Who should choose the reverse diet goal?
A reverse diet is useful for people who want to improve their metabolism and train their body to eat more food without gaining a lot of weight. This includes those who are just coming off a diet and those who are struggling to lose weight or manage their weight on low calories.
To learn more about whether you should reverse diet, click HERE.
How does reverse dieting work?
During the reverse dieting process, calories will be increased by around 30-75 per week, with the exact number depending on your body’s response and the setting you choose. This gradual weekly increase in calories trains your metabolism to speed up and burn through more food. Because you’re adding calories slowly, weight gain will be minimized.
To learn more about how reverse dieting works, click HERE.
What setting should I choose?
With the more aggressive reverse diet settings, calories will increase faster and the risk of gaining fat will be greater. If you’re concerned about gaining weight, choose the conservative reverse diet setting. This will increase calories very slowly, giving your metabolism more time to adapt and speed up to burn off the extra food you’re eating! Keep in mind that you can switch your setting at any time to add calories more quickly or slowly.
If you need help choosing which reverse diet setting to use, click HERE.
Will I gain weight on my reverse diet?
Although most people will gain a little weight on their reverse, the system is designed to limit the weight you can gain each week. If you exceed that limit, the system will hold your macros steady for the upcoming week to give your metabolism more time to adapt and prevent further weight gain.
But not all people gain weight on their reverse—many maintain their weight and others may even lose a little bit of weight. Whether a person gains weight or not (and how much) may depend on several factors, including:
How closely a person is able to stick to their recommended macros during the reverse
What setting is used throughout the reverse (how quickly calories are increased)
What goal a person was on prior to reversing
How responsive metabolism is to the reverse (for example, some see a greater increase in NEAT expenditure than others when eating more food)
How high calories are brought up
How quickly a person stops reversing when they start to gain weight at the end of a reverse
For more on this, click HERE.
When should I stop reverse dieting?
In deciding when to end your reverse diet, you’ll need to listen to your body. You’ll either get to a point where your satisfied with the amount of food you’re eating, or you’ll start to consistently gain weight each week. 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 have questions on if you should end your reverse diet, reach out to our Coaching Team for help.
If you need more help deciding when to end your reverse, click HERE.
What goal should I choose next?
Once you finish your reverse diet, it’s usually a good idea to switch to maintenance for a while before switching to a fat loss goal. This gives your body time to adapt to the higher calories you’re now eating and a better chance to build muscle efficiently if you’re pairing your maintenance phase with a weight training program. Staying on higher calories for a while longer can also give you a mental break from dieting and a renewed sense of motivation when you do decide to cut calories and diet again.
While there is no one-size-fits-all rule for how long a person should stay on maintenance after a reverse diet, there are many cases where a person may want to stay on maintenance for at least several months before switching to a fat loss goal. For example:
If you were coming off a fairly aggressive diet (very low calories) prior to reversing
If you were dieting for 6 months or more prior to reversing
If you’ve spent a large chunk of your life focusing on dieting and the scale
If you were battling a relentless urge to binge prior to reversing, leaving you emotionally and mentally drained
If you were competing in back-to-back fitness shows within a year or two of reversing
In all of the above situations, a person could benefit from keeping calories high for several months (and even up to a year or more) after reversing. This is particularly true in cases where a person has spent the majority of their life dieting or trying to diet. After being in a deficit for a long time, you’ll probably need to spend a longer time in a surplus to change your physiology and mental approach to food.
But in other situations, for example where a person has a fairly healthy metabolism and has spent 4 or more months carefully reversing, it’s probably okay to stay on the maintenance goal for only a few weeks before choosing the next goal.
When you switch your goal to maintenance, just make sure to move the weight-range slider to the widest range possible. This will allow your calories to stay high even if you gain a little bit of extra weight as your body continues to adapt.
***Note: Keep in mind that the main purpose of a reverse is to help you increase calories while limiting weight gain, NOT to allow you to lose weight in the future on higher calories. This may happen for some people who spend several years eating more before attempting fat loss again, but it’s important to understand that for most, calories will still need to be dropped substantially to lose weight.