What is a Reverse Diet and Should I Try it?

It’s a common problem: after successfully dieting down to your target weight, what do you do next to make sure the weight stays off?

After sacrificing, maintaining discipline, relentlessly slogging through cardio sessions for weeks and months on end, you’ve hit the goal number on the scale. Maybe the goal is associated with an event (a show, a friendly competition, a wedding, etc.).

What do you do next?

Obviously continuing to operate in a calorie deficit is not an option, but you also don’t want to immediately binge and consume everything in sight until you return to your previous weight?

Somewhere in the middle is the answer. For those who relish counting calories and meticulous tracking things, a “reverse diet” has a lot of appeal. It can give you a sense of control as you transition back into eating at maintenance or slightly above.

Reverse Dieting, In Theory

Reverse dieting is when you start gradually adding calories to your daily intake, increasing the daily number every week by 25-50 calories, and then getting up to a calorie level that feels better and more manageable without gaining all the weight back. The idea is that you can “build” your metabolism back up and doing it slowly helps your body adjust to the calories without adding weight to your frame.

In theory, if you are accurate in calories in and don’t cheat, you would build your daily calories back to a more normalized level in the span of a few months. That’s kind of where the concept breaks down, because after months of dieting, it is very hard to continue to be so disciplined on the way back up.

Reverse Dieting, in Practice

I have reverse dieted successfully in the past. In 2019, around a year ago, I had dieted down from around 180 pounds down to 172 pounds, but I was eating just 1,800 calories by the end of it. After researching it a bit online, including watching videos on the subject, I put together a plan for a reverse diet.

Below is an example of how that would work in practice. This is what I used last year. You could map out 1800 calories per day, with an extra 50 on Saturday. Then you add 50 calories the next week so you are eating 1,850 per day.

I also increased the Saturday bonus amount by a little more each week (+50 calories from the other days of the week, then +75 calories, +100 calories, etc.).

I wasn’t able to adhere perfectly to this plan, but it did help provide me with a general direction for how many calories I wanted to consume in a given week. Eventually, I did get up to around 2,300-2,400 calories a day without seeing a jump on the scale.

Layne Norton Swears by Reverse Dieting…

• If you want to learn more about reverse dieting, Layne Norton is the biggest advocate of reverse dieting that I’ve seen. He has details on how to set it up in his book and in various videos he’s posted, like this one at YouTube.

But Greg Doucette has a Different Take

• Greg Doucette posted a video on the subject in November, containing several reasons why the concept is silly and doomed to fail. So if reverse dieting isn’t the solution, what is?
• For Greg, it seems the answer is a form of intuitive eating that relies on you being able to judge how many calories you need to have the right amount of energy for what you want to do. 

That’s the approach I plan to use this time, combined with daily tracking of weight and body fat to calibrate that number and make sure I’m not going overboard. 

After years of tracking macros and calories, I think I might be able to pull it off, with the goal being to get the energy to train hard, but not add too much back onto the scale over time.

The Verdict on Reverse Dieting?

So, is reverse dieting totally stupid? Or is trying to eat intuitively after being hungry for months an even dumber idea?

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Having a reasonable target calorie number that’s maybe a little more loosely tracked post-cut is a good way to try to keep yourself in check and avoid ballooning up.  In that loose sense, I think reverse dieting can work for the right people.

But I agree that it requires an incredible amount of discipline combined with no changes whatsoever in your calorie expenditure levels.  Not to mention the fact that all of these things are rough estimates even in the best conditions, given discrepancies in food labels and the challenges of tracking your calorie expenditures reliably.

Like everything else in fitness, experimenting with what works best for you, gaining an understanding of how your body responds will allow you to have a feel for these things over time. It may require discipline and planning early on, but a few years into your journey, you’ll gain an intuition into what works for you.