How To Reverse Diet

If you’ve ever stopped a diet only for people to say “You need to go on a diet”, then you’re going to want to learn how to reverse diet.

Reverse diet?!?!

Yeah, exactly what I said.

REVERSE DIET!!!

Reverse dieting is the process of adding calories back into your diet after severely restricting them for an extended period of time.

Why you should give a fuck about it is because you’re like a lot of people.

And because you’re like a lot of people, you’ve lost a shitload of weight before and put back on the pounds in less time than it took for you to lose them.

Because you’re like a lot of people, I bet you decided to loosen up by eating every bit of scrumdiddlyumptiousness that was calling your name during those long, hard weeks you were dieting. Hey, you were on your grind for how long and reached your goal weight, right?! So what’s an entire cheesecake here and a pizza there? Shiiiiiitttt, if anyone deserves to treat themselves, it’s you!!!¹

Care to take a guess why your weight shot the fuck up?

I’m not a genius or nuffin’ so take what I say with a healthy dose of skepticism, but your weight gain probably has to do with you thinking that the diet was over once the diet was over.²

Sorry, but it wasn’t!

Now, I know what you’re saying to yourself.

Why the fuck is this dope telling me that a diet isn’t over when I reach my goal weight, which is when a diet is clearly over?

– you saying to yourself what I know you’re saying to yourself

Technically, yes, the specific diet you’re on is done.

But the dieting process itself?

Nope, not so done.

Allow me to explain…

What happens after restricting calories for weeks and months is that the body undergoes metabolic compensation.³

That’s why if you end a diet and then increase your caloric intake by binging or immediately going to maintenance levels, what you’ll gain is mostly fat from the metabolism’s impaired ability to burn those calories it’s not accustomed to dealing with anymore.

Additionally, once more calories are available after an extended period at a deficit, the body sees fit to hoard fat to better protect itself from the next time your crazy ass tries to strip the body of its adipose stores and tissue, which are both very important and serve a multitude of vital functions.

The solution?

To keep dieting.

Seriously.

The solution is to continue the diet process.

However, rather than slowly removing calories as you would during a weight loss, fat loss, or whatever loss diet, you would instead slowly add calories back into your diet over a period of weeks until you’re at the level of calories you should be eating to maintain your new weight.

This is what’s known as “reverse dieting” because…ummmm…you’re dieting in reverse. While it’s something that competitors are starting to do more and more of, the general population should also be following suit.

The reasoning behind why you want to do this and not what you and most people do is simple!

Prepare yourself to feel like a dunce if you haven’t figured it out yet.

Okay, dunce, the thinking is that slowly bumping yourself up to maintenance calories in a span of weeks, not days, allows the metabolism to rev itself back up to working order.

Now, will you gain weight?

You betcha!

…but you have to remember what “weight” is and that there’s a difference between weight and fat. The weight you may or may not gain while reverse dieting will more than likely be water weight thanks to the reintroduction of carbs and their gradual increase week by week.⁴

What should be clear by now is that reverse dieting is nothing but a way to help reset the metabolism and get it humming again after severely restricting calories for a fuck long length of time.

While reverse dieting is done primarily to prevent weight rebound, it can be implemented way before you reach your goal weight, like when you’re at a fat loss plateau. In that case, what you’d do is work your way back to maintenance then start stripping calories again.

All that is well and good, you say.

What you really want to know though is exactly how reverse dieting works.

Well, it’s simple…

…once you get past the part that calls for complex math operations!

Let’s say you were 180 lbs and after 8 months of half-assing your nutrition and exercise program, you were finally able to drop down to 170 lbs, with your total daily calories ending at 2000 calories.⁵

Now, to reverse diet you would first calculate your maintenance calories.

There are many formulas available, but the simplest way that requires me doing the least amount of ~~work~~ explanation is for you to just multiply your current weight by

•13 if you don’t exercise at all;

•15 if you exercise a few times per week; or

•18 if you work out five or more days.

So you’re 170 lbs and work out three times per week.⁶ That means we have to multiply 170 by 15.

When we do the math with a calculator instead of our fucking brain, what we get is 2550. That 2550 is the amount of calories you have to eat per day just to maintain the 170 lbs that you’re currently at so you’re neither losing nor gaining any more weight.

Rather than waking up the very next day and eating 2550 calories right from the jump, what you would do is increase the amount of calories you’re currently eating by 3-5 percent.

Because you ended your diet at 2000 calories, that means you’d start by adding 60 calories back into it.⁷

But where are those 60 calories coming from?

Well, protein will stay constant, fat will make up 25 percent of your calories, and carbs will round out the rest.

A week later, you’d increase your total calories by another 3-5 percent and repeat the same caloric procedure.

You’d keep upping the calories week-to-week until one of two things occurred:⁸

(1) Circumference measurements indicate that you gained body fat⁹

(2) You finally arrived at maintenance

Need a visual aid to make this shit even easier to understand?

Say no more!

WEEk	CALORIES	CARBS (g)	FAT (g)	PROTEIN (g)
0	2000	205	56	170
1	2060	217	57	170
2	2122	228	59	170
3	2186	239	61	170
4	2252	251	63	170
5	2320	266	64	170
6	2390	279	66	170
7	2462	293	68	170
8	2536	307	70	170

Moving backwards in life is generally a bad thing.

Going from a job as a high-salaried corporate executive to Wal-Mart greeter? Yup, that would be considered a bad thing!

Living in a bustling metropolitan area and relocating home to Buttfuck, Iowa? Yup, that would be considered a bad thing!

Going from a job as a high-salaried corporate executive in a bustling metropolitan area to relocating home to Buttfuck, Iowa and working as a Wal-Mart greeter? Fuuuuuuccckkk, bad doesn’t even begin to describe that!!!

But moving backwards to climb out of a caloric deficit?

Not so much!

Glossary: adipose, caloric deficit, calories, diet, dietary fat, fitness, metabolism, program, work out

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.

How To Reverse Diet

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