What is reverse dieting and does it work?

IF YOU’RE A  ‘normal’ human being, we’ll make an educated guess and say you probably don’t enjoy being on a diet.

All diets are different, and some are more sustainable than others. But it’s impossible to always be in a calorie deficit, or else we would (quite literally) waste away. So, how do we come out of a diet?

‘Reverse dieting is more the dessert than the diet,’ says Leslie Bonci, sports dietician for the Kansas City Chiefs. ‘It is what one does after losing weight  – not during weight loss.’

To lose weight, we have to be in a caloric deficit, meaning, we’re eating less calories than we burn. Reverse dieting is as it sounds  – the opposite. The concept allows you to add in more calories to your daily intake once you’ve decided the diet is over, without gaining weight.

This concept is commonly used by bodybuilders and those who participate in sports with weight classes, such as wrestling. Let’s dive into the details.

Reverse dieting implies the existence of regular dieting  –  which, at its most basic, is the state of being in a calorie deficit, or taking in less calories than your body is burning. This is what causes fat loss. When dieting is over, the reverse diet is the idea that you can add in more calories to your daily intake without fat gain.

To do that, you have to increase in tiny increments  – typically adding anywhere from 30 to 100 calories a week for a few weeks until you get back to your newfound baseline.

For those not used to counting, this is a very tiny amount of calories. A spoonful of yoghurt, half an apple, or one to two bites of chicken, are all roughly 30 calories, says Bonci.

There are two main reasons people reverse diet. The first is to attempt to combat a weight-loss plateau.

Over prolonged periods of dieting, our bodies can adapt to how many calories we consume and how much energy we are burning as a protective mechanism. They act as guardrails to our weight in either direction  – to make sure you don’t gain too much weight, but also so you don’t lose too much weight. This can be referred to as ‘metabolic adaptation’.

Think about it: your body doesn’t want to waste away, so after long periods of time in a calorie deficit, it can adapt its energy expenditure to be lower, since it’s getting less energy from food. So, your deficit becomes less of a deficit since you’re not burning as much, causing you to stop losing weight. Our bodies do this, in part, by reducing our non-exercise activity thermogenesis. These are the tiny movements we do throughout the day, such as fidgeting and shaking our legs when we’re nervous.

When you eat very little, your body will reduce this kind of movement, so that it doesn’t expend too many calories in an effort to conserve energy. By adding more calories, in small doses, your body will increase its activity, and thus calorie burn, because it feels safe as it gets more energy.

‘Gradually and slowly increasing calories after weight loss rather than a rapid increase in calories can help to prevent the decrease in resting energy expenditure which would allow those who have lost weight to eat more without the consequence of weight regain,’ says Bonci.

While many people struggle to combat weight loss plateaus, Bonci says these struggles are completely normal, and there’s no scientific evidence that reverse dieting will work when it comes to getting to the other side of the plateau.

‘Body fat loss is a series of steps, not a slide,’ Bonci says. She recommends focusing on the quality of your diet rather than the caloric number to ensure body fat goals. This means monitoring fluid, fibre, and protein intake, she says, as calorie intake can be too arbitrary for most.

The other reason reverse dieting is used is to slowly come off a big calorie deficit. This is common in the world of bodybuilding, and weight class athletes. Often, per the nature of their professions, these athletes are required to hold themselves into a super strict deficit. When their competition is over, they can implement reverse dieting to ease themselves back into a normal eating pattern, rather the overeating directly after the competition.

There’s a few schools of thought as to what the best way to go about reverse dieting is. It’s mostly dependent on what your diet looked like before you planned to exit.

Bodybuilders and athletes typically track macronutrients rather than calorie intake, because they need to ensure proper protein intake to build muscle for their sport.

You can add in foods by increasing your macros allowance a little bit at a time. So, when reverse dieting, someone may add in maybe 10 grams of carbs, 10 grams of protein, and 3 grams of fat each week to your diet. This adds about 107 calories to your daily allowance.

If you’re not a macro tracker, and you prefer to diet in reference to calories, it’s typical to add in about 30 to 50 calories a week on a reverse diet. Again, calorie intake can be difficult to envision and is too arbitrary for most, so Bonci recommends adding food that ‘fills up, not out’.

This means aiming for volume in your added calories. Veggies such as celery, tomatoes, and broccoli all have high water content that will help keep you full throughout the day. Bonci recommends foods like salads, vegetable soups, and veggies with salsa to fill up.

Remember: everybody is different and needs different things.

If you’re in training for a bodybuilding competition or are aiming to make a certain weight class in boxing or wrestling, reverse dieting may be an option if you’re strictly controlling your intake.

But, if you’re an average person just looking to lose some body fat and gain some confidence, Bonci recommends more positive metrics for determining diet. That means keeping full with healthy, whole foods, ensuring proper protein intake, and hydration.

‘Think progress rather than suppress, with awareness, quality, quantity and consistency as a way of optimising body composition through lean mass preservation,’ she says.

For the majority, aiming for maintenance calories (that are slightly lower than pre-diet maintenance calories) after a dieting phase should be sufficient. This is because not many truly experience the metabolic adaptation that occurs from dieting, due to their diets not being long enough in duration or severe enough to cause it. Also, if metabolic adaptation has occurred, it can still be reversed by returning back to maintenance calories straight away, without raising calories gradually.

Whoever you are, and whatever you’re training for, speaking with a nutritionist or your doctor before coming out of any diet is always the way to go.

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