Philip Pape: 0:00

Reverse dieting is a slow torturous approach to coming out of a diet and recovery. Dieting straight to maintenance is simple. It's stress free, helps you recover faster, it gets you focusing on your new maintenance phase or building phase, rather than continuing to feel the effects of dieting longer than you have to. Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast. I'm your host Philip pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger. Optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition will uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry. So you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in Wits & Weights community Welcome to another solo episode of the Wits & Weights podcast. I hope you enjoyed our last episode 95 Where I interviewed my client Carol, who transformed her body composition and her mindset discovered a new love for strength training, losing 14% body fat and finding a deep seated confidence in herself and her abilities. Today for episode 96 Why reverse dieting doesn't work like you think. And what to do instead is about reverse dieting, which is a popular but controversial concept that claims to boost your metabolism, prevent weight regain, and make future weight loss easier. By gradually increasing calorie intake after a period of calorie restriction. Shocker, it actually does not do any of these things. And I will discuss why reverse dieting doesn't work as advertised the misconceptions behind it. And an alternative to reverse dieting that I use and my clients use, it's actually pretty simple. And it is more adaptive, it's less stressful, and it allows your metabolism to recover more quickly from a fat loss phase. But I will touch on a scenario where some of the approaches from reverse dieting might still be helpful, but for completely different reasons. So let's jump into today's topic, why reverse dieting doesn't work like you think and what to do instead. Alright, let's define reverse dieting. This is a very popular post diet strategy, it's been around now for probably 10 years or so maybe a little bit longer. It involves gradually increasing your calories over several weeks or even months to prevent weight regain or weight gain as you return to your calorie level. So imagine that you're on a in a fat loss phase, you're in a diet, you're in a deficit, maybe it's eight weeks long, 12 weeks, 16. Maybe longer than that maybe you're a competitor, whatever, and you want to come out of the diet. So reverse dieting says oh, here's what you need to do. Whatever you were just eating, increase it by 100 calories next week, and then do it again and again and again until your body recovers. And that way, you're not going to gain a bunch of fat right back. Right. That's the premise. And there's other claims that are made as well associated with the we're going to go into in a second. Here's the thing, there is no scientific evidence that reverse dieting is effective in increasing metabolism or preventing weight regain. And full disclosure, I spoke to Eric Trexler. On the subject. I read his article, the one about the hype versus evidence posted on the macro factor app. I and my clients and everyone I talked to that I recommend using food logging, use macro factor. And he has a financial stake in macro factor. And he addresses this in the article as well. But also, in from practical purposes, the science is clear. And the alternative that we use instead makes a lot of sense. And I use it all the time because I just find that it is super sustainable. And everyone who uses it loves it, you'll understand why and it works. It works more effectively than anything else. So the last thing about the whole Eric Trexler thing is that he effectively coined the term originally, so he kind of had an interest in seeing it be a real thing that was validated. And when it wasn't, you know, he threw up his hands and said, Hey, that's what the evidence is showing us. And that really comes down to the premise of our podcast here, which is skepticism. And I recently posted online, the idea that skepticism goes both ways that we have to not only question what everyone else is saying, we have to question our own beliefs. And that is something I will continue to do. And if whatever I talk about today, some day turns out to have a superior alternative. I will definitely you know switch to that if that's what the science shows works. But right now there's there's pretty clear, anecdotal, research based and coaching and experience based evidence that what I'm about to talk about is is kind of the way to go. And that's why I wanted to make a whole episode about it. So let's start with the claims about reverse dieting. And there, they're probably more than these, but I'm going to talk about the three big ones that come up all the time. The first one is this idea that it quote unquote, fixes your metabolism. And nothing can damage your metabolism, and therefore nothing can fix it. And what I mean by that is, when you are in a deficit, your body will adapt, your metabolism will adapt, we call this metabolic adaptation. And this is a natural response to weight loss, it occurs for several reasons. One reason is you're just losing body mass. But probably the bigger reason is the your hormones respond to the fact that you are in a deficient energy state, you don't have enough energy coming in. And so you just don't have enough resources to support every metabolic process in your body, and your body starts to triage, it starts to prioritize, and it will down regulate certain things up really up regulate others to get you back to that homeostasis. And that is why you get hungry. That is why you feel more stressed, there are many symptoms, most of which we would call negative that happen, as measured by our biofeedback during fat loss. But none of this is permanent. That's the beautiful thing about it is it's not damage, therefore it can't be fixed. And when you are ready to come out of the fat loss phase, and yes, you're hungry, and yes, you have more stress. And yes, you have more sleep and all these symptoms, and maybe hormonal dysregulation going on reverse dieting, is actually just going to slow the process of you coming out of that. And that's one reason, the claim just doesn't make any sense. Okay, your metabolism is going to recover regardless. And reverse dieting is going to make it take longer. And you're like, well, well, how do we do it faster? Well, I'll tell you that in a bit, that'll be the second part of the podcast today. The second claim is that it boosts your metabolism. So the first claim was that it helps it recover or fixes it or something like that, this claim is that it boosts it in a way that is beyond what you would get just by jumping up to your maintenance calories, or, you know, even in a if you wanted to take a break, let's say a diet break, and then you wanted to go back no fat loss phase. I've heard this many times and it's completely false. So if you're listening to this, and you believe this and you've heard it, or another coach is telling you this as a way to sell you into their program, please don't buy what they're selling. And that is, hey, if you take a break from your diet, and you do this reverse diet, it's going to increase your metabolism. So when you go back on the diet, you're eating more food to to lose the same amount of weight, nope, Bs, I'm calling BS on that, that does not happen. When you go back into your deficit, you adapt right back to where you were, the break a diet break, and I cover this in other episodes, a diet break is psychologically beneficial. And that's it, it is not physiologically beneficial, other than the things you take advantage of while you're in that break, like being able to push your lifts a little bit, or get more sleep or something like that, that then helps you recover. But it's not because of the extra calories in and of themselves. So that's one and reverse dieting may also give you this kind of false sense of security, when you think that that it's actually increasing your metabolism. And so then it causes you to over eat maybe or to binge eat once the phase is over. There's all sorts of side effects that we're not considering here that we should. So that's the second claim. The third claim is that it prevents weight regain. Okay, and this is the claim that, hey, once you're at the end of this diet, if you jump your calories too quickly, you're just going to gain a bunch of fat. This is not supported by the scientific research, which shows that the rate of calorie increase does not affect fat regain, or body composition after weight loss. Very important understand. So if you increase a signal, even if you increased way beyond your maintenance, and you jumped way into a building phase, you're still not going to gain any more fat than you would if you did it slowly over time and eventually got to that surplus. And in the process, you're prolonging the effects of the diet, you're prolonging the effects of the calorie deficit. And this actually is a negative for your body composition because it can increase the risk of muscle loss and hormonal disturbance, right? Because you're still your body still thinks it's in a deficit. This is actually in my opinion, the biggest problem with using this approach is that all the things people claim it's doing it's almost doing the opposite. You know, in a way it's not it's not damaging your metabolism. It's not artificially reducing your tablet. What I mean though is that it keeps you in a state that prevents you from full recovery for longer than you need to and what we are we trying to do when we come out of a diet we're trying to recover back to homeostasis homeostasis so we can get all the energy back we can get our hunger back down, we can get more sleep, reduce our stress, so we can go to the next phase. The next phase And our nutritional plan in our goals, whatever it is. Okay, so those are the big claims. Now in the article I referenced earlier, which is called reverse dieting hype versus evidence, and I am gonna link it in the show notes I have to give full credit to, you know, Eric Trexler. And everyone who's been behind all of this, he suggests for illusions, illusions, he calls them that make it seem that reverse dieting is working, or that it's superior to alternatives. And so I wanted to address these guys who think they're another lens to another perspective and think about this from the first illusion. Okay, so therefore, again, the first one is that the improved consistency from reversed from reverse dieting. Okay, meaning you're, you're only coming up a few 100 calories. And it's this very kind of rigid plan, stepladder approach, that the consistency from that can be mistaken for success, right. And I think this comes down to the fear people have, if they don't reverse die, the fear that they have, they jump up right away, then all of a sudden, it's going to throw everything off, they're going to gain a bunch of weight, and then it's going to cause them to want to go back in the diet or something like that. There's a lot of different reasons. But that's that's one illusion from reverse dieting that makes it seem more effective. Perhaps another illusion is that maintenance calories are, are this fixed number, right? When in fact, they are a range, right. So your maintenance calories have a lot of tolerance like we have, we have this ability for our body to maintain weight within a decent range of calories. But it's pretty fascinating too. Because if, if you've been in maintenance for a while, and it's pretty steady, and then you want to start building muscle, or going on a fat loss phase, you might find that if you just take a small, tiny nudge in that direction, your body doesn't really respond like it might actually take a lot. Now, eventually it will probably respond. But the good news about that is that when you get back to maintenance, the fear about all of a sudden gaining a bunch of weight is not really something to worry about because your body is very tolerant of those changes in calories. So when we get back to maintenance, we consider that somewhere around plus or minus three pounds, which is quite a bit for some people depends on what weight you are. And this leads to a misunderstanding of what we mean when we say reverse dieting. It's not like we're trying to find the magic number, right? We're not trying to find a magic number. I think some people have a fear on these first I'm like, I'm gonna eat my way up, and I might carefully tiptoe up there, and eventually I'm gonna find that magic number, but it's not fixed, it changes every day. Illusion number three, that the immediate calorie intake, versus the delayed weight gain from reverse dieting. makes it feel like you're going to gain a bunch of weight, right? Or it makes you feel like you're actually maybe in a surplus. Like there's this idea, there's this fear behind coming out of maintenance that my to maintain my weight, I need to eat not much more than me now. But I need to eat something higher than I am now, as opposed to a much higher than I am now. And there's a weird psychological and I see this all the time with clients where their maintenance calories might be 2300. And they've been eating in a 500 calorie deficit at 1800. And their diets over I'm like, Okay, well, let's go right back to 2300. And it's like, Well, wait, aren't I gonna gain? Like, that's 500 more calories a day? Aren't I gonna gain a pound a week with no, no, because you're actually losing a pound a week. So now you go from negative one to zero, right. And I know it sounds like simple math, but there is a pig psychological aspect to that of like, Oh, I'm going to gain a bunch of weight. So people don't want to all of a sudden eat a ton more food the next day thinking I'm going to gain a bunch of weight. Okay. And then the fourth illusion is not understanding cause and effect when it comes to weight changes. And I think this really comes down to when you come out of a diet, your body is going to start recovering. And the faster you can get back to maintenance is going to recover even faster. And as it recovers faster, that means your expenditure is going to go up and you're actually going to able to eat be able to eat more and more while still maintaining your weight. And again, this this kind of ties into the last one where people think of that big jump in calories and the associated with a big jump in weight. But when you're tracking when you're aware and when you know your expenditure. That's the beauty in this process is that now you are in full control to know what's going to happen. So we're going to talk about what that all means. If you want to know more about these illusions because I didn't really get into all the nuances. I don't want to take away from the original article. Eric goes into all of that. Check it out. Again, the link will be in the show notes. Here's the thing. Reverse dieting is not all it's cracked up to be. It's not even close and in fact it's worse I'm not, I don't like to use it at all with anybody and I would never recommend it. It doesn't repair boost your metabolism, it doesn't reduce fat gain. And it can prolong your deficit, it keeps you in metabolic adaptation. And it risks further muscle loss and hormonal dysregulation. And a lot of people might be listening to this, maybe coaches, maybe people have been preaching or talking about reverse dieting for a long time. They're like, No, no, this actually works. And I will admit, under a controlled situation where you, you do know your expenditure, but you're just taking longer to get there. And then eventually you get there. And there's some psychological reasons for doing that, which I'm actually going to touch on toward the end here. I think there's a place for that kind of approach, but not for the reasons that people claim, we do it not to fix your metabolism not to boost it not to prevent weight regain No, no, those are not valid claims.

Unknown: 15:53

That most value that I got from this was the fact that I had someone that I could talk to about anything, and that there was going to be no judgment, it was just Well, here are your goals, here's the best way that you're going to achieve it. And then let's work together to help you feel inspired and motivated to do that. And a lot of people out there trying to be coaches, and not all of them have done the work and also just be a genuine person that is positive and coming from the heart in terms of wanting to help. And Phillip really embodied all of those qualities, I would recommend him to just about anyone that's looking to achieve goals in that realm of their nutrition and building new habits.

Philip Pape: 16:38

So what do you do instead? Alright, it's actually pretty simple. And I've mentioned it a few times already. Some people call this a recovery diet, instead of a reverse diet, whatever you want to call it. Or if you don't want to give it a name, that's fine. The idea is that when you're done with your diet, just increase your calories straight to your current maintenance calories. The key word there is current, okay, and the quandary here is that you have to know that number, unless you're properly tracking your expenditure. And what I mean by that is not a wearable device, or you know, the machines that you use, or what your phone says that you're burning every day, all those are up to 80% inaccurate, you cannot use those for expenditure. Instead, you have to be using either a spreadsheet or an app like macro factor. Based on two data points, you're changing weight over time, and you're changing or not, you're changing your calorie intake over time. Otherwise, it is a guessing game. And it is very reactionary. And that's probably why people use reverse dieting, because they really don't know their true expenditure right now. And so this is why I've always talked about the why it's essential to track scale weight and food intake during a fat loss phase. And by scale it I mean every day, so that you can get a moving average over time. And by food intake, I mean, you know your calories and macros every day. That way, you can easily come out of the fat loss phase when you're done. And then if you don't want to track at that point, great, but you'll at least have a starting point for your maintenance. So for example, with my clients, we track a 20 day moving average of weight, and we track weekly averages of calories. Okay, so now we have our scale weight and food loves to give us that information. And then we can make weekly adjustments. And as you're going through your fat loss phase, guess what's probably happening, those weekly adjustments are probably going down. Now there's a lot of fluctuation throughout the phase, depending on your movement, depending on your lifting on your recovery, if you're healing from an injury, and so on. And again, this is why we want to track this because it does fluctuate doesn't just go down. But but generally on average that kind of like the stock market up, down, up, down, up, down, but it goes in one direction over time, in this case down. On the very last week of your fat loss phase, we know your expenditure is this number. So let's say you started your deficit and you were burning 2800 calories a day. And now after 12 weeks, you lost a bunch of body weight, you've experienced metabolic adaptation. And now you're burning 2300 calories. Right? So you started at 2800. And now you're at 2300. Well guess what? That is your current expenditure. And we can recover to that immediately the next day after your fat loss phase is over. So if you're, you know, Sunday, you hit your goal and you're like, Okay, I'm done. I'm happy. I feel great. You know, I have the physique I want. I'm good to go back to maintenance and look with excitement toward whatever the next phase is. Okay. So what you can do is on Monday, set your new targets at 2800. Or no, I'm sorry, 2300 2300, because that's what you're burning right now. Now, people who use reverse dieting might not know that number. And they knew that they used to burn 2800 calories. They know that they're eating less, but they're not quite sure because it's not they're not eating and maintenance, right. They're doing it in a deficit. So they're not quite sure if they're exactly in a certain deficit. Whereas if you know your expenditure, you know that deficit is and you know that you won to close that deficit back to zero, and eat at those calories. Now, macro factor, which is the app I use, they call this dynamic maintenance, which is just a fancy term for your current and maintenance on on a given day, as opposed to an estimate a calculator a guess what a lot of people use. If you know this number, you can increase your calorie target to match. And then what I usually recommend is aiming for just a little bit above that number, when you start to eat, just to make sure that your body fully recovers as quickly as possible. And you're still going to maintain your current weight. I mean, this is a no fuss strategy, this is boom, come right back to maintenance, overshoot it just a tiny bit to make sure kind of to be safe. And why I do that is because as soon as you start eating more food, guess what your body's gonna say, Oh, thank you so much. I was dieting phase was getting a little long in the tooth. And now you're feeding me you've got you know, I've I've had protein, that's great. You've never really, you've never really deemed me on protein, which is great. But now you're giving me all you know, some extra fat and a lot more carbs, right? Mostly carbs. And, and now I can start you know, reducing your hunger and I could increase, I can reduce your stress, and regulate your thyroid and all these other things better than I could before. And all of a sudden, your body starts to become even less efficient, which is what we want, and it starts to burn more calories. And you actually then need to eat more to stay at maintenance and not continue to be in a diet. That's the crazy thing. If you were reverse dieting, you would be in a deficit for a long time. And even as you started to get closer and closer to that maintenance level, once you started to get to a true maintenance where your body started to recover, you're actually going to have to keep going up and up anyway. So let's not prolong the process. Let's go right away. And we're going to eliminate, we're going to eliminate this ironically, much more rigid, stressful need to track small jumps over many weeks in an unhelpful guessing game that drags out that recovery. We also know that this approach, the approach of recovery, dieting, of jumping right to your current maintenance is psychologically beneficial. Because you not only get to eat to the level, your body truly needs, what we were just talking about what it needs to kind of release itself right release itself from that stress now to get back to homeostasis and full function, but the resulting physiological response, like the weight gain and the energy and so on, it enforces that sustainable positive relationship with food. It's actually opposite of what we might think, right? People are worried that if I jump up, all of a sudden I'm gonna gain a bunch of weight, and that's going to cause some sort of disordered eating. And we actually find the opposite. And that's because your biofeedback quickly improves your hunger improves your energy, your recovery, your sleep. And here's the thing, even if you are afraid of a bunch of weight regain, because you jumped so many calories and I I see it all the time, I have clients who were getting to the end of the fat loss phase, they're super excited. But they're also a little bit trepidatious. About the maintenance, because it's like, oh, no, am I gonna get a bunch of weight? Am I gonna just start eating a bunch of junk food that I used to love my guests are binging and so on. And of course, we find that none of that is really caused for for concern, because we've put in place really long term practices during the fat loss phase. So it actually just becomes a less stressful, easier version of that when you get back to maintenance. But a couple things I wanted to mention, okay. First, you will regain some water weight from the increase in carbs and gut content. And this would happen regardless of your approach, it's just going to happen quickly, instead of overtime. This is not fat regain. It is not it's simply fluid. Secondly, if you slightly overshoot on the weight, which I really don't see that happening, in fact, what often happens is what I said before the body recovers really quickly, it becomes inefficient with its calories, it starts to burn more calories right away. And you actually sometimes have a little dip, I actually sometimes see a dip where you got to backtrack. And like what happened here, I thought I was at maintenance, I'm actually losing more weight, or I've had clients who are like trying to get that last pound and I say you know what, let's just stop. Let's just stop stressing the body and not worry about it. Let's bring up come up to maintenance. And guess what the next week, everybody dips down to that last pound because you've now given it that relief. Very interesting how the body works for sure. And we can always play those little games. But if you slightly overshoot and actually see an increase on the scale, like by an extra couple pounds or even three pounds, it's okay, it's only going to benefit you to have that extra energy. And because we're tracking the expenditure, you can then just adjust calories and the subsequent weeks to nudge it down just to nudge it down a bit. I said earlier in the show that plus or minus three pounds is a good range for maintenance. So if you've gone up like two pounds since the end of your fat loss phase, you're really still at maintenance. And again most of that is fluid so no big deal. Really no big deal. because you just went through that successful fat loss phase, guess what you could always get where you need to go. So there is one small caveat. And that is something Carol talked about in the last episode. And this is that if your fat loss phase was fairly aggressive, so this is this is you in a very large calorie deficit, and it could be six 800 1000 calorie deficit, which is very common for me and guys, and men and women who are more advanced trainees who have higher metabolisms. You go as aggressive as you're able to with without losing muscle, because you can because you have higher calories to work with, and you want to get the diet over with quickly, right. So if you're, if you're in that situation, you may not be able to jump up that amount of calories in one day, right go from, say, 2000 to 3000 calories. In fact, I know when I've come out of fat loss phases, and sometimes I go straight into a bulk now of jumping like 1200 1500 calories, I usually don't do it in one day that that is kind of insane for a lot of people. And so you can just take a few days and get there. And it's okay. But that's not really reverse dieting. Reverse dieting is over weeks and months. And it's like you're limiting yourself, it's kind of like a diver who is making stops along the way, you know, to avoid getting the bends. Right, it's like you're making these artificial stops along the way to avoid whatever to avoid, you know, weight regain, or whatever people are scared about, that we already talked about. But if you just simply can't eat a ton more food on the next day, that's fine, there's no need to force yourself. This is a logistical and a psychological short term reason to stretch things out a bit, and a far cry from a reverse diet with the smaller jumps over several weeks. Okay, so to recap, reverse dieting is a slow torturous approach to coming out of a diet and recovery. Dieting straight to maintenance is simple, it's stress free, helps you recover faster, it gets you focusing on your new maintenance phase or building phase, rather than continuing to feel the effects of dieting longer than you have to. So let's be smart about this. I am all about efficiency, right? Not wasting time I talked about all the time, like if you want to work with me, we are not going to waste time with silly games like reversed, I am not going to do it. One final reminder that again, the tool that I 100% percent recommend a user myself, all my clients use to figure out your dynamic, dynamic maintenance. To make precise adjustments to avoid reverse dieting altogether. It's called macro factor. In my opinion, it blows away all the other apps, I am an affiliate, I always say this with pride because I was asked to be an affiliate because I have been a user since day one. And I talk about it all the time, you know, for free, because I love it. And I think it's effective, and it helps people. So use the link in my show notes and use the code Wits & Weights, and you'll get an extra week on the free trial to try it out. If you don't like it fine. But I've actually never heard someone that doesn't like it, who started to use it. So that's pretty cool. I will be diving into food logging and macro factor in particular in an upcoming episode, because they just added complete nutrient targets and tracking. And I want to talk more about how to get the most out of the app. So if you use the app, there are a lot of cool little features and tricks and shortcuts. And then now they have the nutrient tracking, which allows you to track to a specific target, and then see how every food contributes to that, which is incredible. And then you can look at graphs over time and all this fun stuff. For all of us that love the data. But it even it even identifies your targets for you by default. Like you can just say, hey, use the default targets and it'll say okay, you know, you're you're a 42 year old male, this height, this weight, whatever. This is your fiber target. This is your Selenium target. This is your saturated fat limit and so on. Pretty cool. By the way, by the way, this approach all of this we're talking about here of using science backed strategies like dynamic maintenance, like recovery, dieting, that actually work. That is exactly what I use with my one on one clients, where I help them achieve the physical results they desire. It's physical results, but I'll tell you, it leads to so much more than that. So if you want to look more to find muscular leaner, lose two to four inches in the waist, lose three to 5%, body fat, whatever your goals are, along with the confidence, the mental resilience, just like Carol talked about last week, to know how to continue building your body and fueling your performance. This isn't about restriction. This isn't about dieting, this is about being the best. You can be strong, capable, healthy, and you want to have sustainable, long term results long after you ever work with a coach. That's what it's all about. So this is a six month program, where we combine evidence based nutrition, like recovery, dieting, along with your training and lifestyle so you don't have to waste time you don't have to waste time getting the physique you want. It's perfect for people with demanding lifestyles, and I can empathize with those Folks who lift but they want to shed some body fat or break through a plateau. If you're interested, just click the link in my show notes to apply for coaching. And I'll respond back with some questions to make sure it's a good fit. And if it is, we'll get started right away. We don't waste time people I'm in, I'm as impatient as they come. I don't like spinning my wheels. So if that's you, and you don't want to be in the same place, you are now six months from now or a year or five years from now. Click the link in my show notes to apply. Okay, our next episode 97 is an interview with dai Manuel, where we talk about the importance of fun in fitness, challenging yourself to reach new heights in your life, how to recognize self sabotage, and challenge your past beliefs and how to find your optimal in your fitness journey in life. And ladies and gentlemen, I already recorded this just this week, and it was incredible. It's a an amazing episode. It's one of those where you're not sure how it's gonna go because it's not like a very specific technical nutrition topic. But wow, there are there's one insight after another I was taking notes Fast and Furious and you definitely want to tune in so make sure to follow or subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss that episode. And that will help others find the show. So I really appreciate it. Don't just download and forget about it. If you like this show, definitely follow or subscribe. I also appreciate reviews and I absolutely love the most of all emails and messages on social from all of you about anything you took away from the podcast or how I can improve it. As always, stay strong. And I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits & Weights podcast. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits & Weights if you found value in today's episode, and know someone else who's looking to level up there Wits & Weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the Follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then stay strong