calories. Your estimated maintenance calorie intake is based on factors like age, weight, activity level, and metabolic rate.
- Plan incremental increases. Start by adding 50-100 calories to your daily intake every one to two weeks.
- Monitor your progress. Regularly monitor your weight, body measurements, energy levels, and hunger cues throughout the process.
- Adjust your calorie intake as needed based on your goals and how your body responds until your weight stabilizes.
Who Should Try Reverse Dieting?
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.
While scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of reverse dieting is lacking, this approach 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.
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Sample Reverse Dieting Plan
Using the example of eating 1,600 calories daily for weight loss with a maintenance goal of 2,000 calories, here’s a sample reverse dieting plan:
- Week 1: Start by increasing your daily calorie intake to 1,700. Track your weight to see if there’s any change.
- Week 2: If you’re still losing weight, increase your intake to 1,800 calories per day. Continue tracking your weight to see if there are any changes.
- Week 3-4: Keep monitoring your weight and add 100 calories to your daily intake each week until your weight stabilizes and you're neither losing or gaining.
If you prefer a slower approach, you can add 50 calories to your daily intake each week or only increase your calorie intake every other week.
After completing the reverse dieting process, you’ll likely have added a few hundred calories to your daily total. Focus on choosing whole, unprocessed foods as part of a well-balanced eating plan, but in slightly larger portions compared to your weight loss phase.
Risks and Considerations of Reverse Dieting
While reverse dieting is generally considered a safe approach to weight maintenance, it's important to be aware of potential risks and other considerations:
- 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: The lack of scientific research supporting reverse dieting means its long-term effects and overall efficacy are not well understood. Without evidence, it can be difficult to determine its appropriateness for various individuals.
Additional 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.
Reverse Dieting and Metabolism
Some people claim that reverse dieting can increase your metabolic rate even higher than it was before you started dieting. However, there is no evidence that reverse dieting after calorie restriction boosts your metabolism.
While it’s true that dieting does decrease your metabolism, this is normal, unavoidable, and easily reversible by simply eating more food. By reverse dieting, all you’re really doing is reducing the size of your calorie deficit. The amount of calories you need depends on several factors that are specific to you.
Addressing Metabolic Adaptation
During long periods of calorie restriction, your metabolism slows as your body adjusts to a reduced food intake. After dieting, 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. Even if a person is meticulously watching their food intake, they may still be eating over their calorie needs.
Adaptive thermogenesis (metabolic adaptation) is a protective process that alters the body’s metabolism to increase energy intake and decrease energy output in efforts to slow weight loss. The body does this through a few mechanisms:
- Hormone changes: The body releases or suppresses various hormones, including ghrelin, insulin, leptin, and peptide YY, to increase hunger, which may cause you to eat more.
- Decrease in resting metabolic rate (RMR): Your body focuses its energy on vital organs to keep you alive. Less energy is dedicated to “non-essential” functions, such as 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 exercise 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. For example, you may subconsciously choose to park your car closer to your destination to reduce walking, perform fewer household chores, or avoid random movements like pacing while talking on the phone.
- Slowed digestion: During periods of calorie restriction, the body may slow down digestion to absorb as many nutrients and calories from food as possible. Plus, the thermic effect of food (TEF), or how much energy your body uses to digest food, decreases, since less food is being consumed.
Most weight regain after a diet may be the result of excessive calorie intake.
Reverse Dieting vs. "Bulking"
A reverse diet is not a "bulk." The goal of a reverse diet is not to gain back a bunch of mass after dieting and it does not mean stuffing your face with any and everything that has calories. A reverse diet still involves the tracking of your intake.
Is Reverse Dieting Right for You?
A reverse diet isn’t right for everyone. If you simply cut your calories a little bit for a couple of weeks, you probably don’t need a reverse diet. If you stopped drinking soda or eating added sugars and this caused a caloric deficit resulting in you losing weight, you most likely don’t need a reverse diet.
Bodybuilders/physique athletes would benefit from a reverse diet after getting done with contest preparation. These competitors often drop their calories to very low levels so that they can get as lean as possible. This significant decrease in calories can negatively impact their metabolic rate and make them more susceptible to weight gain post-show. A bodybuilder or physique competitor who just wrapped up their show is a prime candidate for a reverse diet. Getting stage-ready-lean means dropping your calories to very, very low levels.
If you consider yourself a “yo-yo dieter”, hopping from one diet or mean plan to another, a reverse diet is right up your alley. Cycling between restriction and “over”-indulgence can have a negative impact on both metabolic and psychological well-being, (3) making it hard for you to truly assess your nutritional needs.
What Happens After Reverse Dieting?
What happens after you have achieved your goals with reverse dieting? Do you begin another diet? Do you continue to meticulously track your intake forever?
If you’ve been rigorously monitoring your intake for a while, it may bring you some peace to back off of tight tracking and work on mindful eating habits. If you’d like to hop on a bulk to pack on some extra muscle in the future, you absolutely can, and the same goes for adopting another weight loss plan.
Reverse diets are far more logical than they may sound at first, especially if you haven’t increased your caloric intake in a long while. Instead of doing a hard turn-around back to your old eating habits, reverse dieting can set you up for success in the kitchen - which will pay dividends in the gym.
Takeaway
Reverse dieting involves gradually increasing your calorie intake after losing weight on a calorie-restricted diet, with the goal of making weight maintenance more sustainable. Some also claim that reverse dieting can boost metabolism, preserve muscle mass, and balance hormones after weight loss. While popular among athletes based on their personal experiences, there is limited scientific evidence proving its effectiveness.
Despite the lack of strong evidence, reverse dieting is generally considered safe and may appeal to individuals seeking to maintain weight loss more effectively after dieting.
If you’re considering trying a reverse dieting approach, talk to your healthcare provider or dietitian to make sure it’s right for you. A registered dietitian can also monitor your calorie intake, weight, and energy levels to help you make informed dietary adjustments.
Alternatives to Reverse Dieting
If you’re following a diet for weight loss that requires you to restrict calories or certain types of foods, you may regain weight you’ve lost after stopping the diet. Many people regain the weight they’ve lost within 1 year of stopping a temporary diet. Weight regain usually results from eating more calories after a period of restricting them, along with changes to your metabolism, enzymes, and other bodily processes that happen as a result of weight loss.
Long-Term Eating Plans
Try a long term, nutritious eating plan rather than a temporary diet. Following restrictive diets, which usually involve eating a very low number of calories, is hard long term, especially because your body engages mechanisms to prevent drastic weight loss when it notices that you’re in a large calorie deficit. It’s also difficult to ignore feelings of deprivation and hunger. As a result, sticking to a low calorie diet, especially if it restricts many foods or entire food groups, is hard to maintain long term.
Long-term eating plans to consider include:
- The Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes eating whole foods, lean protein, and various vegetables, fruits, and legumes, and limits sugar and ultra-processed foods.
- The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, which focuses on eating fruits, vegetables, and lean protein and limits salt, sugar, and fat intake.
- The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet, which combines aspects of the Mediterranean and DASH diets.
Manage Portion Sizes
If you notice that you’re regaining weight, you may want to check your portion sizes to ensure you’re eating the amount you intend to. To manage your portions of the different items that may be on your plate, can try the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) MyPlate Method, which involves:
- Making sure half of your plate contains vegetables and fruits.
- Dividing the remainder of your plate between whole grains and lean protein, and varying your sources of both.
- Consuming only a small amount of dairy and dairy alternatives.
The MyPlate Method also recommends eating a wide variety of each of these types, which helps increase the different nutrients you consume.
Support Overall Health
Other factors outside of what you eat can make weight regain more likely. These include sleep deprivation, which can affect your metabolism and lead to increased energy intake, and stress, which can reduce increase food cravings and distrupt the gut microbiome, making weight gain more likely. Mental health conditions like depression can also increase weight gain. This may be due to increased stress, changes to sleep time, physical activity, and dietary patterns.
To support your overall health, try:
- Getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep, the recommended amount per night for most adults.
- Managing stress and practicing positive coping mechanisms, such as meditation, yoga, therapy, or journaling.
- Seeking treatment for any mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety.
Find a Support System
Having a support system, whether a healthcare professional, coach, friend, family member, or online community, to help encourage your lifestyle changes can make them easier to stick with longterm. You can also find support through joining an exercise class or weight loss program.