Reverse Dieting: Can it help maintain weight loss?

Have you ever gone on a super strict diet just to gain the weight back in the weeks following? Most diets aren’t sustainable, so after a few weeks or months on it you eventually go back to your old eating habits and end up losing all the gains you made towards your health and weight loss goals. So, what can we do to help prevent this? The answer may be reverse dieting. 

What is a reverse diet?

Reverse dieting, as the name suggests, is slowly increasing your food intake after a long period of calorie restriction. This helps you to slowly get back to normal eating habits, without losing all the progress you made. It is usually done alongside a workout program to maximize its benefits. Many people think that low calorie diets are the way to lose weight, when things like reverse dieting and increasing food intake are much more beneficial for weight loss and muscle gain. When you drastically decrease calories, your metabolism drops and your body uses muscles to help fuel it, since it is basically starving. Since we don’t want this to happen, by increasing calories you are providing your body with the fuel it needs, regulating your metabolism, and sparing your muscle so you can gain some muscle. 

This is common in bodybuilders and athletes who want to increase their energy levels and food intake while still losing weight and altering their body composition. The research is conflicting on how much reverse dieting actual does vs just not dieting to begin with, but for the most part it is considered a good way to get out of a period of strict dieting without ruining progress made.

The main function of reverse dieting is that it gradually increases your calorie intake over days, weeks, or months to boost metabolism and allow you to keep losing weight/gaining muscle. [1] The more restricting your diet is, the harder it is to maintain and the easier to is to end up binge eating at the end of it. This cycle of strict dieting, then binge eating slows down your metabolism as your body tries to conserve energy. [2] Then when you try to return to normal eating, your metabolism is very slow, and you end up gaining weight.

So how do you do a reverse diet?

To begin it involved deciding how you want to slowly increase your calorie intake. Chose something small to start, 50-100 calories per week higher than what you were consuming on your diet. This will give your body a chance to slowly catch up to what you’re doing. Continue to increase your intake like this until you reach your target pre-diet intake. This is typically done post show, or competition cut phases, and can last until you are ready for your next cut phase. 

If you are trying to maintain your muscle mass while doing a reverse diet its important to keep up with your exercise so you continue to gain muscle. 

Research has shown that a reverse diet regulates your hormones that control hunger and gets rid of the hangry feelings you may be having in your diet phase. Your overall mood and well-being will probably increase as well, and you’ll have lower feelings of cravings!

My advice on how to make reverse dieting work for you

Stick to the basics, a reverse diet can seem challenging, and it can be hard to let yourself eat regularly again after strict dieting for long but the easier you make it for yourself the better its going to be. Set small food and calorie goals each week that you can easily achieve and try not to worry about what the scale says too much. 

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