Jonathan Steedman (00:01.216)

Okay, food groupies today we're going to talk about something I kind of forgot was still a thing because I thought we'd sort of put it to bed, but I'm getting lots of questions about it. I think every week for at least the last four weeks in the Q and A, I've been getting questions about it often more. So there must be someone out there talking about it still. Reverse dieting. I don't think I've said what I'm talking about today yet. Reverse dieting. We're talking about this idea of reverse dieting. And so there's a few things we need to understand before.

we can dive into it. And of course I'll explain what reverse dieting is as well if you're unfamiliar with the term and explain why maybe it's not the best option for you. And then a few specific scenarios where I have used it. Not personally, but like with clients. Cool. So firstly, before we dive in, we need to understand something called metabolic adaptation, which you might've heard me refer to or talk about before, but it's a critical part of this discussion. So I'm to touch on it first. Essentially,

when you lower your food intake or you lower your calorie intake with the goal of reducing your body weight, like that's, and that's the right thing. That's the only way to do it. I guess technically you could increase your calorie expenditure, i.e. you could move more, but eating less is often more effective for a whole host of reasons. Anyway, let's say you've eaten a little bit less and there's now a deficit between what you're burning and what you're eating.

you're eating less than you're burning, so you start losing weight. But the body does some clever adapting to try and lower its expenditure down to the level that you have lowered your food to. So what was once a deficit is no longer a deficit. The way I always kind of explain this is imagine you took like a 10 % pay cut. That would suck. You could probably make it work. Hopefully, I hope for your sake you could. You you tighten expenditure, you don't

buy takeaway coffees, no more fun, all of these sorts of things. So you make changes to your spending habits so you're no longer losing money. And that's kind what your body does. It changes the amount of energy that it sends to certain systems in your body and reduces its expenditure. And so it can't do this forever, by the way. You don't just keep lowering your food and then you get to like 800 calories and the body's like, nope, too bad. I can adapt to that.

Jonathan Steedman (02:26.965)

So there is a threshold below which your body can't adapt to. I'm also not for a second suggesting that you should be eating ever, eating 800, like ever. Just, that was just a kind of proof of point. So then you basically, if you are at the end of a dieting phase, you have lost some body weight. At the end of that phase, your metabolic, your metabolism will have adapted. It will be lower because it basically, your food intake is one of the main things.

that affects your metabolism. And so that's normal, that's natural, that's totally fine. Enter reverse dieting. The idea here is because your metabolism is lower at the end of a weight loss phase, if you increase your food suddenly, you like you jump back up in food, your body is just going to gain fat. So you have to reverse diet, you have to slowly come out of your deficit and you know,

I've seen like people adding like 30 calories a week or 50 calories a week to slowly build their calorie intake back up to what it once was. And the idea is if you do this slowly and steadily as part of a reverse diet, you'd limit the amount of body fat that you regain, right? So it actually makes kind of makes sense on paper. It sounds right. It sounds legitimate. And I'm, I can't remember. It's been a long time, but I'm fairly confident when I started at least studying, I probably was like, yeah, that sounds right. Cool. However,

You don't need to do it. There's a couple of different reasons why, but essentially slowly incrementally building back to your maintenance or jumping back to your maintenance, straight back to your maintenance, we see the exact same thing. Nothing changes, right? So in both of those scenarios, don't regain body fat in scenario A or scenario B. The same outcome occurs. It's just that reverse dieting takes longer.

You've added four to six extra weeks onto the end of your diet where you are potentially already kind of like done with it all. And so you're much, much, much better off just jumping straight back to maintenance. 99 % of the time, that is what I would recommend you do. Now there's two important caveats that you need to keep in mind if you're going to do that. The first is the scale will still jump up and it will probably jump up a little bit more aggressively if you go straight to maintenance and if you reverse diet, but that is not fat.

Jonathan Steedman (04:51.24)

If you have gone straight to, if you have truly gone to maintenance, it won't be fat. And I'll talk about true maintenance in a second. But adding more food in is going to naturally cause you to be heavier, not gain body fat, but just be heavier. Your glycogen stores, so that's your muscle stores of fuel and a big store of fuel in your liver. They and those stores picture little Jerry cans all over your body. Those are not gonna be full during a diet.

they're gonna be like half full, 60 % full. And when you finally eat enough food at the end of your weight loss phase, they're gonna get topped up, they're gonna get full. So all of a sudden these 50 to 60 % full jerry cans are 100%. Now, that's a much heavier jerry can, not fat, but weight. so if you, again, if you're eating more food, you generally have literally more grams of food sitting in your gut, digesting at any given time, which is also going to increase your weight on the scale, not your body fat.

So I think what happens is people go straight back to maintenance and they see the scalp spike up and they're like, see, I knew I was gonna regain body fat. I should have reversed dieted. And if they do it slowly, the slow shift up in the slow replenishment of glycogen and the slow increase of food matter in their gut, they don't really notice it as much. So it seems less aggressive. So it seems like they're quote unquote better way of doing things. But like I said, you end up in the same place. One of them reversed dieting just takes way longer.

right and why would you take longer in that process than you need to. The second mistake I see is people don't jump back to their true new maintenance. So it's really important at the end of a dieting phase to recalculate your maintenance calories or well I mean if you're working with someone who knows what they're doing they'll do that for you anyway because it's probably going to be a little bit lower because an

I said up the top that one of the main contributors to your metabolic rate or one of the main influencing factors rather to your metabolic rate is the amount of food that you're eating. Another influencing factor is how heavy you are, right? If you've lost five kilos, 10 kilos, whatever, if you've lost, let's say five kilos, you're now carrying five kilos around, five kilos less around with you all day, every day. That's gonna significantly impact your energy expenditure, you know, how much you need to burn.

Jonathan Steedman (07:12.186)

Go to the next time you go to the gym pick up a five kilo dumbbell next time you go to the shops pick up a five kilo bag of rice you are literally not carrying that around with you all day of course you're gonna burn a I Was gonna say a fair fewer. That's not right. You're gonna burn a little bit fewer. my goodness It's like five o'clock on a Friday. I should be done anyway You're gonna burn less calories. It's it should be fewer anyway so all of that is to say oftentimes what I find as well as people not

understanding that the spike in their weight is due to the glycogen and food stuff I spoke about before. Oftentimes, they've also just gone back to what was their maintenance at the beginning of their diet, which is now probably no longer maintenance, it's now probably a surplus, a slight surplus, but still a surplus. So to sum this all up, you don't need to reverse diet, going straight back to maintenance calories, or slowly but surely incrementally building your way there.

either way you end in the same place. Reverse dieting just takes way longer and keeps you in a bit of a mild deficit for longer. more fatigue, more of the negative consequences of dieting, right? So I wouldn't recommend it. Make sure that you're okay with you understand what the scale is gonna do at the other end and that's totally fine. Or make also make sure that you are truly going back to true maintenance and you'll be okay. Now,

I would never really do one of those really slow reverse diets for anyone, but sometimes I do step their food up if someone is psychologically struggling with reintroducing food at the end of the diet. Particularly if often that's if someone's done it somewhere else and they've come to see me because they're like, need to eat more and I'm too scared to do it. I wouldn't just be like, it's sweet. Just jump straight back to maintenance. You'll be fine. Even though physiologically that would be the right move, psychologically that would wreck them.

So I would still step their food up. It wouldn't be at like 50 calories a week. Essentially, I would just work with them to figure out what is the most amount of food I can comfortably get you to increase. And we'll just slowly build that up as you are comfortable. That's how I would do like a psychological based reverse diet. So again, still not doing it for the reasons of true reverse dieting, but I can absolutely see the value in that if someone is struggling with that.

Jonathan Steedman (09:35.145)

The last thing I would say as well is I know I said like recalculate your maintenance. Oftentimes what I do is I'll recalculate someone's maintenance and then I will actually just lower it by 10 % just to provide a little bit of a buffer in case my calculations, well not that they're wrong, they're never wrong, I'm never wrong, but just understand that it is a calculation. So it's working on averages that may not be accurate for that person. And so you have...

that little bit of buffer, little bit of leeway. And then after a couple of weeks, if you're finding that they haven't gained any weight or maybe the scaler's crept down a little bit more, then we increase food. So you can do a bit of a conservative big jump, not all the way back to their maintenance. And then a few little incremental jumps up to just really find the upper kind of the ceiling on their maintenance. That would be how I would bring a client out of a deficit. And so now you can do that too. All right, cool. Don't reverse diet unless you...

No, don't reverse diet unless you're working with a practitioner who has recommended it. And if they have, make sure they're not doing a really slow creep up. And if they are, ask them, hey, why am I reverse dieting? And if they're like, so you don't gain unwanted body fat, maybe send them this podcast. All right, thanks. I'll chat to you next time.