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What do most people mean by a diet? Well, a diet usually means eating fewer calories, so we can lose weight or maintain our target weight. But what happens after the diet?
Many people go back to eating normally the way they did before, once a diet is over. But that's exactly when the yo-yo effect kicks in, which I already covered in a blog post last week. In short: if we go back to eating the way we used to after a diet, we regain weight very quickly, and sometimes even end up above our starting weight.
In that blog post, I also shared plenty of tips on how to avoid the yo-yo effect. Today I want to talk about another method, the reverse diet. Here you'll learn everything worth knowing about the reverse diet, how to apply it, and what advantages this method brings.
Before we get started, let me briefly introduce myself: my name is Marco Laterza, I'm a personal trainer from Zurich. I support my clients in the areas of sport, nutrition and mindset. A holistic approach to health and fitness matters to me, and it's a concept I want to pass on to everyone. If you're interested in working together, feel free to contact me anytime.
What is the reverse diet?
Let's start directly with the basic concept of the reverse diet, also known as the "diet after the diet." The idea behind it is that after a diet, you slowly increase your daily calorie intake while still keeping your weight. You achieve this by stimulating your metabolism.
Let's take the typical starting situation where the reverse diet makes sense: you've just gone through an intense diet and finally reached your dream weight. You know that after the diet, you can't keep eating the way you did before it, since you want to avoid the yo-yo effect. After all, your body has been in a savings mode during the diet. If you now eat a lot of calories again, more of them get stored as fat, since another "starvation phase" could occur again, as far as your body is concerned.
Still, you want to slowly start eating more again. So what now? Well, this is exactly where reverse dieting comes in. Here you slowly and deliberately increase your calorie intake every day. This is meant to help your body wake back up out of savings mode and get your metabolism going.
The advantages of the reverse diet
This form of "diet" has a few advantages. For one, the gradual increase also raises your body's thermogenesis. This way, food is used more as energy, rather than the body storing it as fat.
You'll also feel less hungry as you're able to eat more food. This reduces the release of leptin, which slows down your metabolism and promotes fat storage.
The most important tips for reverse dieting
In theory, the concept sounds pretty good, so why not give it a try? In the following paragraphs, I'll give you a few tips to help you with the reverse diet.
1. Increase calories slowly
The principle of the reverse diet really only works if you actually increase your calorie intake in small steps. There's no strict guideline for this diet, but you should increase your daily calorie intake by about 50-100 calories per week.
Let's take an example: say you've just finished a diet where you were eating 1500 calories a day. In the first week after the diet, you'd now eat around 1550 to 1600 calories. In the second week, that would be 1600-1700, and so on. You keep doing this until you reach your actual basal metabolic rate for your body weight.
Only through this slow increase in calories can the principle of the reverse diet really take hold, which is why this point is so important. This, by the way, is also a good example of why crash diets never really work well. With an extreme diet of 500 calories a day, hardly anyone would have the staying power to apply the reverse diet afterwards.
2. Count calories
To actually stick to your calories, you need to keep counting them even after the diet. This is of course quite exhausting, especially when you've already been through an entire diet. But it's part of the process if you want your target weight not just for a few weeks, but ideally for several years.
So remember to keep counting your calories every day. At the end of the day, what counts is your calorie intake versus your calorie expenditure. That's why it's also important to calculate how many calories you burn through exercise.
3. Keep eating healthy
It's important that you keep eating healthy during the diet too. Here you should mainly rely on foods with a low glycemic index. These cause a slower rise in insulin levels, so you store less fat.
In general, you should pay attention to a good distribution of macronutrients. Plenty of protein, high-quality carbohydrates, and more unsaturated fatty acids. You shouldn't forget about micronutrients either. You mainly get vitamins and minerals from fruit, vegetables, etc.
The principles of healthy eating shouldn't only apply during a diet. If you stick to them during the reverse diet too, the chances are higher that you'll keep these habits for good.
My conclusion on the reverse diet
I think the basic concept of the reverse diet is very good. Many people think you can simply maintain your target weight after a diet, but unfortunately that's not the case. The yo-yo effect should definitely be avoided so you can actually keep your weight.
The reverse diet is a very promising method for achieving this. I can't promise it works for everyone, after all, everyone has a different metabolism. So even during the reverse diet, you should always keep an eye on whether your weight has changed and adjust your calories accordingly. That way the concept definitely has real potential for success.