The point at which you should end your reverse will depend on why you chose to reverse diet in the first place.


Reason # 1: Bring calories up to a more comfortable level.

 

If you were:


  • Fighting an overwhelming urge to binge

  • Sick of being hungry all of the time

  • Struggling to maintain your body weight on miserably low calories

  • Just finishing a diet and wanted to maintain weight loss while eating more food

 

Your main goal of reverse dieting was not necessarily to push your metabolism to its absolute upper limit, but rather to increase calories to the point where you were binge-free and satisfied. 

 

In this case, the next step is easy. Simply stop reversing as soon as you are happy with your food intake.

 

Reason # 2: Get your metabolism running as fast as possible.


If you were:


  • Wanting to lose weight but needed more calories to work with

  • At a weight loss plateau and needed to restore metabolism and give yourself a mental break from dieting before trying again

  • Needing calories as high as possible to fuel athletic performance and put on muscle

  • Wanting to eat as much as possible without gaining much weight


In each of these situations, optimizing your metabolism is critical to your success. To do this, you’ll need to continue reverse dieting until weight gain becomes linear.


As you reverse diet with Avatar Nutrition, you’ll very likely get to a point where you start to gain some weight. At first weight gain might fluctuate—you gain a little weight one week, none the next, lose some one week, and gain even more weight the following week. 

 

This is no real cause for concern, as it can take some time for your metabolism to adjust to the increased calories and start burning through fuel faster. Inconsistent weight gain followed by weight plateaus can be a sign that your body is continuing to adjust to higher calories.


But when you’ve been reverse dieting for a few months and start to gain a substantial amount of weight for several weeks in a row, this can mean that your metabolism is becoming less responsive to the surplus calories. For a while, the extra food each week will stimulate your metabolism to burn through fuel at a faster rate—especially if feeling more energized means you’re moving around more! But at some point, you’ll reach an upper limit where metabolism is no longer increasing to burn off some of those extra calories you’re giving it. Instead, it will store the extra calories mainly as fat each week, and this will reflect on the scale as consistent weight gain.


You should stop reverse dieting as soon as you hit this point! Attempting to push beyond this is usually counterproductive and can result in a lot of weight gain, putting you in a worse position if your ultimate goal is to lose weight.


If you’re consistently gaining too much weight by system standards with your macros frozen for 3 or 4 cycles in a row and weight gain has become linear, you should consider ending your reverse diet.


The app will give you a coaching message at your check-in and tell you if it’s time to end the reverse diet based on how your weight is increasing.


*If you’re wondering how high your ending calories should be, refer to the following guideline. Keep in mind that the exact number will vary based on lean body mass and activity level:


For someone of average activity level (think 1 hour of intense activity a day and relatively sedentary job), an approximate reverse diet endpoint might be when you approach 20 calories per pound of lean body mass. 

            *For a 150 lb woman with 25% body fat that is 2,250 calories. 

            *For a 200 lb man with 15% body fat that is 3,400 calories. 


For more information, please check out our article: This is When You Should End Your Reverse Diet.