What even is a reverse diet? How does one start and what should one expect to experience while on it? 

Reverse dieting is one of my favorite things to do with clients because it allows them to really set themselves up for a successful and healthy fat-loss phase down the road and in case you haven’t guessed yet, it’s what we’re going to be talking about in this post. 

The first question about reverse dieting that I get  is “why should I care about it”  or “how do I know if I need/should reverse diet?”

Why you should care about a reverse diet

• You’re trying to lose weight and it’s not working
• You’ve been dieting for more than 6 of the last 18 months
• You always gain your weight back on the weekends or when you go on a trip

Signs that you need to reverse diet

• Your diet isn’t working
• You’ve been dieting for 6 months or more (on the very high end)
• You’ve plateaued in every lane even after incorporating refeeds, dieting break
• You’re just sick of dieting and you want a break

To put it simply, when you spend so much time in a calorie deficit or in some sort of restriction around food, your body doesn’t feel safe and your metabolism is most likely very run down and your body needs to reverse that to get back on track and operate the way it should. 

Okay, but what the heck is it? 

Layne Norton was one of the earliest people to coin the term reverse diet and “diet”  is when you kind of place restrictions around food or cut your calories in order to lose fat. 

Well, a reverse diet is generally what is prescribed either before or after a cutting phase. It’s the phase placed in between because even if you have 100 pounds yet to lose, you can’t just diet all year round (more on that later) because your body will go into survival mode and you’ll plateau and eventually get to a point where you can’t lose any more weight. 

So how do we combat that in a healthy way? Or how do we navigate that? 

The answer isn’t just to keep lowering calories to the point where you’re eating anywhere from 14 to 1200 calories on a regular basis. I feel really uncomfortable putting my clients even below 1500 calories because there’s just no need to.

The answer is to reverse diet which is when you reach the end of a cut or reach a plateau and start to slowly feed yourself more calories week by week. 

With this diet,  every week when you’re feeding yourself a little bit more calories, your metabolism is going to raise a little bit. 

The key is, however, we have to do this slowly and methodically to give your metabolism time to catch up. If your body is only used to burning 1200 and all of a sudden you give it 2000, it’s going to store quite a bit of that as fat. But, if we increase it little by little each week, that gives your metabolism time to catch up and say, “Okay, we’re getting a little more energy, I’m gonna burn a little bit more of that energy ”. 

That’s the end goal of the reverse diet; you’re able to increase your calories without gaining very much body fat. 

If you ever look at bodybuilders, and you’re thinking, “wow, this girl is eating 2600 calories and looks amazing. Meanwhile, I’m eating 1400 calories, and I look like garbage. What is going on? What is the difference here?”. 

The difference is that she spent time raising her metabolism and going through a reverse diet. She’s given her body an opportunity to keep her body fat around the same percentage while at the same time, increasing her calories significantly to help raise her energy and metabolism, and to give her body a break from dieting. 

Whatever your goals may be, reverse diets slowly set you up for success so that you’re able to eat more, without gaining any more body fat. 

It took me a long time to really understand this because I went through quite a few bodybuilding shows, or I didn’t reverse my diet properly and I paid the price for that. Now that I fully understand reverse dieting and I’ve come to know and love the benefits as well as my clients, I’m so excited to share with you how to start a reverse diet, what you can experience when to stop it, and more. I want you to be able to do this on your own even if you can’t afford a coach.

Starting the Reverse Diet 

The very first thing you have to do when you start your reverse diet is to make a mental note that your goal is no longer to lose fat during this phase. Once you start to reverse out, you have to let go of wanting to see that scale go down every week as well as the measurement changes every week.  You have to understand that your goal is now to have more energy and enjoy more food and put some muscle in your body.

Adding calories each week. 

You’re going to add anywhere from 2% to 8% of your daily calories each week. For example, let’s say I’m eating 1400 calories and I want to add 3% Or five 5% each week. That would be adding 70 calories to my daily calories each week. 

Remember: you can go anywhere from two to 8% on that range, depending on how fast you want to go. The faster you go, the more likely you are to put on a little bit of body fat. But you’re also more likely to feel the benefits of that increase in energy sooner. 

What you can expect to experience. 

While you’re slowly increasing your calories each week, you can expect weight fluctuations. This goes back to making sure you have that mindset mentioned in the first step in checking sure that and how key that is to this process. You are detaching emotion from the scale in all phases, but especially during the reverse diet. 

You can expect more energy and better workouts plus more food. This really can be a fun phase if you let it be. 

When should I slow down?

What we’re looking for in weight fluctuations, scientifically speaking, is we want to stay between 2.0% and 5.0% of your starting weight. If you were to start your reverse diet weighing in at 130 lbs and picked a range of 3.5%, you wouldn’t want to gain more than 4.5 lbs in order to stay within a healthy body fat percentage. If you were to go over that limit, that would be a sign to slow down.

When slowing down your reverse diet, take a pause for a week, and instead of adding 70 calories, you sustain your calories. 

If you’ve increased consistently for six weeks and you haven’t seen any weight spikes, take a more conservative increase or take a week or two without increasing at all just to pause because your metabolism can’t just keep going up and up and up forever. 

Of course, there’s a limit to all things so we want to be conservative and mindful when we are doing these increases. 

How long do you stay on a reverse diet? 

For the person who is happy with their body fat percentage as well as their calorie intake and physique and who doesn’t want to go into another cut, then that person can stop and enter a maintenance phase. I would still recommend dropping your calories by 5%  to give you some cushion to make sure you don’t continue to gain weight. 

If I had my way, most people who wanted to lose more fat would keep reverse dieting to the point where their metabolism matches their predicted equations until their rate is higher by 10% to 20%.

Here’s what I mean by that; there is plenty of science-backed equations to calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) but let’s use the Mueller equation, which is reputable, and puts your TDEE at 2000 calories per day. I’d want you to reverse to the point where you’re maintaining your weight within that recommended range which would be 2200 to 2400 for you to be 10 to 20% higher than the predicted equation. We want your metabolism to be even higher than average and to be in such a good spot that you’re burning calories like a machine. 

That’s what we do here at Fit To Lead. We take our time with our clients and reverse them to the point where they’re at that spot in which their metabolism is burning calories like a fire. Then when we flip the switch when they’re in a good spot and have them enter a cut phase where we drop their calories by just a few 100 but they’re shedding body fat as they’d never have before because they’ve given themselves that time to reverse and to build their metabolism and to have that cushion of calories. 

That’s how you see those pictures of ladies who are eating more, but somehow look better. 

How this happens is with a reverse diet. 

I want every single one of you to be able to start and go through a reverse diet if that’s what you want. 

Go ahead and start your reverse and if you have any questions, just shoot me a note on Instagram and I’ll be sure to answer it. 

If you’re ready to take action on your fitness journey and see lasting results, click here to apply for my Metabolic Reboot System, and let’s chat!