There are rare instances where a person doesn’t gain a whole lot of weight during the reverse diet itself, but starts gaining weight all at once after switching to the maintenance goal. The most plausible explanation for why this might be happening is that during the last several weeks of the reverse, there may have been a lag in your metabolism’s response to the extra food—meaning that it didn’t fully adapt to the higher calories.
Put simply, even if you ended your reverse at say, 2500 calories, your body may only really be burning 2,200. The 300 calories you’re not burning will be stored as fat and will finally start showing up on the scale as extra weight. While you wait for your metabolism to speed up and close the gap between 2,200 and 2,500 calories, you’ll continue to put on a little bit of weight each week.
In this case, there are two things you can do:
Make sure you select the widest weight range possible on the maintenance goal to allow for some additional weight gain and fluctuation. You’ve put in a lot of time and effort getting your calories up to where they are now, so you don’t want to the system to drop them down unless you’re gaining substantial weight each week with no sign of stopping.
If you still exceed the widest weight range or gain more than a pound or two for several weeks in a row on maintenance, you should reach out to the Avatar Coaching Team for help. Your metabolic rate may have reached its maximum capacity several weeks prior to ending your reverse, and the Coaching Team can manually reduce your calories to the appropriate level to minimize additional weight gain while still ensuring that you made significant progress on your reverse.
**Note: If you’ve exceeded your weight gain limit on maintenance and the system has already been cutting your calories, please reach out to the Coaching Team so that they can assess your case and manually set your post-reverse calories to the appropriate level.