Is It Time for You to Try a Reverse Diet?
If you’re looking for a sign to take a break from your diet, here it is: taking a break from your diet is not only beneficial, but imperative to your long term weight loss success.
Your body’s biology has an incredible strength and an opposing weakness: it’s genius, and it’s also kind of lazy. It knows exactly what it needs to survive and function, but it wants to have to work as little as possible to do either.
We all know that change is hard, but your body knows it best. When you gain weight, your body has to work hard to convert excess energy to muscle or to fat. When you lose weight, your body has to work hard to use stored fat or muscle for energy. But your body doesn’t like to work hard to function and survive. It prefers to “just chill” (in quotes because keeping you alive is far from “chilling” but stay with me).
Unfortunately, in a culture obsessed with toning up in a caloric surplus (eating more calories than your body requires to gain muscle), and trimming down in a caloric deficit (eating less calories than your body requires to lose fat), your body’s favorite mode is hardly talked about: maintenance.
Maintenance (or eating just enough calories to maintain your current weight) is when you finally allow your body to “just chill.” You’re not asking it to put on muscle. You’re not asking it to shed fat. You’re just asking it to help you stay healthy and get through your day to day activities.
The benefits of living at maintenance for an extended period of time include increased energy, stronger, more powerful workouts, better sleep, and less psychological and physiological stress (pssst: all of these are negatively impacted during a diet).
And if you’re dieting, a break is imperative for your metabolism to have time to recover. As we diet, our metabolisms start to slow down. The longer the diet, the slower the metabolism can get. This can be one of the reasons people reach a weight loss plateau. If you’re eating very little, your body is also slow to convert what you’re eating into energy. By fueling your body more for an extended period of time, your metabolism will be encouraged to increase and convert energy more efficiently. Then, if you choose to enter another dieting phase in the future, your body and metabolism will be reset and ready to begin the process again.
When I mention these benefits to clients, their first question is almost always, “But what about my progress? Won’t I lose it all?”
Not if it’s done strategically in a process known as reverse dieting. Emphasis on strategically. Simply eating whatever you’d like, whenever you’d like with no regard to your overall intake is a sure way to lose some of your progress. But, by strategically and gradually entering a reverse diet, your hard work will remain intact.
Here’s how a reverse diet works: If you have been eating at a caloric surplus to achieve muscle growth, you will gradually cut back on calories until you reach your body’s maintenance level, at which you will maintain the majority of the muscle you worked so hard to put on. If you have been eating at a caloric deficit to achieve fat loss, you will gradually increase in calories until you reach your body’s maintenance level, at which you will maintain the majority of the fat loss you worked so hard to shed.
I say “majority of” because there will be slight and, if done properly, almost negligible differences that you’ll experience when exiting a surplus or a deficit. But those differences are well worth the psychological and physiological benefits you’ll experience.
If you’re still with me, you might be thinking: “Have I been dieting for too long? How do I know? Is it about time to try a reverse diet? What is a deficit or surplus? What is my ‘maintenance?’” I cover all of these topics and then some in my nutrition coaching sessions. Each session is catered to you, your needs, and your goals.
If you’d like to get answers, click here to schedule your complimentary consultation, no strings attached! We’ll chat about where you’re at and where you’re hoping to go, and see if nutrition coaching is right for you!
