(#307): How to Reverse Diet

Whether you’ve recently hit your goal weight (WOOO!!!) or you just want to figure out how to maintain your weight loss, you’re likely going to need to start adding some calories back into your diet. 

Enter: reverse dieting. The upside down, backwards, and complete opposite of all things diet....mostly.

This episode was so fun because we ebb and flow between real world examples and scientific studies to understand metabolism, energy balance, metabolic adaptation, and adaptation thermogenesis - and how ALL of them affect the body and brain.

If you're wondering how to get BMR calculated, I included information below!
Calculate Basal Metabolic Rate

• Men: BMR = 88.362 + (13.397 x weight in kg) + (4.799 x height in cm) – (5.677 x age in years) 
• Women: BMR = 447.593 + (9.247 x weight in kg) + (3.098 x height in cm) – (4.330 x age in years)

And to calculate TDEE (total daily energy expenditure): 

• Men: BMR = 88.362 + (13.397 x weight in kg) + (4.799 x height in cm) – (5.677 x age in years)
• Women: BMR = 447.593 + (9.247 x weight in kg) + (3.098 x height in cm) – (4.330 x age in years) 

Visit www.liveunbreakable.com for more information on nutrition, reverse dieting, and all things gut health!

Transcript

01:32 Coach Shaun: One of the most common questions I get asked on Instagram or by clients or anyone who sees me is: can they heal from dieting.  There’s a bunch of different ways you can take that from a mental, physical, metabolic, all sorts of different standpoints.  That’s kind of always my answer, but I think it all really boils down to this one idea of what's called reverse dieting.  I want to talk about that today because these questions about healing from dieting and what you do to come out of the diet effectively and all this other stuff really boils down to reverse dieting and how to incorporate that into your lifestyle in a way that is maintainable for the period of time it takes to come back.  But also at what point you stop reverse dieting so that you can enter that maintenance phase, all equally important steps in this entire situation.

02:25 Coach Shaun: Let’s talk reverse dieting, what does it actually mean? What is it, what are reasons to do it or not to do it, how do we do it effectively, when do we stop, all this kind of stuff.  We’re going to cover all of that in the podcast today, but this is just going to be a really big overview.  So I said this in my last podcast, too, that Crash Course was created by LiveUnbreakable as a way to create free education around topics in health and fitness, to make them approachable and digestible in a way that can reach hundreds, thousands, millions of people, as many as possible to start to deflate some of these myths in health and fitness, and so if you know someone that could benefit from listening to this podcast, please please please send it their way, also review us on any of the podcasting platforms that really helps us reach more people as well.  Reverse dieting, it is pretty much what it sounds like, but to dive in deeper, it is a diet turned upside down, instead of cutting calories and ramping up your time spent in the gym or doing cardio, you're actually increasing your metabolism, by gradually adding calories back into your diet while simultaneously reducing cardio.  So reverse dieting is very strategic and it is a very slow increase in the amount of daily food intake on top of a strategically identified weekly caloric intake in an effort to raise your metabolism back from where it settled as you were dieting.  A lot of people assume that metabolic detriment and issues with your metabolism are just kind of there for the long haul, and that's not true, reverse dieting is very helpful in getting your metabolism back to a maintenance phase and kind of getting you into this really cool position where you can start to “eat normally”, and you can enjoy or splurge a little bit, but you can also restrict a little bit depending on what your goals are, and it is very, very, very individualized.

04:23 Coach Shaun: So we're going to talk about all of the science behind metabolism and how it works and how reverse dieting works and how to do it effectively, but it will vary person to person, depending on how long you've been dieting, how restrictive the diets were, what the purpose was for the diet, all these kinds of things. So just keep that in the back of your mind as we go through. So reverse dieting really is at the beginning tied to body building culture, and it was created, to help body builders come out of this body building physique in a very functional way. So, if you've never been in a body building competition, you start with wherever you're at, and you start to slowly but to really restrict your diet and increase your weight lifting and cardio to get to a certain physique or look, and you can tell body builders because they have really broad shoulders that are well-defined, they have abs and all these kinds of things, and they look very aesthetically pleasing.  Especially in America, we kind of fawn over all of these amazing bodies and seeing what those bodies are capable of, and I think that's awesome, but there is no way to maintain that body year-round without causing serious health problems.

So when they're coming out of that competitive phase, they are in a reverse diet for a period of time, so then they can start to pack muscle back onto their bodies.  I will never say something is impossible, but it's very difficult to add muscle to your body when you are in a low-calorie diet or in a caloric deficit.  It’s not impossible, it’s just really, really hard. So in the weeks leading up to the competition, body builders aren't necessarily building more muscle as much as losing body fat, so they look more trimmed and toned.  Afterwards when they need to build more muscle, that's when they start doing the reverse dieting, so they start eating a lot more, but it's not all at once. If you go from a very restrictive diet to eating “normally” or even above normal, your system is going to have a really, really hard time with that because your metabolism hasn't caught up, your system is not used to that many calories, it’s not used to cleansing, all of these other kinds of things and can cause a bunch of health issues as well.  That’s why reverse dieting from a post-competition standpoint, became so important, this strategic incremental increase in portions and then also simultaneously increasing cardio and putting a focus back on to strength training.

That trend allows the metabolism to adjust upward over time, but eventually in reverse dieting, you hit a caloric intake where you feel energized, you're performing really well, you're gaining some muscle, and you're still minimizing fat, and that's ideal for all athletes or people who are trying to look aesthetically pleasing, to get their body functioning optimally, all this kind of stuff.  You get to maintenance calories, but you spend a lot of time building back up to that, so even in reverse dieting, you are going to gain some fat back, and that's good, because body builders usually compete at drastically low levels of body fat, which can really screw with your hormones, your metabolism, all sorts of other bodily functions.  That’s why it's important for reverse dieting in that culture and reverse dieting in the general population. So weight loss is notoriously difficult to maintain, if you've ever tried to lose weight, you know that there becomes almost this plateau that you get to where you're stuck trying and get a little bit more weight off, and most people who have been in a weight loss cycle who have been dieting for a long period of time end up regaining what they lost, or most of the time, even more.

08:20 Coach Shaun: They did all these scientific studies on people that were on the Biggest Loser, for instance, they lost all that weight real quick and that's amazing.  But 95% of the competitors gained back all that weight or more after the show, because they just couldn't maintain that weight loss at that caloric deficit that they were at. So it's important to note that when you reduce calories and your body shrinks, your metabolism will slow down.  That’s a function of your system to stay alive essentially, which in turn, we have decided means to cut more calories to keep that fat loss going, and sometimes even when people reach their goal, the amount of calories they can eat to maintain that weight doesn't translate to all that much food.  It feels very small, it feels very hard to stick to, and that's when the calorie start to creep in, you start to add just a little bit more, maybe a lot more. And that's when the scale starts to rise because your body is super confused, who wouldn't be.  And once the scale rises, you start dieting again, restricting your calories, and so begins the yo-yo cycle instead of following an intentional and strategic plan to lose weight and keep weight off, this yo-yo diet of up and down, really restrictive, not restrictive, really restrictive, not restrictive kind of comes in.

09:56 Coach Shaun: I think to really understand what's going on, we're going to have to cover the concept of energy balance, and I'm sure you guys know from listening to my podcast or seeing my Instagram, the only way to lose weight is to expend more calories than you are intaking.  That's the only way, and there's a bunch of ways to do that, but the equation has to be that you are intaking fewer colors than you are expending when you eat more energy or more calories you gain weight.  When you eat less energy or fewer calories then you burn or lose weight, that's just how it goes. That's the energy balance. So this is also known as calories in calories out, and even though it's simple, there are so many things that go into that balance: there's appetite, there is the amount of food that you're consuming, there's calories that you're absorbing, there's psychological factors like, are you stressed out, how is your self-esteem, how’s your sleep quality, how are your friendships and relationships in your life, that kind of thing.  There’s also these factors that influence the amount of energy that you're burning, so the size of your body, your hormones, how much exercise you're doing, what type of exercise you're doing, what type of non-activities you're doing that are still burning calories, so that's also known as non-exercise thermogenesis where you are burning calories by doing things like if you have leisure activities or you have a walking desk at work, those kind of things.

Then there's also energy burns by metabolizing food, so you really have to balance those: what food you're consuming, your appetite, your calories that you're absorbing, and the psychological factors with the energy out, like burning calories at rest, through exercise, and all of these other things.  That energy balance gets quite complicated quite quickly. It sounds easy: calories out, but you never really think about all of the factors that go into both, and so reverse dieting works through one of the factors that impact energy balance, and that is the metabolic adaptation, which is also known as one form of your starvation response.  Most people on social media are going to tell you your starvation response is when you're not eating enough food, and so your body just keeps all of the food in it, and so it's an instinct that your body just takes over and starts preparing for famine.  That’s actually true, so the science behind it is that your basal metabolic rate will decline, that's just the amount of energy that you need to live at rest, your body is going to shut down everything that it doesn’t absolutely, essentially need, and that will reduce your energy out.  It did what it's supposed to do.

12:41 Coach Shaun: Exercise becomes more difficult too, because you don't have any energy available at all because you have no food coming in to give you that energy to create energy.  Your body doesn't want to create a down energy because it shut down all of those other things because your basal metabolic rate needs to slow down so you don't burn calories.  You’re also going to spend less energy through exercise, so it's going to seem harder and you're going to burn fewer calories at the same time.  As your body gets smaller, it doesn't require as much fuel to move, and so your metabolism adapts to make sure that you are more efficient, this reduces the number of calories that you've burned through movement resulting in less energy out.  Daily activity outside of workouts: walking to your car, if you have a walking desk at work, if you pace while you're on a phone, or something like that, it's going to result in reduced energy from non-exercise activities. And also, your digestion is going to slow down because your body is trying to absorb every single piece of food and nutrient that you put into it, because it's a starvation mode, so it's going to get everything it can out of anything that you're going to give it, and that increases the energy in and is the only thing it can do.

So because of that adaptive response, someone who has died in down may need 5% to 15%, fewer calories per day to maintain the same weight and physical activity level as someone who has always been that weight.  If you've dropped weight, you’re going to have different caloric needs at, let's say, 150 pounds than someone who has always been 150 pounds.  That’s why calories are so personalized and individualized for every single person, it really depends on your history and how you've treated your body.  If someone has lost an extreme amount of weight, the percent drop in calories and needs to become more extreme as well because of this adaptation.  This metabolic adaptation that has created us as we know it and how we have survived for so long.  Our bodies are trying to keep us alive, and it does what it can to keep that going, it doesn't want to die, your body wants to live on, that’s what it was designed for.  When you drastically restrict your calories or lose weight, the body senses that gap essentially, and the departure from its body fat set point, and it's a desperate attempt to raise the energy gap, it puts the breaks on fat loss, which is that starvation response, which is one of the metabolic adaptations, and so your body works together to orchestrate a reduction in your metabolism.  All of this leads to your metabolic restriction, and so your organs are consuming less energy; your heartbeat is slower; and your sympathetic nervous system activity declines, hormones that influence metabolism and appetite like your thyroid testosterone, leptin, relain, all of those are adversely affected; you’re burning less energy when you're doing all of the things that I was named before, so walking around doing chores on that kind of stuff; you're using fewer calories to absorb and digest food; you're going to take longer to do so; and then your muscles are going to be less efficient as well.  All of that boils down to burning fewer calories at rest and during workouts.  

Luckily, the good news here is that the metabolic adaptation that I just described is not a one-way street.  It actually works both ways, so you can slow down your metabolism like we just demonstrated, but you can also speed it up.  That is the concept that reverse dieting was really built on.  A lot of the physical physiological changes that work to slow metabolism during calorie restrictions occur in the opposite direction when over-eating to make your metabolism faster.  In the same way that your body is creating this slower metabolism, you can actually speed it back up by doing the opposite.  Because you were dieting strategically and limiting your calories, you have to also increase your calories in a strategic fashion. Now, this phenomenon is known as adaptive thermogenesis, so what we were just discussing is metabolic adaptation from restricting calories and being in starvation, and now we're moving into adaptive thermogenesis, which means that your body wastes calories as heat. Now, when done properly, reverse dieting provides a lot of metabolic effects, that's one of them, your BMR is going to rise. We said before it was going to go down and now it's going back up.

17:29 Coach Shaun: That results in more energy coming out, your workout capacity is going to increase again, because now you have more energy, increasing your energy out, if you have more energy to expand, you're more likely to expand it.  Your non-exercise activity thermogenesis is going to go up because you have more energy to expend, your digestion and your metabolism are going to return to “normal”. Now, this is the process, it's going to take much longer because your body has to learn that this is no longer a phase of restriction that you are in, so your GI tract is not going to squeeze every single nutrient out of every single little piece of food that you give it, which is going to decrease your energy in essentially so everything that was going in the wrong direction, you can swing back into the right direction.  These effects are only available for adaptive thermogenesis when you do this strategically and slowly, because the body responds differently to varying rates of what's called over-feeding or over-eating.

I think it was one study said eating 20% above maintenance calories did not significantly increase fat gain, but if you increase your caloric intake to 40-60% above maintenance, it really did increase your fat gain.  It really does matter how many calories you are intaking versus expanding.  That sounds like a very easy equation, but when you take into how many calories you're actually expanding throughout your day, doing all of these activities, you also need to take into account how many calories you are intaking and throughout your entire day.  Literally everything that goes into your body is a calorie that you can count and you need to be very specific about that.  Let’s say you are on a maintenance diet of 2000 calories, you can eat up to 400 extra calories a day without seeing a big impact on the scale, but if you add in 500-700 calories and you're reaching that 3000 calorie per day mark, it's going to weigh you down.  You’re going to notice that on the scale, and then you're going to kick into that yo-yo dieting cycle again.  I gained weight, I have to lose weight. And then you go up and down again.

There’s also data suggesting that people need time to recover from dieting, and that is fair. So by that, I mean you need to increase and then stop the increase, increase a little bit and then stop the increase, it was more of like a stair step method or you could slow it down into a curve almost, but your body needs that time to recover. And there are studies out there that support both sides.  You can follow one methodology that says you can reverse diet for the exact same amount of time that you were dieting, so if you were dieting for six months, you need to reverse diet for six months.  Now that's fine for the shorter periods of time. If you've been dieting and yo-yoing for decades, for most of your life, it's not going to take that long for you to reach a maintenance calorie structure from reverse dieting, but it's still going to take you a long time.  That’s just because your body is trying to adapt to this new method. So you have one school of thought that says, if you've been dieting for a certain period of time, you have to reverse diet for that amount of time.  The other school says, if you've been dieting for a really long time, you just need to learn what your maintenance calories are, and then slowly create this curve very strategically to get there over the course of two to three years. Totally fine. We know its not going to be a fast process, you didn't get here overnight. Everything with our body is going to take a little bit of time and really settling into that and understanding that is key to achieving reverse dieting properly. 

21:38 Coach Shaun:  Now, the other thing I want to say about this is that reverse dieting is obviously not magical. It might seem like, oh, this is finally what I've been looking for, I get more calories and I can finally do whatever it is that I need to do with my body.  Sometimes reverse dieting is to increase your weight, that’s awesome. Sometimes reverse dieting is going to help you lose weight. Now, both are true and it depends on what you've been doing with your body, so if you're looking to gain weight again from doing a restrictive diet for a short period of time, like body building or something like that, you lost a lot of body fat, now you're looking to put more muscle and body fat back on, that's awesome. And you need to do reverse dieting strategically, incrementally for the amount of time that you were dieting before and put that weight back on, so you can start to build. Now is say you've been a calorie restriction and you have adapted metabolically in a negative way.  You keep restricting your calories lower and lower and lower, and you're just kind of maintaining this weight or maybe even gaining weight, even though you're cutting calories.  When you start reverse dieting, and you slowly step by step increase your calories, you might notice that weight starting to shed because you're coming out of starvation mode.  You would notice that that metabolic adaptation has now reversed, through that adaptive thermogenesis and your body is starting to see those calories coming in again.  Both are true and both situations happen all the time, not at the same time.  It depends on what your goals are and what you're looking to achieve with your diet and reverse dieting, whether or not you're going to do this for a set period of time, or we're going to figure it out as you go and work with your coach to see what amount of time is proper at each of these caloric steps to increase.

Now, I want to talk about some of the caveats to reverse dieting. So the first one is that there are no guarantees. I know this is super frustrating because what you want me to say is that if you do A, B, C, D, then X, Y, Z happens.  Humans are not like that, they're notoriously not like that, which can be really frustrating because if you want to build muscle in your biceps, pretty easy, work your biceps and surrounding muscles, you're probably going to get there.  If you're trying to lose or gain weight, it's not as easy as just calories in-calories out because it depends on the quality of the calories that you are expanding and that you are taking in.  I think this is important because this kind of shows the guarantee lack in this thought process, in this one study conducted at the Mayo Clinic, researchers brought in 16 “normal” weight people. So they were in their metabolic maintenance phases, and they brought them into a lab for 8 weeks and they served them an extra 1000 calories per day, so basically two double cheeseburgers a day on top of whatever it is that you usually eat.

And the participants were not instructed to exercise. If you do the calorie math, essentially, everyone should have gained 16 pounds in those 8 weeks based on calories and calories out.  No, they gained anywhere from <1 pound to 9 pounds over the course of those 8 weeks, because the biggest predictor of adaptation metabolically; or gaining or losing weight, whatever you want to call it; is increased non-exercise activity thermogenesis.  Some people bumped up a lot, so they were doing their same activities day after day, but because they had more calories in their body, now they were able to expend more calories, so walking around, they burned more calories then they usually would, sleeping they burned more calories than they usually would.  Others had more modest increases and they ended up gaining more weight.  That 100% just depends on who you are as a person and your genetic makeup.  The degree of adjustment or whether any adjustment happens at all varies from person to person, so drastically, there's no guarantee, which is why if you're comparing your weight loss or your weight gain to the person to your left or right, even if they're the same “size” as you and you're doing the same “exercises”, it doesn't matter.

25:46 Coach Shaun: Because the way that your body is expending or in taking energy vary so drastically from this person to that person.  So stop comparing yourself to other people in the gym and social media, because it's not real. There are so many things that go into it, and it's really hard for us as humans to understand that in our experience, because if someone else did it, why can't we do it? And there's no reason why we can't. It's just going to look different. Our yellow brick road is not going to be 3 bricks wide by 76 bricks long, it's going to be very different depending person to person.  In that same caveat, age affects our ability to adapt, and this pains me to say as much as the next person, because I know this first-hand, because now I'm older, and I've definitely noticed in my nutritional needs, I have drastically different needs now than I did when I was younger.  Less to be completely honest with you, and if you've talked to people who are post-menopausal versus not, versus men who are older versus men who are younger, everyone has different ideas.  Not just because of different people, but because age really does affect it, unless your training strength consistently, you lose 5-10 pounds of metabolically active muscle per decade starting when you're 25.

That's terrifying, right?  You're only 25, and already, if you are not using those muscles in strength, you're going to lose 5-10 pounds, a metabolically active muscle per decade, yikes. And that continues in a relatively linear fashion until the end of time, so the same reverse dieting protocol that work for you at 20 years old as a body builder or an athlete or whatever it is, is not going to work for you at the age of 25, 30, 45, 60, anything. It's not the same because your body has changed, your metabolism has adapted so many times, you've lived more life, and that's just how aging works. If you think about anything, food that ages, it tastes different. Oak aged, barrel aged, whatever it is.  We love that, that's great. But there's also the downside of that too. And it sucks. There's no other way about that is just rough.

28:15 Coach Shaun: I think the next caveat is that reverse dieting assumes you're reasonably sure of your calorie intake.  I’ve said before this entire podcast, that's not necessarily the case.  If you have never tracked your calories in-calories out, but you've been relatively sure that you've found a maintenance calorie plan that works for you, that is awesome and more power to you. I always use the Macro calculation as kind of this check book.  You need to know the balance of your checkbook and, oh my gosh, I just realized this is such an outdated way of saying that, oh no. Alright, it's like a see-saw, everyone knows see-saws. I'll just use that, if you have more and one that than the other, it's going to stay on one side, and so maintenance is when both sides, in and out are balanced, if you don't know what's on the other side, it's really hard for you to balance that see-saw.  You just keep adding and adding or taking away and taking away until you find a balance.  If you always have to start with a very balanced seesaw in the morning and then you're adding on both sides, but you can't see each side that's really frustrating for you to try to balance.  You can imagine walking away from that see-saw a million times before being able to find the right balance and being able to recreate that day after day is going to take a long time. That's how I feel about calories and macro counting, because you have to be incredibly precise with reverse dieting for it to work properly and in your favor.

29:51 Coach Shaun: Now, of course, there's no way to be a 100% sure of your caloric intake or expenditure outside of a lab: blood work, VO2 max, all this other stuff that you can calculate.  The goal here is to just have a good enough gauge of how much you are eating and how much you are exercising and expending per day, and if you're off by 50-100 calories, that's totally fine, because that's a tablespoon of peanut butter or something.  But if you're missing your Starbucks drink in the morning or an apple throughout your day, that's going to make a much bigger difference because not only of the macros it's made of, but the number of calories that you're intaking and expanding throughout the day is going to be much different.  For reverse dieting to work at all, you need to understand and also consistently know the amount of food that you are intaking and expending, your level of activity and your goals, and also acknowledge that at some point, reverse dieting may not be the best goal for you, and even though you have been dieting and have this kind of metabolic adaptation, for you to have thermo-genetic adaptation, you might have to go through a different process.

31:07 Coach Shaun: So the last caveat is the same as the first, it's basically there's no guarantee that this is going to work for you. It's just a lot of different ways to say that, and honestly, going into this with clients, nutrition can be very frustrating, but it's also really fun, and it is very scientific, and it's one of those things that you can work really hard at and not see any benefit or you can enjoy the process, learn about yourself and your body and then really start to enjoy the process.  I really hope that this doesn't discourage you from reverse dieting or trying it or even doing your own research on it for your coach or with your coach or whatever it is, because it can really help you.  I want 80-90% of the time, reverse dieting done properly is very effective for whatever goal it is that you're trying to reach, if you are in that caloric deficit before. But there's also a chance, 10-20% that it's not going to work for you, and that's okay. Because your body is different, and maybe if it doesn't work right now, it might work next year, or it might work next time you do your body building competition, but it does depend on your history with dieting and how either severe your caloric restriction was or maybe intense your re-feeding was last time, all of these different factors, so don't get discouraged by me saying it's not ideal for everyone, because it's ideal for most people, especially when you do it properly, if you don't do it properly, nothing's going to work for you.

If you don't gas-up the car properly, it's probably not going to run, that’s how it goes.  And if you treat your body that way, then you're going to see the benefits from it.  There are a couple ideal situations for reverse dieting that I can explain now, and if you fall into one of them, that's awesome. And hopefully, this gives you a ray of sunlight.  Of course, caveats, not withstanding here is the first: I'm eating 1200 calories a day, I'm not losing weight and getting really frustrated.  So when I see my clients and they tell me they're only eating 1200 calories a day, I ask for receipts, I need to see what they're eating, I need to see photos of it, I need them in a macro counter, I need something.  Usually when someone says they're on such a low calorie diet, they aren't actually that low, it just means that they're not estimating their caloric intake effectively. A highly restrictive diet that keeps calories low for a few days can increase the chance of accidentally overeating on other days, so let's say your positive Monday through Friday, you're only eating 1200 calories because you have such a structured, 9-5 life.

33:58 Coach Shaun: That's great. But then what are you doing Friday night, Saturday and Sunday? And how is that impacting your Monday morning? The occasional highs here, average out the steadier lows for sure.  That doesn't necessarily mean from metabolic adaptation standpoint, you're starting at the same as if you're eating 1200 calories per day every day or if you had one splurge day or one splurge meal or whatever it is. So by the end of the week after you factor in all of your snacks and coffees and alcohol and everything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, are you really at 1200 calories or are you not, and are you eating mostly high quality foods or are you not.  What’s going into your system? And if you're not eating high quality foods and you're not actually eating 1200 calories a day, it's going to be harder for us to increase your caloric intake, but at the end of the day, if you're really restrictive for more than one day out of the week, slowly increasing your caloric intake can actually help restore that metabolic output.  If you're at a really restrictive caloric diet for more than one day a week, reverse dieting can be very helpful for you.

So if you're truly eating very low calories throughout the week and you're getting the nutrition that you need, but barely, reverse dieting could help to restore your metabolism and simultaneously restore or jump start some fat loss for you.  The more likely outcome here is that if you start reverse dieting, you’re going to take a break from dieting, which is great already, you are going to gain a little bit of weight, if not a lot of weight, depending on what you're doing for strength training and cardio, etc, etc.  You’re also going to be evening out from a psychological and metabolic standpoint. So if you do reverse dieting for a period of time, you are not “dieting and restricting” anymore, which is great, so that's going to be good for you overall, and when you do return to dieting, if you do, for whatever purpose, you're probably going to see a better gain from it.  Now you have come back to that maintenance. However, once you reach maintenance, unless you are competing in body building, I highly, highly, highly recommend not going back to the your dieting lifestyle.  Reverse dieting isn't something that you can always come back to. If you do this every six months, eight months, whatever it is, it's not going to always be there for you, it's not always going to work, and that's not because you use it all the time.  It’s because your body and your metabolism are adapting so it's not always going to work if you do this, this is not a form of yo-yo dieting. I thought that this is meant for.

The second way that we can describe ideal reverse dieting is to say that you want to eat more without getting any weight.  We kind of already cover this a little bit because gradually increasing your calorie intake can actually help to turn up your metabolic heat if you slash calories get the scale to go down for a short period of time.  If you are not dieting and you're someone who just wants to be able to enjoy social situations, but you need more nutrients for your health and performance, you wouldn't mind welcoming in some more calorically dense foods, things like coconuts, avocados, oils, and nuts and those kinds of things. 

37:24 Coach Shaun: For those people reverse dieting probably won't work as effectively as it would for someone whose metabolism has slowed due to longer term dieting.  Because there are limits to how much metabolism can heat up and cool down, so if you're already pretty metabolically healthy, there's less room for you to shift, so if you've been dieting for a long time and you're ready to maintain your current level of body fat reverse dieting can help increase maintenance calories.  If you have been dieting for a long time, if you haven't been it's not for you. This is seriously only if you have been in a caloric restriction for a small or medium or a long amount of time, you have to have been in a caloric deficit for revers dieting to work because otherwise you're not reverse dieting; you’re just maintaining or gaining weight. 

The last one, this one is a little bit iffy, but saying you want to get ripped by using reverse dieting.  This comes from the myth that reverse dieting is here to help you improve your body composition; so lose fat, gain muscle, remain the same weight, aka keeping that energy balance shifted in one direction.  Here you're going to say more cardio will help increase your energy out, giving you more flexibility with your energy in, and increased exercise will also change your nutrient partitioning or the amount of macro nutrients you need from each category, and sending more calories for muscle growth and fewer to your fat cells.  So provided you have the ability to exercise more than you are now, increasing your calories while keeping activity high can be a solid strategy for muscle growth.  So if you're trying to get “ripped”, reverse dieting  can work for a little period of time, if you're going to go back to restrictive dieting, so if you're looking to gain muscle, change your body composition a little bit, reverse dieting could actually work for you very well.

Alright, we've covered a lot so far, and we only have a little bit left, and that is how to actually do reverse dieting in a proper fashion, and I'm going to give you all five steps, so first I want to take a little break and say, Thank you so much for listening to crash course podcast. It is brought to you ad-free by LiveUnbreakable, the brand, here to bring you free education on things, health and fitness related.  The only way we continue to do these podcasts is if we get reviews and shares to do them. There are no ads, we do not pay for this. Any of my guests or all of the research that I'm doing here for this podcast is just to help educate in a free fashion that is easily digestible to the majority of humans out there who are interested in these topics. So if you could leave us a review or share our podcast, it would do a lot of good.

So getting back into reverse dieting, how do we do it? How do we make this happen? How do I do this? How do I walk away from this podcast with some actionable items? So the first one is, if you've ever seen a nutritionist or a dietician or you've been my client, you know the first step to doing anything with your nutrition is a track exactly what you were doing right now for 2-4 weeks. Don't change anything about what you're doing. Don't change your exercise, don't change your nutrition. Just start tracking it, because what you need to know is your baseline, how much are you expending, how much are you actually intaking. Be very, very clear about this. The other part of this journal that I want you to really track is how you're feeling after you exercise and eat.  If you always have a 2pm slump because you exercise at 11am, you eat at 12pm, and at 2pm, you're really tired, I would want to know that going into this, so I could tell you more strategically, the number of calories that you should be eating after working out, instead of whatever it is that you are. So being very detailed in your journal for 2-4 weeks is awesome.  Now I say 2 weeks, because for some of us, there is a history of eating disorders and doing things like this have a tendency to bring up some of those habits, that's not what I want here at all, I just want a snapshot of what you are doing, so if this seems like, “Oh, I don't know that I want to do that.”

41:34 Coach Shaun: Take it slow, one day at a time. Do one day here, one day there. Give me a snapshot of what you're doing.  If you've never had disordered eating, that's awesome. And I am seriously, very happy for you because it's hard to do that in America, or really worldwide, but definitely in America. I want you to track for 4 weeks and be very specific about it, you can weigh your foods, you can track it in MyFitnessPal or a bunch of other ones that are out there; that’s not add for MyFitnessPal, I'm not paid by them, but they have a really great platform, you can scan bar codes and stuff like that. So just be honest with yourself about how many portions are serving yourself.  From there, after you've done your macro and your calorie counting, you're going to determine what your maintenance calories are. Now, there's a couple of steps for doing this, and I'm going to explain both of them in detail.  You’re probably going to want to calculate or maybe an Excel spreadsheet for this, so you need to know your weight in pounds and in kilograms, your height in inches and centimeters, and then your age, so that you can determine your basal metabolic rate.

Once, do you have your basal metabolic rate, that's literally the number of calories that you need just to exist, just to survive.  You are the size that you are right now, and you need however many calories to breathe, to make your heart beat, to move around, to think, to blink your eyes, all of these things.  When you created your basal metabolic rate, and there's a lot of pieces in this, it varies between men and women, so I can put this in the show notes for you guys so that you can see it because BMR is a  lot of numbers, and I don't want to bore you with that right now, so we're not going to do that. Once you have your basal metabolic rate, you're going to calculate the amount of days that you are active, and then your total daily energy expenditure is going to be a multiplication of that, so let's say you're active for 0, 1-3 days, 4-5 days, 6-7 days, 7 days a week, or 2+ times per day, you're also going to calculate your total daily energy expenditure kind of the same way.  Your total daily energy expenditure is a multiplier of your basal metabolic rate, because your total daily energy expenditure should include your exercise for the day, so if you are going on walks in the morning, if you play volleyball, if you are going to the gym, all of those count as expenditures above your basal metabolic rate.  So things that you purposely add into your day to burn calories, you want to include in your total daily energy expenditure.

Once you have your basal metabolic rate and your total daily energy expenditure, you can then start to calculate your next step in this whole reverse dieting process, which is your macro nutrient balance. Now, there's a couple of ways to do this, and there is no right answer. Again, everyone is very different, so I always start with protein because protein is the most satisfying or satiating macro nutrient, which means it keeps you fullest for the longest and the most bang for your buck essentially. So for women, technically, it's 1.3-3g of protein per kg of body weight, which is basically 0.6-1.35g per lb of body weight. For men is 1.4 to 3.3g per kg of body weight, or 0.65-1.5g per lb of weight.  Another way to do this is to assume 1g/lb, so 1g protein per lb of your desired body weight. So if you're looking to hit 155 on the scale, assume that you're going to need 155g/day of protein to get there.  That’s usually what I use because it's close enough, you can definitely get closer using a 1.3 or 1.4, but you want to do whatever is going to be best for you.

45:33 Coach Shaun: And if 155g seems really high, if you're aiming for 155 and 155g seems impossible, well I promise you, it's not, I have a bunch of recipes for you, so just DM me.  But then put it down a little bit, do 0.5g of protein, per lb of body weight and start to work up from there. Reverse dieting is a curve is going to take us a minute to get where we're going, but because we're trying to calculate our maintenance calories right now, we have our total daily energy expenditure and that's awesome, we're going to calculate our macro nutrient balance in a way that makes sense to maintain. So, if you are tracking and you know exactly what it is, you're very happy with your weight, there's no need to reverse diet, and this whole conversation has been moot.  If you know what you're eating now and you're like, I really wish I could gain a little bit of weight, or I really wish I could lose a little bit of weight. Understanding an optimal macro-nutrient balance is going to be really important for you.  The carbohydrates and fats, which are your other two macro nutrients, the balance between these two is less important, but I would say have a higher amount of carbohydrates than fats, I would say roughly, maybe 1.5-2 on a ratio of 2:1 for carbs:fat to have more carbs, it doesn't really matter because again, this is very specific to you.  If you're a very low fat diet, don't put a lot of fats into your diet that's totally fine.  If you are much more into the carbs, it's okay to have more carbs in your diet, that's totally fine, just organize your macro-nutrient balance around that, so decide your carb:fat ratio based on how you like to eat and what you can imagine yourself doing long-term, don't say, “Oh, I really want to be on a low fat diet.”  Do whatever you're doing right now, just extrapolate on that a little bit, because the result is you can skip weighing and measuring your food and logging it, but reverse dieting is based on understanding what you're doing right now and being able to create that longer term curve. So if you don't know where you are right now, you can't create a curve because you don't know your starting point.  Like being on a race track and you're like, I don't really know where the starting line is, so I can't finish because I don't know where to start.

And the next piece, and this is going to be much more intensive, is to choose your rate of progression.  This depends on a lot of things, not the least of which is your motivation; when your goal is supposed to hit, if you're doing this for an event or something like that; and how much time you're willing to dedicate to it.  Be honest with yourself, the steeper the curve, the harder it's going to be to stick to; the slower the curve, the easier it's going to be to stick to.  So if you're desire to eat more is pretty low, but your fat gain tolerance is also low, you're only going to want to increase maybe 10%-ish from your maintenance calories, so increase your daily calories by 40-60 ish, and then your average weekly weight gain should remain somewhere under a half a pound.  Whereas your desire to eat more is very high because you're recovering from very low body fat levels, your fat gain tolerance is also very high, you're starting intake is going to be your current maintenance plus 20-30%, so it's going to be, let's say, 140-180 calories and your weekly weight gain should remain under 1.5 pounds per week.  You never want to gain more than 1.5 pounds per week.

Whereas if you're just looking for like peak physical performance, your desire to eat more and your fat gain tolerance is pretty moderate, you can do current maintenance and then plus 10-20% somewhere in there, which can vary drastically depending on your goals, so I don't know, 80-120 calories and you want to basically gain 1 pound or less per week when you're on this plan.  And again, you're not going to fall specifically into any one of these when you start, you’re just going to take a stab at it and see how you feel. If you're super sluggish, you have brain fog, you're not feeling energized, maybe you're really, really tired, those are all signs that you are probably either eating too many or too few calories. Now, chances are, if you're reverse dieting, you're eating too many calories too fast, so dial it back a little bit. If you don't feel any difference after two weeks, I would say you're probably doing it too slowly and you need to increase your caloric intake quite a bit, so that you are in that reverse dieting cycle.  It really just depends on what you're trying to increase maintenance calories before you diet again, you’re looking for physical performance ,or you're trying to recover from low body fat percentage after dieting for a long time.

50:17 Coach Shaun: This all hinges on the fact that you are monitoring your progress in some fashion: now that could be photos, that can be with a journal, whatever it is. And it has to be consistent.  So week-to-week is fine, month-to-month is fine, as long as you have something where you can look back and see where you've come from, because it's so easy to fall into a routine or a habit and say, "Okay, well, this isn't working, I don't feel any different.”  But in all actuality, you are very different, but because you see yourself every day and you are yourself every day, it's really hard for you to see the day-to-day or the month-to-month changes because you're so close to the process.  So you're going to want to monitor your progress and adjust it over time as necessary, so that could be weighing yourself, that could be measurements, photos, I love progress photos, but I never share them because I don't think that is an adequate way of sharing all of the process behind it. You're going to gauge your workout performance or how much you're lifting, maybe your endurance or your intensity for cardio stuff that, and then also, like I said, tracking your feelings and your hormones and your energy levels, those are all super important.

Now, it's also important to know if you think that you have any intolerance around food or allergies, that you are documenting your digestive responses or any symptoms that you seem to be having. So you're going to the bathroom more or less, constipation, bloating, brain fog, acne, those kinds of things are all linked to gut health, and in reverse dieting is really important that you focus on gut health because increasing calories often requires that you increase the number of foods that you're eating and the kinds of foods that you're eating.  So if in your restrictive dieting before when you were trying to lose weight forever and ever, and you were yo-yo dating, maybe you never ate breads or maybe you didn’t eat cruciferous vegetables, those kinds of things are higher in fiber, and so that can wreak havoc on your system, if you haven't had them in a long time.  Your body is really used to what you've been putting in it, so without any form of probiotic in your system, there might not be bacteria that can digest that very well, so you're going to have to re-introduce that a slow fashion so that your system gets used to eating those foods again.  Realistically, as you start this reverse dieting curve, you're also going to have to watch your digestive system, see if there's any bloating, if there's any bathroom issues, stuff like that, and be able to determine what foods it is that you've reintroduced and say maybe it is time for a pre/probiotic, maybe we take this out of the diet, we put something else back into it.  If you stayed away from things for months or years and you're starting to introduce it and you wonder why you don't feel good, that's probably why.

53:00 Coach Shaun:  It doesn't mean that you're allergic to it or that you have an intolerance, it could mean you have intolerance, but it more than likely means that you just don't have the bacteria to digest it properly, and so it's just going through your system and causing you pain of some variety because your body doesn't recognize what to do with it or to get the nutrients from it, or digest it properly. So keep that in mind as well. So, if you're thinking about when to stop, some of ways that you would recognize it’s time to stop or reverse diet is that you've gained as much fat in your system as you feel comfortable gaining. Now, this is going to vary person a person: the number of times you've done this, maybe how comfortable you are in your body, if you have dysmorphia, all other things, so keep a very strategic mind this entire process.  This is going to be really hard to see your body change and just know and monitor your numbers and make sure that you're a healthy level of body fat when you stop.  If you don't feel interested in eating more or continuing the cycle, chances are, you've maybe found your maintenance calories.

Maybe you're just tired of this process and you're ready to take a break from tracking, or you've been in a reverse diet for drastically longer than you were in a caloric deficit.  If you're a body builder and you start reverse dieting, you're doing it for eight months, but you only dieted for four. Maybe it's time to start thinking about reaching a maintenance calorie. But if you want to continue some of the signs that you want to continue or that you haven't gained much fat yet, or you don't mind the amount that you've gained, so 1-2% maybe, if you still feel interested in eating more and feel like you're not satiated at the end of every day or the end of every meal, or you've been reversed dieting for last time when you were in a cleric deficit.

Because reverse dieting does require so many details, but it's also such an extremely scientific process that requires experimentation to get it right, you might find that your final caloric increase leads to more fat than you're comfortable with, and that's okay, because you're going to go back to your maintenance calories and that's pretty easy, now that you've started to eat more.  By creating these tracking metrics of understanding your total daily energy expenditure and your basal metabolic rate, and understanding how your system works, whether you're in adaptive thermogenesis or a metabolic adaptation, you can adjust your calories down or up or whatever they need to be to find that sweet spot. It does take a little bit of time, for sure. And it can be very frustrating, but if you've been tracking this whole time, it's going to be a lot easier for you to narrow it down.  There’s a lot in this podcast, but honestly, reverse dieting is just one of those tools that you can use in your nutrition tool box to create the body composition that you're looking for.  At the end of the day, that's really all we're looking to do is understand more about our system, understand the science behind it and be able to utilize that knowledge to create the body and the life that we anticipate and that we want.

Coach Shaun: Thank you so much for tuning in today. It was such a pleasure having you on the Crash Course podcast, brought to you by the LiveUnbreakable brand. If you enjoyed today's podcast, please some love on iTunes as a review so that I can keep this good stuff coming at you. Or share this podcast with your friends to give them a crash course on something that you're passionate about.  If you're not following me on social media yet, I would be honored to have your follow so search for LiveUnbreakable on any major social media platform and enjoy the extra motivation and knowledge shared over there, and of course, reach out to me at LiveUnbreakable.com with any questions. Until next time, y’all.