Do you fear eating more calories ⁉️
You’re not eating a lot and you’re busting ass BUT you’re not losing weight or seeing body composition changes. Do you think it’s time to STOP dieting and instead focus on your metabolism?
You know you probably need to eat more calories in order to increase your metabolism, but you’re afraid you’re going to gain weight. I get it. I’ve been there. And most of our clients think the same thing before they work with us.
Enter the Reverse Diet.
Reverse dieting is a strategy use to raise someone’s calories up over a period of time to help optimize and up regulate their metabolism and hormones (thyroid + sex hormones) that play a big role in health and fat loss. While increasing calories, we work to decrease stress on the body (ie: excess cardio, poor sleep, nutrient deficiencies, etc). If you’ve been living off of LOW CALORIES, your body adapts and down regulates hormones. Using reverse dieting helps your body return to homeostasis.
Who is Reverse Dieting for?
- People who have been chronically dieting or under-eating for > 6 months (this can be intentional or unintentional).
- You’ve been yo-yo dieting and progress stalled/plateaued.
- You’re seeing signs of hormonal imbalance and biofeedback is negative (poor sleep, energy, brain fog, decreased performance, irregular cycles, PMS, low libido, etc).
- You dieted for > 6 months or are in a cut and progress/biofeedback is poor.
- You successfully completed a diet/cut phase and you’re now ready to add calories back in while maintaining progress.
Here are our top recommendations that we use with our clients when Reverse Dieting:
✔️Be sure to download Abby’s Guidebook- How to Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, Improve Body Composition.
✔️Determine how much you’re actually eating. Do this via tracking food on a free App like Cronometer or MyFitness Pal for at least 1-2 weeks (this is Point A).
✔️Determine what your maintenance calories are. Refer to the Guidebook to determine your maintenance needs (this is Point Z).
✔️Gradually increase from Point A to Point Z by ~100-200 calories every 1-2 weeks and pay attention to biofeedback (energy, sleep, performance, hunger/cravings/fullness).
✔️Slow, gradual increases in calories helps to prevent unwanted weight/fat gain.
✔️Track your weight.
✔️ You need to truly TEST (and push) your maintenance calories vs just going off a calculator. For example: My maintenance calories are estimated ~2200 calories BUT my actual maintenance is 2600 calories. The goal is to eat the most amount of fuel while maintaining your body weight.
✔️ You have reached maintenance when the scale starts to trend up OR you no longer can eat more food without being uncomfortably full. This was me… I actually increased my calories by over 1000 calories/day to 2600 calories and lost 2 pounds (see pics below) but couldn’t really force myself to eat more food.
✔️Progress pics, clothing, etc. can also be good indicators of progress.
MOST clients that work with us need a Reverse Diet to restore their metabolism before we even touch a Fat Loss Phase because of the chronic dieting they’ve done in the past and the adaptations their body made. But by focusing on the restoration phase we improve energy and biofeedback, and sets them up for success long-term. It also puts you in a better position going into a diet because you’ll be able to diet off of more calories.
