If, like me, you have cut your calories to lose weight before or plan on losing weight in future, this is for you. It seems strange that we constantly find ourselves talking about how to lose fat but rarely ever how to STAY that way! You might spend 3, 6 or even 12 months losing weight, achieve the physique you were aiming for, but then fall victim to the infamous "yo-yo" phase. This is where you put some (or all) of that weight back on in the weeks following the end of your diet &, as with almost everything in fitness, it's no coincidence. It's science, with a bit of flexibility due to our different lifestyles & preferences. But there is a way to avoid this, donned by some in the industry as 'reverse dieting', so let's get into it...
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Unfortunately, reverse dieting isn't just reversing your diet by stuffing in as many calories as you can (ahhh wouldn't that be nice)! It's a manipulation of our body’s energy-using processes, known as our metabolism.
We use energy for everything we do, mainly in the form of exercise movement, non- exercise movement (see last week's post for more on this), heat & digestion. We group this total energy expenditure (TEE) together as our metabolism, which has slight variations due to our size, age, hormones, activity levels etc.
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Now the thing with fat loss is that it goes against our ancient, inbuilt desire to conserve energy for when a lion comes for us, or your boyfriend forces you to go on a run... No but seriously, our body desperately wants to save energy for when we need it most. The problem is, our lives are so lovely & comfortable now that we never use that extra energy, it just gets stored as fat whilst we sit enjoying another pint of Timmy Taylors. So, when we cut the calories & lose a bit of weight, our body adjusts every internal process to consume less energy (this is why your energy levels drop with fewer calories). The result? Our TEE tries to drop to match the lower number of calories we're consuming. This is called metabolic adaptation.
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This becomes a problem when we return to a higher daily calorie intake. It's now super easy to be in a calorie surplus, as our body is burning less calories each day than before we dieted. You can counter this with exercise but it's an uphill battle!
So, here's the solution:
Reverse dieting is simply upping your calories back to your maintenance level (consuming the same number of calories as you burn) in small increments. For example, if your diet had you consuming around 1800 calories each day, you might increase the number to 1900 for week 1, 2000 for week 2 & so on until you reach your new* maintenance. This allows your body to adapt its energy consumption to what you’re consuming without that shock of going straight to a higher calorie intake & storing it all as fat.
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There is a LOT of science, research & nuance around this due to our varying lifestyles & natural bodily processes from person to person. Some peoples metabolisms adapt much quicker than others in both directions. If you like all that stuff, there’s a video below which goes into it further with some helpful on-screen representations of the process. It also goes through some methods to help you through a reverse diet. If not, just reach out whenever you need to for some help with nutrition or fat loss.
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In the meantime, you can find more articles below to broaden your fitness, nutrition & wellbeing knowledge! I’ll be back next week with slightly more philosophical post than usual… See you there!
*Important to note, this will probably be slightly lower than before as the new, lighter you has less mass so will burn fewer calories.
Elliot Hutchinson // 13.10.2024
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