Getting stage lean requires being in a sustained calorie deficit, which is achieved by gradually dropping calories and increasing exercise. This can be hard on your body, often adversely affecting hormone levels and your metabolism. To reboot your metabolism and return your body to a healthier state, you’ll need to eat more food. But rather than just cranking your calories up all at once and jumping back to your pre-contest prep diet, you’ll need to increase calories in a slow and controlled manner called "reverse dieting.”
By increasing calories slowly over weeks and months rather than all at once, the body has time to adapt to the increased food intake. With each slight increase in calories, metabolism is triggered to burn through fuel faster. In this way, your metabolism can catch up to the surplus calories each week and burn through most of them, rather than allowing all of them to be stored as fat. By reverse dieting, the rapid weight rebound often seen after competition can be prevented!
Now that you have a better idea of what a reverse diet is, you might be wondering how quickly you should increase your calories. To choose the best setting with Avatar Nutrition, here is a brief guide:
Select "initial calorie boost" when setting your reverse diet goal
During the last few weeks of show prep, calorie intake is usually pretty low. For this reason, we recommend that you select the initial calorie boost option when choosing the reverse diet goal. This will give you an initial calorie boost right out of the gate, allowing you to take charge of your physical and mental health more quickly.
Decide how concerned you are about potential fat gain
If you’re in a hurry to receive higher macro targets, you’ll want to a faster reverse option—especially during the first month or so after finishing your contest prep. On the other hand, if you prioritize both minimizing weight gain and quickly increasing your food intake, you’ll want to choose either the slow or moderate reverse setting. If minimizing weight gain is your primary concern, you’ll want to choose the “conservative” reverse setting and stay there during your entire reverse. Also, keep in mind that you can change settings at any time if you find that your targets are increasing too slowly or too quickly for your taste!