Bridget Moroney
0:00
Eating more calories without gaining weight or sometimes even losing weight? This is either unicorn diet or one of my favorite nutrition strategies, especially around the holidays. So let's dig in. Welcome to the performance RX podcast where the conversations are about health, nutrition and mindset for anyone who considers themselves an athlete from the most elite competitors to those who are simply seeking to improve their athletic performance. We hope the knowledge shared on this show will empower you to reach your physical potential. Thank you so much for tuning in. Now for today's episode. Hey, everyone, welcome to today's show. I'm your host, Bridget Moroney. And today I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite topics in nutrition, and that is reverse dieting. So if you have no idea what a reverse diet is, just hang on and listen, because I'm going to basically explain what it is what the claimed benefits are. And then I'll give you a little bit of an outline of how you could do a reverse diet, if that's something that makes sense for you in your nutrition program right now.
Bridget Moroney
1:05
I'm also going to talk about why I think right now is a good time to start a reverse diet. So if you're listening to this podcast, when it was originally released, it's going to be in the beginning of October, which if you live in the northern hemisphere, this is usually the time of year when the days get colder, the days get shorter, and people just kind of slow down with their training in general, if you live in the United States, this is the time when the holiday season kicks off with Thanksgiving, Halloween, all of the holidays during December, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, etc, then there's new year's and so in general, it's a good time to start a reverse diet, in my opinion, because again, the days are shorter, it's colder, your desire to train kind of goes down anyway. But also, as I mentioned, with the holidays, there's a lot of food going around. So from a psychological standpoint, this isn't the best time to be doing a calorie deficit, because even the most disciplined, dedicated person is going to have a hard time with their calorie deficit during the holidays, just because there's so much temptation around, there's just, there's just no way around it. Like I said, you know, it doesn't mean it's a moral failing if you feel tempted at your Thanksgiving dinner with your family. Or if you go to a Hanukkah celebration, and there's food there that you want to eat. This is usually a time when if you look at sports like bodybuilding and physique, competitors, this is like their their offseason, basically. And a lot of sports also kind of follow suit with that. So again, in my opinion, I think this is a good time to begin a reverse diet if you've already been in a calorie deficit, but I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. So we'll revisit this topic here in a second. So let's start off with what our reverse diet is in the first place.
Bridget Moroney
0:00
So reverse dieting is a method that involves slowly and strategically increasing your daily food intake in an effort to raise your metabolism. And basically, this came out of the bodybuilding world. So if you're not familiar with bodybuilders, or physique, competitors, these are people who basically are training and manipulating their body composition to be as lean as humanly possible. So that involves a lot of training. It also involves their diet going down into a very low caloric deficit. So when they step on stage, you can see their muscles and all the detail and striation and everything else like that super, super clear, as much as possible. But then the question comes up what happens after the bodybuilding show, and so the person out of the bodybuilding world who really made this popular was Dr. Layne Norton, if you're not familiar with Layne Norton, I highly recommend you check him out. He is a natural pro bodybuilder, he is an elite raw power lifter, and he's a physique coach, and he's also got his PhD in nutrition, hence the name, Dr. Layne Norton. So basically, if you don't know Layne, he is a really jacked nerd. And I say that with as much admiration and respect for him. Because the dude is really smart. And he's been in the fitness industry for a very, very long time. He knows his shit. He was the one who really popularized it because and I'm paraphrasing some different interviews I've heard from him, but basically you have a bodybuilder or you have a bikini competitor, they step on stage, they finish their contests, they step off stage, what usually happens well, as you might imagine, a lot of people will go and they will binge on food that next day week whatever and ultimately what ends up happening is they gain back a lot of weight and quite a bit of that is body fat. So for a long long time, that was just kind of the nature of the beast there. You diet down to very low body fat percentages and then during your bulking season, you gain some weight back, rinse, repeat, do it all again. So the idea of the reverse diet is basically a way for bodybuilders, physique, competitors, or really anyone who has dieted down to increase their food intake, but also not gain as much fat back, or in some cases very, very little, sometimes none at all, depending on what their diet look like their physique, their metabolism, etc. And the cool thing about it is many people gain muscle and lose fat while eating more food than they were before. Again, this isn't magic. And I'll get a little bit more into the overview of the science for it. But just keep that in mind. That's why people got so excited about this is basically it's it sounds like it's the unicorn program, you're eating more food, but you're not gaining weight, and you're able to put on muscle and lose fat. Again, it's not magic, we're not defying the laws of physics here. There is a reason why this happens. And I'll explain in a minute. So like I said, reverse dieting is basically a way for you to slowly and strategically increase your food intake in an effort to raise your metabolism if you've come out of a calorie deficit. So what does that look like? It's basically as the name implies, the reverse steps that you would take to lose weight. So in other words, anyone who's losing weight, whether it's for a bodybuilding contest, just general health, whatever, you're going to slowly and strategically subtract calories and food from your daily intake until you reach your goal. So the reverse diet is is basically that it's adding back in those calories. And I'll get into the specifics of what that actually looks like and how many calories you could or should actually add back in a little later on in this episode, so make sure you keep listening. So you're adding back in calories, which means that your metabolism is going to adjust upward over time. And I'll talk about metabolic adaptation here in just a second, you keep going you keep going, eventually, you're going to hit a calorie intake where you're feeling good, you're feeling energized, you're performing well in the gym, you might even be gaining muscle at this point. And again, it's all minimizing fat gain. A couple of things to keep in mind. There is also another caveat to this, which I'll explain in a second. But usually, again, using bodybuilders as an example here, bodybuilders also do tons of cardio during their preparation for a contest in order to get as lean as possible. So that's another caveat to this is usually, you reduce the amount of cardio that you're doing because you just don't need it. And resistance training strength training that is emphasized. So again, that's going to play into how reverse dieting works because of the way nutrient partitioning works. The other thing too, is I'm just going to be point blank here, we're talking about bodybuilders, you have to keep in mind that performance enhancing drugs, steroids, all of that are also a factor. Not saying that this doesn't work for general population, people or anyone who's natural. But when you see these extreme body composition shifts, you have to keep in mind that there is some sort of PED involved in that.
Bridget Moroney
0:00
So I've been talking a lot about reverse dieting in the context of physique sports, so people who are bodybuilders or bikini competitors, etc. But what about people who are in other sports or the general population? So the same rules apply. And this is a reason why again, even though you may not be a bodybuilder, or a physique competitor, this might be something useful for you if you are coming out of a calorie deficit. So first things first, weight loss is very difficult to maintain. And regardless of your sport, regardless of who you are, it's pretty common knowledge that most people who do diet end up regaining what they lost. And in some cases, sometimes more just because when you do a fat loss diet, the calorie intake you end up with at the end of that diet just isn't sustainable, especially if you are training for performance and other things like that a couple of reasons. Again, it's just the laws of physics and the laws of biology and the laws of how our metabolism works. But when you reduce calories, your body's going to shrink, right? That's the purpose of a fat loss diet is you're trying to get your body to shrink. Hopefully, that's fat mass that you're losing. But either way, a smaller body means smaller calories. And the other thing is that your metabolisms going to slow. So this is where our bodies become adaptable. Your body senses it's taking in fewer calories, the metabolism slows down in order to meet that demand. And so eventually what ends up happening is people reach this plateau. You can't just keep cutting calories because eventually, you're going to end up in a spot where you're going to put your health in danger. So eventually your fat loss phase is going to come to an end one way or another. The other thing about reverse dieting for the general population, or anyone who's not a bodybuilder, is, like I mentioned, the amount of calories that you need to maintain your weight just doesn't translate into a lot of foods. So again, if you've ever done a fat loss diet, think about how much food you were eating in that final week, that final two weeks, it probably wasn't very much, right. And again, this is where people will claim that diets quote unquote, fail, it's because there isn't that sustainability. And so what ends up happening is people get into this cycle of yo yo dieting. So this is something that I always pondered over my fitness journey. And just being interested in nutrition coaching, etc, is how do you avoid that cycle of yo yo dieting? Yes, you need to cut calories to lose weight. Yes, you need to bring those calories back up. But how can you do that without gaining all the weight that you just lost back? And so this is where reverse dieting really caught my attention. And I tried it a couple of times under different circumstances each time and of course, I've used it with clients as well.
Bridget Moroney
0:00
Before I move on, let's just talk about what metabolic adaptation is, and the laws of thermogenesis. And everything else like that, because like I said, reverse dieting seems like magic, because you're increasing your food, but you're not gaining weight. But there's a little bit of science behind it, why it's not necessarily just some magic thing, and you just eat a bunch of food and never gain weight. So if you're not familiar with how our metabolism works, or the concept of calories in, calories out, it's pretty simple. You eat more energy than you burn, you gain weight, you eat less energy than you burn, you lose weight. This is what a lot of nutrition coaches like to emphasize because it is at the end of the day, what determines if we gain, maintain or lose weight. But as you'll hear other nutrition coaches talk about as far as hormones, gut health and everything else like that it's a little bit more complicated than that. Talking about metabolic adaptation and why reverse diets work. But they're not magic. As I mentioned, there's the starvation response, right. So when you diet down, your metabolism is going to slow down. Let me just point out that starvation response is not the same as starvation mode, so don't go misquoting me. I know there's a lot of people out there in the interwebs on social media that like to talk about starvation mode as a reason or an excuse, why they're not losing weight, and it's just flat out not a thing. But starvation response is a thing. And it's a response to calories being low. And what happens is your metabolism down regulates so that your body can hold on to its fat stores. That's what makes those last final weeks of any sort of fat diet so hard because your body is literally fighting you to hold on to its fat stores. So metabolic adaptation, there's a couple of things that happen when you eat less, your body is going to lower your basal metabolic rate. So this is the amount of energy you need to lose when at rest. So basically, it literally reduces the energy, our exercise becomes more difficult. If you've ever gone through a fat loss phase or gone on a diet and you try to go the workout, your energy probably sucked, your performance probably sucked, especially at those final weeks. It's tough. And as a result, because you're not performing as well or as intensely as you would fully fed, you're also going to burn fewer calories working out. The other thing that goes down as far as calories burned is your neat. So neat is an acronym for non exercise Activity Thermogenesis. So this is basically your fidgeting, you're bouncing your knees, you're walking, you're pacing, your body is going to naturally down regulate this so that you don't move as much. And thus, again, you're not burning as many calories. So pay attention to how you move throughout the day. When you're on a diet versus you're not on a diet, you probably have more energy and you probably get up and move around. When you're well fed. Versus when you are in a calorie deficit, you're a lot more tired. So you're probably sitting and conserving energy. The last thing that gets downregulated is your digestion. So like I said, there is a little bit more to the calories in calories out. And this is one of them. So one of the things that your body does when you're in a calorie deficit and it senses that it's not getting as many calories as it usually does. Or as many calories as it needs to maintain the weight is it slows your digestion down which is kind of a good thing for survival mode. Basically it slows down so that it's able to absorb as many nutrients as possible and therefore get as much
Bridget Moroney
14:58
energy or calories in as possible. So if you are eating 1500 calories, and your metabolism and your digestion are slowing down, you're probably going to absorb as much of those 1500 calories as possible there. Great for survival. But if you have certain physique goals or whatever, that's going to be a little bit frustrating. So that's a pretty basic overview of what happens to your metabolism when you're in a calorie deficit and you lose weight. But this is why reverse diets aren't magic. Because, as the name implies, it all works in reverse. So when you do your reverse diet the proper way, which I'll get into a little bit later in this episode, so just keep listening if you want to try it yourself, but basically all those metabolic adaptations that went down, are going to start going back up. Once you start adding in food strategically, and slowly and systematically. So same thing, but in reverse, your BMR is going to rise, so you're going to burn more calories to stay alive, your workout capacity increases. So again, you're eating more food, you're feeling better in the gym, you're able to perform better in the gym, you're getting more out of your workouts, your NEAT increases, you may find yourself fidgeting more pacing more, you may want to take the stairs instead of the elevator and your digestion returns to normal. So your GI tract is no longer trying to squeeze every bit of sustenance out of every piece of food you eat. Again, the big part I need to emphasize here is that this process has to be done slowly, your reverse diet has to be done slowly, if you go from eating 1300 calories all the sudden up to 2000 calories, your metabolism isn't going to adapt the same way it does as if it were doing a reverse diet very, very, very important that you add calories slowly. And this doesn't necessarily mean that you have to starve yourself. I'll get into how many calories you could add potentially week by week and what that would look like a little bit later when we go over how to do a reverse diet. But just keep that in mind that you don't just like dump a whole bunch of calories back into your diet. And this is basically because the body seems to respond differently to different rates of overfeeding don't get triggered when I say overfeeding. This is the word that researchers use to describe eating beyond your calorie needs. This doesn't mean that you're going to be stuffing yourself. And it's going to look different for everybody, it's going to depend on your muscle mass, it's going to depend on your age, your sex, your activity level, things like that. But looking at the research studies there, there have been some that have shown that eating 20% above your maintenance calories did not significantly increase fat gain, whereas maybe doing 40,50 60% did increase your fat gains, let's just assume that your maintenance is at 2000 calories, you might be able to eat up to 400 extra calories a day without seeing a big impact on the scale. So again, this is where you hear people reverse dieting way beyond, quote unquote, way beyond their maintenance calories without seeing any sort of fat gain there. So yeah, reverse dieting is a great method to use in your nutrition, if it makes sense. And you can get great results from it. I've gotten great results from it. My clients have gotten great results from it. There's other coaches out there who have used it with their clients. There's plenty of people who have used it and have gotten great results out of it. But again, just like any diet, it's not going to work for everybody under every single condition 100% of the time. And so just to kind of acknowledge there, there are no guarantees in life just like if you tried the keto diet, the Paleo diet, whatever diets out there, and your friend, your sister, your brother, your mother, your cousin, your teacher, your coach, whoever some influencer on the internet lost weight on it doesn't guarantee that you will.
Bridget Moroney
19:05
So this is an interesting study from the Mayo Clinic they brought in 16 normal weight people into a lab for eight weeks and they serve them huge meals that basically made them over eat an extra 1000 calories each day plus they are told not to exercise. So if you can do the math here, basically 3500 calories equals one pound. If we want based on pure math alone, every single person in that study should have gained 16 pounds in eight weeks, but in reality they gained anywhere from under one to about nine pounds. And the biggest predictor for this was increased NEAT so in other words, some people's NEAT one up a whole bunch and because of that they didn't gain very much weight. Other people had some modest in increases and they ended up gaining more. So the same thing applies to reverse dieting. Again, this is why it's not defying the laws of thermogenesis. And it's not magic, where you get to eat a whole bunch more food and you lose weight. What you're doing when you reverse diet is you're hoping that your body and metabolism will adjust because you're increasing your NEAT. And then other mechanisms I talked about, like the BMR, and your exercise performance, and everything else like that. But the degree of adjustment, or whether any adjustment ever happens is going to vary from person to person. Like I said before, it depends on things like your sex, your age, how much lean muscle tissue you actually have on your body, and things like that.
Bridget Moroney
20:43
And then one last thing, before we get into who might benefit from a reverse diet, I've been talking a lot about measuring calories and tracking calories and maintenance calories. So a big part of reverse dieting is making the assumption that you're pretty sure what your caloric intake is. So keep in mind, no calorie counting is 100% accurate, but you need to know where you're starting from in order to increase your calories via a reverse diet. So if you're coming off of a calorie deficit or fat loss phase, hopefully you know what your calories are, because I'm assuming that you've been decreasing your calories and therefore tracking the decrease in your calories to get to that fat loss. If you're doing this at a regular maintenance phase, then you should at least know what your maintenance is. So in order to do a reverse diet, you're going to have to make some compromises. So even though it sounds magical and amazing that you get to increase your food and not gain weight, it does come with a price. So in order to reverse diet, effectively, you're probably going to have to eat the same amount of food each day. Just because when you are counting calories, that's what's going to help you be more consistent, you're going to have to measure your food intake in order to count those calories. And you're probably going to have to adjust your physical activity up or down depending on your goals. So this may mean eliminating some or quite a bit of your cardio. And you also have to go with the fact that it may not work for you, or it may not work for you at this point in your fitness or nutrition journey.
Bridget Moroney
22:28
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So let's get into the part of the podcast that you all have been waiting for. How do you actually go about reverse dieting. So here is a five step process to reverse dieting. So before I tell you about this, something to emphasize here, this is just a five step overview. And if you want to try it, please, by all means go ahead and try it. But keep in mind if you're someone who isn't sure about their maintenance calories isn't sure how to track calories or anything else like that, you might need some extra help from a qualified nutrition coach or dietitian. If you are brand new to dieting at all, this may not work for you. So even though I'm giving you a five step method, please keep in mind that like I said before, reverse dieting is kind of an advanced technique. And so if you're completely new to any of the things that I'm talking about here, it might be a good idea to reach out to someone to get a little bit extra help and coaching around your nutrition. Alright, so first things first, you need to figure out how you're going to track your calories, right? Like I said, reverse dieting revolves heavily around your knowledge of how many calories you're taking in versus how many calories you're going out. And basically your goal the ultimate is to be able to get a little bit past your maintenance. So are you using a calorie tracking method like My Fitness Pal, where are you weigh in measure your food, you put in your calories, you get your macros, etc. Or there's something that a lot of nutrition coaches really find helpful. And that is using your hand as a measuring tool. So for anyone who's unfamiliar, basically your thumb is one portion of fat, your fist is one portion of leafy greens, a cupped hand. So you make a little cup with your hand, they're not the same as a fist, but that's your carb intake, and then your palm is protein. And let me just clarify there, the cupped hand is starchy carbs, so rice, oatmeal, potatoes, and so on. This is a good method for someone who basically doesn't want to live and die by their food scale. Then once you figure it out how you're actually going to keep track of your food and your calories, then what you need to do is determine your maintenance calories. So before you can increase calories, you need to figure out where you're actually starting. So I've said this enough, but I'll just say it one more time. If you're already coming off of a calorie deficit. Hopefully you know where you're starting from. Hopefully you've been keeping track of your calories and you've dieted down to a certain point where you've lost weight and you're maintaining that lower weight, but now you're ready to dial back up. So if that's you, great
Bridget Moroney
25:00
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For other people, what you can do is you can use a nutrition calculator, and I'll put a link in the notes there. But there are plenty of nutrition calculators out there that will tell you how many calories you need each day in order to gain lose or maintain your weight. And so if you haven't been dieting at all, and you just want to see what a reverse diet is, I would start at the maintenance phase. And I wouldn't even worry about doing a reverse diet for at least two to four weeks. And here's the reason why these calorie calculators have been around for a long time, the formulas that they use to make these calorie calculators have been around for even longer. But as great as a calculator is and as precise as these formulas are no calculator is going to be able to take into account your dieting history, your genetics, and all those other things that we talked about that can make someone gain or lose weight differently than someone else on the same amount of calories. So find out what your maintenance calories are, and then eat that amount of food for two weeks up to four weeks. And just take note, does your weight go up? Does it go down? Does it stay pretty safe, stable. And once you have that information, you will be able to make a better decision about whether a reverse diet is actually a good idea for you or not at this point in your your life or your fitness journey. And so those are the first two steps figure out how you're going to track your food, figure out what your maintenance calories are. And if you're coming off of a calorie deficit, just start right there and then make your way back up.
Bridget Moroney
26:35
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And now what you need to decide is your macronutrient balance. So this is what percentage of protein fat or carbohydrates are you going to take from those, let's say 2000 calories each day. So even though I've been talking a lot about calories in calories out, making sure that you're tracking your calories in order for the reverse diet to be effective macronutrient ratios are also important because hopefully, you're looking at your body composition and calories in calories out are going to determine whether you gain maintain or lose weight. But your macro nutrient partitioning is going to determine how much of that weight that gets lost, maintained or gained is muscle. And so basic overview a higher protein diet seems to maximize muscle protein synthesis and minimize protein breakdown, which we assume we hope would lead to more muscle gain. This is why one of the reasons why higher protein diets are better for improving your body composition than moderate or low protein diets. More protein is also going to help increase your energy out because your body uses more energy to process protein than it does for carbohydrates or fat. So there's something called the thermogenic effect of food. And that's basically it is your body has to work to break down protein. So what would an optimal amount of protein look like for someone who's trying to build or maintain muscle, it kind of depends. But here's just a general guideline, if you are a female, if you identify as a female, if you're a biological female, then you want basically 0.6 all the way up to 1.35 grams of protein per pound of body weight. And if you're a male, biological, etc, then you're looking at 0.65 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight, not that big of a difference here. And again, it comes down to the fact that typically males have more muscle than females and have larger bodies. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't women out there that have more muscle than men and have bigger bodies than men, and vice versa. So these are just general guidelines. And again, you have to find what works for you also keep in mind, depending on where you're starting your reverse diet from and what your goals are. If you want to maintain your lean mass while losing body fat, then you should probably go to the higher ends of those ranges. So a lot of people like to say as an easy rule of thumb, one gram of protein per pound of body weight. So if you're 150 pound individual, that means that your protein intake will be at roughly 150 grams of protein. So that's the most important thing is your protein because that's going to determine your muscle maintenance or gain during any diet, not just reverse diet.
Bridget Moroney
29:31
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Once you've done that, then you're going to look at your carbohydrates and fats. And I'm just going to tell you right now, the balance between the two isn't so important. You hear all this discussion over high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat here, people can lose weight and or gain muscle with any reasonable mix as long as it's sustainable. So yes, for people who swear by keto, it works for them because it's sustainable for them. So when you're thinking about your carbohydrate and fat ratio, you want to think about what you like to eat, how you like to eat, and what you can imagine doing for yourself long term. So if you love carbs, then trying to do a low carbohydrate type of diet is not going to help you in the long term. So the actual math and formulas to determine what your carbohydrates and fats are going to be with the remainder of your calories is a little bit more complicated than just the straight forward 0.6 grams of protein up to 1.3 grams of protein per pound. So what I'll do is I will put in a link to a nutrition calculator that should be able to help you with that. And you can kind of toggle around with the percentages there. In order to help you make your best decision.
Bridget Moroney
30:49
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Now on to step four. So this is where you need to have a conversation about yourself and what your goals are, and what sort of realistic expectations you have for this reverse diet. And the two things that you really need to think about is one, how motivated are you to eat more food because eating more food often sounds like it's a fun thing until you actually have to eat more food. And that food requires you to eat whole foods, and adequate protein and whole carbohydrates and vegetables and all that good stuff. And then also how much fat you're willing to gain. So again, reverse dieting can be done in a way where you don't gain weight, or you gain very little weight. But again, we aren't doing any sort of magical trickery to the laws of thermogenesis. So there is a potential to gain weight. And there's quite a bit of potential to gain quite a bit of weight depending on how many calories you put back in.
Bridget Moroney
31:41
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So here's a brief overview of basically three different calorie bumps and approaches to reverse dieting. So the first one, let's say your goal is to increase your maintenance calories after dieting or before dieting again. So your desire to eat more is probably just going to be kind of on the moderate to low, and then your fat gain tolerance is low. So in other words, you're at your current maintenance calories, and you just want to eat a little bit more food to hopefully put on some muscle without going through a full bulk and or increase your sports performance. So this is actually what I did the first time I tried reverse dieting. And it worked well for me, my friends at the gym were very jealous again, they thought it was like some magical voodoo I was doing where I was eating more food and losing weight. But I was actually training for a competition. And so I needed to increase my calories. But I want to do so in a slow and strategic way so that I wasn't gaining weight. And so what does that look like? Well, basically, it's 40 to 60 calories a day. So not a big increase. And over time over over each week, that number would increase. So for example, let's say I started at 2000 calories, the first week of reverse dieting would be 2050. Then the next week would be 2100, so on and so on there until I got to a point where I just didn't want to eat enough food or I was happy with where my energy and everything was at. That was me the first time I did a reverse diet. And again, it wasn't a lot of food at first. But over time, over the weeks, I got up to I think 2400 calories there at my maintenance, the average weekly weight gain should remain under half a pound. So for me, in my case, I was increasing my exercise my strength training and my performance. So I actually lost weight in this case, but that's not going to happen for everybody. And it doesn't guarantee that's going to happen for you. Okay, so the next calorie bump would be for someone who's going for peak physical performance, and this is going to be 80 to 120 calories. So you guys are probably thinking like So wait, Bridget, didn't you just say that you did a reverse diet to increase your performance, but you only did 50 calories? Yes, but it wasn't like I was training for an ultra marathon or the CrossFit Games or anything else like that I was just doing like a little local competition. So if my training had needed a lot more calories, I probably would have done this approach. But I was just doing some extra met cons here and there to get ready for this this local competition. So going back to this peak physical performance, so your desire to eat more is going to be increased to moderate your fat gain tolerance is also going to be increased to moderate. This would be someone like I said myself, you're starting at your maintenance, but now you're trying to increase your calorie intake to 10 to 20% more once again 80 to 120 calories and your average weekly weight gain should remain under one pound. And this is where hopefully you've done your macronutrient partitioning correctly and that weight gain should come from actual muscle not just fat. The third situation for a reverse diet is recover from very low body fat level. So this was actually my most recent reverse diet. And I'll just say really quick, I wasn't at a very low body fat level. But what I was at was a very low calorie maintenance level, because I had gone through a fat loss phase and I lost quite a bit of body fat, no, no doubt about it. But I wouldn't say that my body fat was like, so low. But my calories were at a very low point where I just didn't want to be on that diet anymore. And I actually didn't do this reverse diet as well as I could. And I'll tell you what I mean by that in a second. But really quick, basically, you're starting at your current maintenance, which in this case, my maintenance calories were very low, and you're trying to get up to 20 to 30%. More from where you're starting, your desire to eat more is very high, and your fat gain tolerance is high. So this is where I didn't do it correctly, because your fat gain tolerance is probably going to be around 1.5 pounds of body fat, and you're increasing your intake 140 to 180 calories. Well, when I did this, I did it on the conservative approach, which you can mix and match all of these, by the way, like just because I'm giving you some general outlines doesn't mean that you can't be conservative or you can't be aggressive, or you can't be moderate with your reverse diet. These are just general guidelines, again, do what is right for you.
Bridget Moroney
36:24
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But I will say having done the conservative approach, which is basically 50 calories a week, starting at a very low maintenance calories was pretty miserable. It wasn't a enough food. For me, it wasn't enough weekly or daily food increase for me to feel like I was properly recovering from my fat loss calorie deficit diet. And so this is where reverse dieting gets a lot of criticism from other people in the fitness and nutrition world. Because if you have someone who is at such a low body fat level and or caloric maintenance level, then 50, 100, even 200 calories a day extra may not be enough to make them recover as quickly or as adequately as they could if they just went back into a maintenance phase. But that's another conversation for another day. And that brings us to the last step in this process.
Bridget Moroney
37:24
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So step five is monitor your progress and adjust as needed. So basically, it's the diet, you've picked your plan, you've got your macros, you know how many calories you're going to be increasing, and you just go for it. So a couple of things to do when you are monitoring your progress. And to determine whether your reverse dieting is doing what you want to do is to track some key metrics. So you want to weigh yourself daily or weekly, day to day numbers aren't so important but keeping a record of your average weight gain or loss is useful measure your waist, hips or other body areas. So again, there's a difference between weight gain and fat gain. And although you may be gaining weight on your reverse diet, hopefully that is from muscle and not from fat tissue. So again, part of the quote unquote magic or hype around a reverse diet is that people are able to gain muscle weight without putting on as much fat, you can also use some progress photos. So this can show you differences in body composition, if you don't want to use a scale looking at your workout performance. So especially if you've been coming off of a fat loss phase, your energy, your performance are probably in the trashcan here. So if your reverse dieting is working, and it's working at the pace that you want it to, you should see an increase in performance in the gym. And then the last thing that you can look at is energy levels hunger and digestive system. So as I mentioned before, your digestive system gets upregulated and downregulated. So hopefully the changes that you notice and that are positive ones, hopefully your hunger levels are going to go down because you're eating more food and hopefully your energy and your NEAT go up because again, you're getting more food and energy. And so based on all of that you can adjust your calorie and your reverse diet as needed. So if you start off with an aggressive approach, and you realize that maybe you're gaining too much weight and that weight is actual fat mass, not lean mass, then maybe you can dial it back a bit. Some people may find that you can increase your intake every week without gaining much fat. That was definitely the case. Like I said in both times I did the reverse diet there one because I had already started I had a very low caloric maintenance and then two I was increasing my training and therefore my calories out if that doesn't work for you then increasing every two to four weeks is also a solid guideline. So don't be in a rush to go through your reverse diet. You can do it very slowly and methodically and you'll still reap the benefits of it.
Bridget Moroney
39:57
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And then of course the big question is how do you know when to Stop reverse dieting. So again, it all depends on your goals and what you want to get out of this reverse diet. If you are a physique competitor, you probably have certain competitions or things on the horizon that you're getting prepared for. So that could be a determiner. But for anyone else, a couple of guidelines. So first and foremost, something I forgot to mention, in the beginning of this episode, you want to reverse diet for about as long as you were in a calorie deficit. So most of the research shows that people's metabolism needs to recover for as long as they were downregulated. So I'll use myself as an example, the fat loss phase that I did was 12 weeks. And so when I did my reverse diet, it was 12 weeks now, I'm just maintaining where I am until I decide what I'm going to do next with my body and nutrition. Some other factors that you want to keep in mind are how much weight have you gained. So you may want to continue reverse dieting, if you haven't gained much fat or you don't mind the amount that you have gained. Another thing to keep in mind is how much are you interested in eating, if you are still interested in eating the food that you're eating, then by all means, keep going. And then, like I mentioned, don't reverse diet for less time than you were in a calorie deficit. So if you were dieting for six months, don't reverse diet for four months, you're not helping yourself. I know it's a mental trip for a lot of people. But get yourself a coach work through those mental barriers, your body, your health, your metabolism, are going to thank you for it in the long run. And then on the other side, what are the signs that it might be time to stop your reverse diet? Well, same thing but opposite of what I just said. So you've gained as much fat as you feel comfortable gaining, you're not interested in eating anymore, and you've been reverse dieting for longer than you're in a caloric deficit, and you're ready to move on to your next goal or whatever phase it is in your nutrition and training. All right. So there you have it, a little overview of reverse dieting, what it is where it came from, how it works on a very simple biological, physiological level and the steps you can take if you want to try reverse dieting, I like to use reverse diets this time of year which is around the fall and winter time because there's already so much food around me so I might as well try to increase my calories while I can and I will be putting all of the links in the show notes or some of those studies and the calculators but if you have any questions reach out to me I love hearing from you all I love helping you guys I love answering questions so if you have questions about reverse dieting or nutrition performance mindset training in general hit me up on social media @Aspiretocoaching on Instagram @Aspiretocoaching on TikTok I know on TikTok, you can't slide into my DMs but in Instagram, you can. So hit me up there, watch some of my educational videos. And I'll see you guys next time.
Bridget Moroney
42:55
All right. That's all for today's show. Thank you so much again for listening. And be sure to head over to aspiretocoaching.com/podcast, check out the show notes for today's episode. There you'll find some of the links we've mentioned on today's podcast, as well as some of the previous episodes we've done. And while you're there, please make sure you sign up for our show updates. I am always updating the show and bringing in bonus content. So you do not want to miss out on any of that. One last thing. If you loved this episode, and you think a friend would really enjoy it as well. Grab the link and share it out for me please. It truly does help spread the word of this podcast and the topics that we discussed on our episodes. And at the end of the day. My goal is to empower as many people on their performance journey as possible. Thank you all so much again, and we'll see you next time.