Want to lose weight and keep it off? Have a reverse dieting plan!

Jun 15, 2022
Mark Carroll

Are you someone who struggles to keep your weight loss result long term? 

You are able to lose the weight, but post fat loss you tend to rapidly put it back on, and some more? This is all too common.

Are you a person who has finally achieved the fat loss result you were after, but you are now terrified to increase calories out of fear of weight regain? Living on low calories? 

This is where I love REVERSE DIETING! 

What is a reverse diet? 

A reverse diet is a tool I use with clients to exit a fat loss phase. Simply put, a reverse diet is an “exit strategy.” A strategy to transition from a calorie deficit to maintenance calories. 

It’s a fancy way of simply increasing calories incrementally out of a low calorie phase. I strategically use gradual increases in calories as I aim to work a client up to their predicted TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure). The place where they should theoretically be able to maintain their weight. 

What’s that look like as a snapshot? 

Say you finish your fat loss phase, a 16-week cut, on 1,400 calories. 

You have lost 10 kilograms! Amazing! 

Now, you can use my TDEE Calculator to work out your predicted TDEE. Let’s say it is 2,300 calories. This is where you should theoretically be able to maintain your weight: 2,300 calories for maintenance. 

The issue is, you have just finished your fat loss phase on only 1,400 calories. You were losing very slowly. The weight wasn’t just falling off. 

This is a good sign that you would not be able to maintain your weight on 2,300 calories. Right now, if we just immediately bumped your calories to 2,300 you would initially put on some body fat. 

Not what most people want after finally getting to their goal weight.

You want to KEEP THE WEIGHT OFF long term! Not rush to gain that weight back. 

This is where we can use a reverse diet as a tool to exit a fat loss phase for certain clients. 

A reverse diet involves being very conscious of fast weight regain when there is a large gap between your finishing fat loss calories and your predicted TDEE. 

A reverse dieting plan will teach you to incrementally build your calories up to your TDEE over a period of time. 

The idea is as we increase calories, your metabolic rate, which has been lowered through metabolic adaptation from dieting, will slowly pick back up. 

By increasing calories slowly, we can mitigate rapid weight regain and ideally help you to both increase calories AND maintain your new weight loss. 

This is why a reverse diet is such a useful tool for the right person to mentally transition from low calories to increased calories. Too large a jump in calories immediately partnered with fast scale weight gain can cause a mental struggle and prevent you from wanting to increase calories. You’re scared and want to stay on very low calories as a strategy of preventing weight regain.

Once we have the desired result, long term low calories are not what we want. We want to increase calories! However, we need to be strategic at times. A reverse diet allows a person to take the positive step of increasing calories, while at the same time, slowing the rate of potential weight regain. This process of gradually bringing up calories can play a big psychological role in improving someone’s ability to eat more once again. 

 

Coach Mark Carroll