Reverse Dieting Is a Dead End for Metabolism Recovery | Ep 493
Reverse dieting gets sold as a slow, safe way to “fix” your metabolism after fat loss, but the evidence and the real-world experience rarely match the promise. Reverse dieting came out of coaching, not research. Add 50 calories a week, bring your metabolism back up, stay lean while you do it.
We break down why most people cannot execute it, why it often delays recovery, and how to transition out of a cut with faster metabolic and hormonal rebound while keeping your head straight about the scale.
If you're coming out of a fat loss phase (or years of dieting) and want metabolism recovery in days instead of months, hit play!
Try MacroFactor with code WITSANDWEIGHTS for an extended free trial, the food logging app that calculates your expenditure dynamically so you know your maintenance calories the week your cut ends.
You'll learn:
Where reverse dieting came from and why it sounds so reasonable
Why adherence collapses even in disciplined physique competitors
What the limited research shows on reverse dieting vs. maintenance vs. “eat normally”
What the Minnesota Starvation Experiment reveals about delayed rebound
Why staying in a deficit slows metabolic rate and hormone recovery
A practical post-cut plan
The scale math behind rapid post-diet weight gain (and why it's rarely body fat)
Timestamps:
0:00 - The reverse dieting promise
4:33 - Where reverse dieting came from
7:42 - Problem 1, can you even do this?
10:20 - The one randomized trial we have
13:15 - Finding your real maintenance calories
16:26 - What happened when compliance was guaranteed
19:55 - What your metabolic rate responds to
20:58 - What happened to the women's cycles
22:31 - Who this research applies to
25:33 - 5 steps for the week your cut ends
32:23 - Scale math after a cut
Episode Resources:
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The reverse dieting promise
Philip Pape 0:00
If you just finished a fat loss phase, or maybe you've been dieting a long time, you've probably heard that you need to reverse diet. Add 50 or 100 calories a week, creep it back up, increase your metabolism, protect it, and stay lean while you do it. Today, I'm gonna show you why almost nobody can pull that off. It's not even a real thing, including for the most disciplined dieters. And those who manage to do it in some way often end up with repercussions like just being less recovered for even longer. And finally, I'm gonna share what to do when your cut ends for the fastest recovery and the best result. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and reverse dieting is the topic de jour. It is one of those ideas that took over the fitness world, but was never really tested properly. Or I should say that the evidence has never showed that it works in the way that we think it does. It actually came out of physique coaching, not really out of the science, which, you know, a lot of things come from bro science, a lot of things come from experience and lifters over the years. But this one kind of came right out of the coaching world. And the promise is really beautiful. And this is probably why coaches love it. You finish a cut, or maybe you've been dieting many years, you've done the yo-yo thing, and you're being marketed to, hey, we've got a great program to finally help you fix your metabolism or to finally help you lose the weight the right way or whatever. But maybe you finished a cut and you're a little bit leaner, you're a little bit hungry, your training isn't as optimal. And what do you need to do? You need to recover, right? Or maybe you've been dieting for a long time, you've been in that dieting culture, and you're told, hey, the reason your metabolism is so low is because you've never reverse dieted. You've got to recover. And so what we need to do is add calories back slowly over time in a way that your body doesn't notice it as much, that your metabolism comes up slowly and gets to where it needs to be, and that you don't gain too much fat back. And so, yeah, your metabolism is gonna climb, your hormones are gonna come back, you're gonna get that recovery that you need, or what some people call metabolic restoration, or even fixing your metabolism, which is a complete misnomer, of course, because you can't break or damage it. And then you keep all your results, you keep your physique, or at the very least, you're gonna be in a better place to have a higher metabolism and lose fat from more calories. Probably sounds familiar, right? So I've had a lot of people, especially uh, especially women, especially people over 40, tell me, hey, I was told to do this, or I had a coach that walked me through this, and it didn't really work like I thought it would work. Where I took six weeks in this reverse dieting phase, maybe I added 50 calories a week. You know, the actual jump depends on the coach. And I'm still hungry, I'm still afraid of food, I'm still watching the scale, I still feel like things are very sensitive there. I still don't have the body I want, I still don't look the way I want or feel the way I want. Don't the energy the way I want. Maybe I tried another fat loss phase and I tried another diet. It didn't seem any different than last time. Felt like I was cutting, restricting, et cetera, et cetera. All right. And then it's this just fragile experience and fragile outcome that you don't feel well equipped to do fat loss the right way. And you may even feel less confident, right? And the problem is not you, as always, with these situations. The problem is the approach, the protocol, the principle. And I want to walk you through the data on that today. Hence the title of the episode that reverse dieting is a dead end for metabolism recovery. Because I want you to recover your metabolism. I want you to be optimal. I want you to get the result in, I'll say as more efficient as a way as possible, but that's not it. If you stay around to the end, I'm gonna share a little trick about what happens after a cut and the math behind it and whether or not you're gaining fat so that I can help you come out of that phase properly. Uh, but we need to lead to that point before I could say, okay, here's what you do. So what we're doing today is talking about reverse dieting. Where did it come from? Why does it sound so reasonable? I'm gonna talk about the two biggest problems with it. They're two separate problems. One is can you even execute this? And the other is, does it do anything if you do? And a lot of this research is on very lean physique competitors, which chances are, dear listener, you are probably almost certainly not one of those. You might be, but you know, I'm talking to everybody here. And then, of course, what to do the week that your cut ends. What do we actually do about
Where reverse dieting came from
Philip Pape 4:33
this? So let's start with the origin of reverse dieting. It came out of bodybuilding coaching roughly in the 2013 to 17 windows. So we're only talking about a little more than 10 years. And, you know, it spread the way the good fitness idea spread, which is it sounded great. And somebody wrote a guide about it, probably an Instagram carousel or something, and some famous person, you know, I think Elaine Norton put out a full reverse dieting guide back then, you know, and he he's he's walked back at least some of the promises of reverse dieting. He may still call it. In fact, a lot of so coaches coaches still use the word reverse dieting, and they don't always mean that. So that's part of the confusion here. And from there, it moved out of the physique circles into general fat loss coaching, and then of course, into the midlife women's fitness, which is just so hot right now, where it got stuck onto the metabolic damage and the heal your metabolism type of conversation and culture. And I wanna be, I wanna be nuanced here as always. I don't want to accuse anyone of lying. I don't want to call people out who don't deserve it, but this is a great way to sell coaching, a great way to sell metabolic repair protocol. How often do you see metabolic repair protocols or detox protocols? I put them all in the same category. They really sell a promise that seems like they're the only ones who can solve it. And it's gonna be some unique method or some unique approach. And if you do it, it's gonna set you up for success in the future. And oftentimes we don't want to do the hard thing that it really takes to be successful, so we go for these and they seem great, and they're just not gonna work for you. And the reason it sounds so reasonable is because part of the story is true. Dieting does suppress your metabolic rate, it does suppress your hormones. Absolutely true. The rest of it is where it gets fishy, and we're gonna get into that. So, in the study that I'm going to rely on the most today, natural physique competitors going through contest prepped, they dropped their free T3. That's your active thyroid hormone, so T3. And it dropped far enough that eight of the 19 athletes were below the normal reference range before they got on stage. All right. So they got significantly hormonally suppressed. So the logic goes like this: going down slowly with your diet, with your calories, with your weight causes the adaptation. So going up slowly should reverse the adaptation in the same way that it's symmetrical. And, you know, if you got an engineering brain like I do, symmetry is very satisfying. It's very intuitive. You know, you lower the input in steps, you raise the input in steps, the system tracks back to where it started. But it's wrong. It's wrong. A lot of things in reality and real world systems are asymmetric. Asymmetric. We talked about this before with set point theory and how there's actually a floor. How, hey, it's pretty easy to gain weight and it's often harder to lose it, right? That's kind of the idea. It's asymmetric. But it took me a while to understand this, and I used to talk about reverse dieting very, very early in my coaching career before I quickly realized it wasn't the thing that works practically, let alone supported by the science. So
Problem 1, can you even do this?
Philip Pape 7:42
let's talk about the first problem that almost no one can actually do a reverse diet. Well, what do I mean? All right. Eric Trexler, who I have enormous respect for down at Duke, he's been on the podcast before. Um he was originally behind Stronger by Science and Macro Factor, which you guys know I love as an app. He is one of the sharpest people that write about this stuff and wrote a great article that created a lot of controversy on both directions, as these tend to do when they upset the apple cart. And he wrote recently that he's aware of exactly three studies that have ever attempted a to track a real reverse diet with lean dieters after a fat loss phase. So, in two of those three, the reverse diet just didn't work. It was so bad that the studies stopped being an intervention at all. The compliance was so poor that the researchers gave up on the protocol and they just switched to observing what the athletes actually did. So go ahead, do your best. That was the that was those two studies. Okay, now these are physique competitors. These are people who are pretty disciplined compared to the average person. They weigh their food, they've run the protocol multiple times, they have coaches. If they can't execute a slow reverse diet under research supervision, then who is this being designed for? Now, if you look at the newest study, the third of the studies I mentioned, Butel and colleagues published just this year, 2026, there were 19 natural drug-tested competitors in Australia. So we're eight men, 11 women, ages 18 to 45, and they tracked them from the back half of their prep all the way through to 12 weeks after their show, after their physique show. And their original plan was we're gonna do a controlled reverse diet, but it couldn't be done. What did they actually eat? Well, in the final weeks before competing, they were down around 1580 to 1,720 calories a day. Two weeks after the show, they were at nearly 2,950 calories a day. So notice that that's not a reverse diet, right? You can go from like 1,500 to 1700 all the way up to almost 3,000 calories within two weeks after the show. So that's basically a jump of over 1,200 calories a day immediately almost. And then 12 weeks out, they settled, they settled out a little bit lower, around 2560 calories, which is still way more than the roughly 1,900 they were eating at baseline before the prep even started. And that is often what happens when a diet ends. It's not because we are weak people that can't control ourselves, it's because our body, our biology, causes this to occur. Now, I know what you're thinking, okay, these are
The one randomized trial we have
Philip Pape 10:20
competitors at, you know, super low 5% body fat for men, maybe 15%, 10 to 15 for women. I'm a normal person. I did a normal cut. Does this apply to me? Well, hold that thought. I'm gonna deal with that in a few minutes. But first, the one randomized trial that we have is Dr. Bill Campbell's group at the University of South Florida. They ran this with Trexler, and I love the design of this, which I'm not surprised by two, you know, stalwarts in the industry who know how to do this stuff. Resistance-trained adults, 87% of them were women, average age was 36, and everybody dieted down until they'd lost 5% of their body weight. Then I think it was 15 weeks in, or I'm sorry, they did this for 15 weeks, the dieting, across three different groups. So group one reverse dieted, so they had gradual weekly increases. Group two went straight to a calculated maintenance intake, and then group three went back to just eating normally, they didn't even have a target. So what happened over 15 weeks? Well, the reverse dieting group, in terms of regain, weight regain, they regained 3.77% of their weight, so 3.7. The maintenance group 2.7, and the hey, just eat whatever you want group 1.3. Now they weren't statistically different from each other. So I don't want you to take these to be like massive differences. The group that didn't have the protocol, that last group, they actually rated their adherence as easier over the last six weeks. And, you know, part of that actually makes sense in my head when I think about it. If you're just kind of doing whatever you want, it's easy to adhere to just doing whatever you want. Okay. Now, this study was presented at a conference. I don't think it's a full peer-reviewed paper yet. So take that caveat for what it's worth. But I think the key here is there was no clear winner in terms of the reverse dieting group. If anything, if you take the difference in percentages, they trended the worst if you count weight regain as a bad thing. And I don't want to necessarily say that that is in and of itself what we're trying to measure, because you do expect weight regain when you're going to increase your calories because of the fluid and the carbs. And it might not be the worst thing that your weight jumped faster and larger initially, given that it's not body fat, but it's associated with recovery. In other words, the reverse dieting group or the just eat normally group would have trended up toward that eventually anyway, potentially. We don't know, because it's a function of how quickly you go. Now, what's interesting is reverse dieting by going slowly, why did they gain more weight? Well, again, there was not a statistically significant difference between these. So I don't want to give too much pun intended weight to the weight regain piece. I just wanted to mention that. The point is reverse dieting didn't stick out as anything magical or beneficial in any way. So if you've tried to reverse diet and found this doesn't really feel great, I feel like I'm still dieting. That's one of the most common
Finding your real maintenance calories
Philip Pape 13:15
things that I see happen. Like with just trying this with people, especially early in my coaching career, I tried this and they were like, man, something's off. You know, I still don't feel great. Like I feel like I'm dieting, but I'm also gaining weight. It's kind of the worst of all the worlds. So, you know, when we talk about what do we do about this, the fix I'm gonna give you depends on knowing what your maintenance calories are. Because part of the issues with part of the reason people reverse diet as well in the past is they have no clue what your maintenance is. And they're like, this is the only way to find it, right? Well, no, your maintenance, it's not a calculated number. It's not fixed, we know that, but it's also not a total mystery. Okay. It does change a lot, though. It changes as your weight changes, as your training changes, your activity, you know, it changes through the dieting and out of dieting, all of that. And so a lot of the reason people do this slow reverse is they're trying to be conservative. They don't know where that ceiling is, so they want to creep it up, which is going to extend the recovery. We're gonna talk about that in a second. But I just wanted to mention what I use for this with clients and use myself, the secret is out of the bag. I use MacroFactor for this as a food logging app. Still to date, I am shocked by this. It's the only app I know that calculates your expenditure dynamically and in a reasonably sophisticated way. I I there might be some apps that try to do that, but they don't seem to be very good yet. So, Macro Factor, you can use my code wits and weights, all one word, and get a free week, two, two-week trial. Try it out. Let me know what you think. Again, wits and weights, all one word, go check out macrofactor. I'll include a link in the show notes. But the reason it works so well for recovery dieting instead of trying to reverse diet and guess your way up is it's looking at your weight trend, it's looking at your log calorie intake, and it back calculates here's what you must be burning. It doesn't need activity, it doesn't need anything else. If it knows how much your weight is changing and how much you're eating, that is sufficient to know how much you're burning. So then when you come out of a cut, you know exactly what your maintenance calories are right there at that moment, and you could just jump to those calories or a little bit higher. I always recommend a little bit higher to kind of speed up that recovery a little bit. And that's really, really useful in this situation. Because one of the biggest fears of reverse dieting is what if I overshoot? What if I gain too much fat? And this answers the question using your data. It's why we do this type of tracking in our programs as well. Okay, so macrofactor, go check it out, go download it. If you're not using it, use my code Wits and Waits All1Word as a code. Please support the podcast. You don't have to use the code, you can just download it. But if you do, you'll get an extra week free trial and you'll support the podcast. All right, so problem one is hey, almost nobody can actually do a successful reverse diet, even just from an adherence perspective. But then that leaves the obvious question. What about people who can? What if you're the exception? What if you're the special snowflake who can do this? Or what if you've just white knuckled your way through a reverse diet? What actually happens? Well, we have an answer. We have an answer. And it comes from a situation where it's really depressing, uh, but the compliance was essentially guaranteed. And I'll say this study gets misdescribed a lot and misused a lot, but I'm gonna throw it
What happened when compliance was guaranteed
Philip Pape 16:26
out there. And that is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment from 1944 into 1945. The participants were actually what we call conscientious objectors, right? They were objecting to the war, the draft, and they were living on an army base, and every calorie they ate was controlled and provided by the research staff. So they were intentionally dieted down to about five to six percent body fat, and they were not lifting weights. And I think this matters. I'm gonna come back to that. That matters tremendously. They weren't lifting weights, but you know, they couldn't cheat or anything. They they had to do what they had to do because they were forced to. I mean, I think they volunteered as conscious as project. But anyway, we're not gonna get into that piece of it. Okay, then after the diet, after the starvation essentially, came the refeeding phase. And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this part, but it's interesting. The researchers split them into four groups with different rates of calorie reintroduction over 12 weeks. Not sure if you knew that, but we have some good data on this. So the slowest group started at 1930 calories a day, worked up to 3,000 over 12 weeks. And they were basically weight stable for the first six weeks. They gained like 1.2 grams of body mass a day. And that is a reverse diet. It's a textbooked reverse diet executed flawlessly, you know, gradual increase. They had no choice, they did it. We know they did a reverse diet. The fastest group started at 2944 calories and worked up to just over 4,000 calories. So during their controlled phase, or I should say during the control phase of all four groups, the weight gain tracked to the calorie surplus exactly the way you'd expect. You know, energy balance. Like we we know that that works, calories in, calories out. The slowest group gained the least, fine, but then the 12 weeks ended and the floodgates opened, and they had eight weeks of unrestricted eating. So at the start of that window, the slow group was five kilograms lighter than the fast groups. And then after eight weeks of free eating, that gap had shrunk significantly to less than half a kilogram. So, despite 12 weeks of what we can call perfect discipline, it basically just bought them eight extra weeks before they have a rebound. So they didn't avoid the rebound weight gain, they just postponed the rebound weight gain. Okay, and that's a very important thing to understand. Because on the metabolic side, and this is where it gets kind of interesting for the reverse dieting piece, in the buttol study I mentioned earlier, the researchers ran a model looking at whether athletes who increased their intake more after the show recovered their metabolic rate faster. So if they ate even more sooner than a reverse diet. And guess what they did? Every extra 100 calories a day during recovery was associated with 16 to 18 more calories a day of metabolic rate recovery. Interesting, right? So the typical post-show increase of 500 to 1000 calories a day correlated to somewhere around 80 to 160 calories a day of metabolic recovery. So more food, faster recovery, which is the opposite direction from the premise of reverse dieting, which is intended to restore and recover your metabolism, right? Now, there were 19 people in the study. Okay, it's an exploratory analysis. I get it. I'm not gonna build a religion on this or anything. But the three separate studies, post-competition and physique competitors, all line up. They're all, they all line. It's not a surprise. And then you throw in the Minnesota starvation diet, and
What your metabolic rate responds to
Philip Pape 19:55
we see that those who re-reintroduce calories and regain weight the most conservatively also have the slowest hormonal metabolic recovery. So that is a piece I want you to take away from this episode. Your metabolic rate is responding to two things whether you're in a deficit right now and how much tissue you're carrying, like actual body mass, but also muscle mass within that body mass. And that's mostly it. How much you weigh and how much tissue you have, and also whether you're in a deficit. So if you reverse diet and only add, say, 50 calories or 100 calories, and that's not nearly enough to get out of the deficit and you're still in a deficit, you're just in a smaller deficit and you're just extending the diet. You're just going with a smaller diet. Does that make sense? So you're not actually at maintenance yet. That's the that's the thing we got to get through our heads, right? The person who quote unquote succeeds at reverse dieting, they might stay lean, if that's a word we want to use, or at least lower body weight, but their meta metabolism also stays suppressed. And honestly,
What happened to the women's cycles
Philip Pape 20:58
these are two sides of the same coin, two sides of the same coin. Now, this shows up on the hormone side too, which is important for all of us, especially when hormones become more and more important as we age, especially for women peri postmenopause, right? In that study, the same study of the seven naturally cycling women, four had already lost their period before the show. And then six of the seven had lost it two weeks after. So amenorrhea, we call it. By 12 weeks, four had it back, but two still didn't. What did bring the their periods back was guess what? Eating substantially more food and putting body fat back on, not creeping up with a reverse diet, right? And that is, you know, somehow the people who say reverse dieting protects your hormones tend to point to this study and they've actually got it, it actually works against them. You know, and one last thing on Trexler, just for cool little side stories. He co wrote, I think what he states, and maybe the first peer reviewed paper to ever use the term reverse dieting. You guys can look that up and see if he's right or wrong on. That. But anyway, he wanted reverse dieting to work. Like he really hoped that it was a strategy that did work. He calls himself the banana guy. So back in like, you know, 12 years ago, whatever, when he was building physique competitor, he was sitting there after a show eating a bunch of bananas and a half jar of peanut butter, well past the point of fullness. And his conclusion now, after studying this for a decade, is that reverse dieting is a dead end. And that's, you know, following the evidence. His idea changed over time.
Who this research applies to
Philip Pape 22:31
All right. So now I want to give you a caveat and then I want to help you fix this. I kind of already alluded to the recovery diet piece of this to do the fix, like to obviously increase calories quickly is the real goal here. But the people in the research that I just mentioned, pretty much all of those physique competitors and the Minnesota starvation diet, the people were very lean or shredded or whatever word you want to use, 5 to 6% body fat, semi-starvation. The Minnesota starvation diet, they didn't have any resistance training. Whereas in Butel's research, they were stage lean. So of course they were training. If you cut down from, let's say, 32% body fat to 27-7% body fat over 12 weeks while lifting, say three days a week and eating your protein, you know, you're not in that demographic, right? You're not in that 5% body weight, body fat demographic. Not even close. I mean, I've had really, really lean clients and they still, unless they were planning to do a physique show, get down to for men, maybe 10%. 10% is extremely lean. I don't know what this thing about single double single digit is, as if it's some aspirational thing that many, many men can and should get to. Not even close. Most men getting to 15%, they're gonna see abs, they're gonna see plenty of muscle definition, they're gonna look great. 10% is really, really lean. So 5% is crazy. Now, for women, you add like 8 to 10% to that. Now, there aren't any trials on post-diet, calorie restoration, perimenopausal, or post-menopausal women. What a surprise, shocker. Anyone who tells you research says X about reverse dieting for menopausal women is just making it up. So, what is transferable here? Like what can we actually apply to everybody? Well, I think the feasibility problem is what transfers here, and it actually is worse for the general population. In other words, if you've got 20 or 30 years of dieting history and a very fear-driven or nervous kind of mindset or system that where you've learned that food restriction is the answer, even if, even if you know it's not intellectually now, but you've kind of been conditioned to that, like we all have, then a six-month reverse diet is not gonna happen. It's gonna, that's gonna be so tough because you're basically forcing yourself to diet for that many months. It's not a reverse diet, it's still a diet, like we said earlier. You're still in you're still in a deficit and yet you're not getting a result, let's say. So psychologically, it's just brutal. Also, the direction of reverse dieting, when you think of recovery, recovery is associated with eating more and putting tissue back on. So the idea of gaining weight is is a problem for a lot of you, even though it shouldn't be when you understand what's being gained and why, and the correlation between that weight gain or weight regain and going back to full maintenance and recovery. Now, the good news is you tend to be in a much smaller hole than a physique competitor. In other words, you haven't dieted to a crazy ridiculous amount. So the amount that you've experienced in terms of adaptation is probably nowhere near what they have, which is a good thing. That's a positive thing, and in that recovery can take as little as
5 steps for the week your cut ends
Philip Pape 25:33
just a few days to maybe a couple weeks, right? It's not, it shouldn't take months though. It should not take months. So here's what you do when you end your cut. Okay, five things. Here's the steps. Number one, go to maintenance as quickly as you can in as little as two weeks or less. Okay, so if you're using Macrofactor, like I mentioned before, use my code Wits and Weights, please use it. Log your food, log your weights, see how easy this actually becomes to say, okay, I'm done with my diet. I know when I started my diet, I was burning 2200 calories. At the end of my diet, I'm burning 1700 and I'm eating 1200, so I'm gonna jump up to 1700. Like that's it. That's that's what you're gonna do. Now, if the jump is too big on that first day where you feel distended or like gonna have gas or something like that, it's totally okay to stretch it out for a week or two. But that's not a reverse diet. That's just titrating up that amount that you know you have to jump to get to full recovery. All right. So that's it. And we're not telling you to jump all the way to the 2200 that you started with either. That's why you need to track this stuff. We're not saying jump to your original maintenance, we're saying jump to your current maintenance. So that's number one. Number two is I would put most of those new calories into carbs. Why? Because your protein should already be high at like 0.71 gram per pound of body weight. You should not have gotten into a diet in the first place if you couldn't reliably and consistently eat enough protein, right? Of course not. Now, if I'm talking to you and you you found this show after a bunch of unintended weight loss or crash dieting or GLP1-driven weight loss, and you weren't doing that, fine. Now's your opportunity to come out, increase the protein and the carbs. But if you did have the if you do have the protein up high enough, the change is mainly the carbs. Fats will drift up a little bit, but mainly the carbs, which is what you want. Carbs are gonna refill your glycogen, support your training. It's gonna help your thyroid, help your stress, help your energy, all of that stuff. Carbs are beautiful in this case. And in fact, that's what we do when we take diet breaks and refeeds. We increase carbs. So it makes sense. Number three, don't let your training drop. And the reason I say this is because in the Butual study, the training load fell below the baseline after their physique show. Now, that could be because of physique competitors. They really, really train all out really hard. They're motivated by the show, and then afterward they kind of slack off a little bit. But I would say for you, it's kind of the opposite. When the weight's coming back, you're gonna feel better and you're gonna get PRs and you're gonna feel like you can make progress again. So I probably don't have to tell you this because it's gonna feel like you want to train more. It should feel better, but but your training intensity should actually go up. Number four, I want you to decide your sealing ahead of time. Now, what I mean by that is for the scale, I want you to decide: are you going into maintenance, are you going to aggressive maintenance, or are you going into a surplus? And understand that there's gonna be at least two to three pounds of immediate weight gain from water and fluid that has nothing to do with body fat. But then there might be another pound or two beyond that, not from overshooting, but really just from this extra recovery, maybe some muscle mass, some muscle mass coming back, kind of a variety of things. And there's a little bit of noise there, and you have to accept that. And it's totally cool because what you're getting for it is a much healthier body and physiology. And then number five is I would recommend staying at maintenance for like two to three months before you think about another deficit, or maybe one month, maybe two to two weeks to a month if you're gonna go in a building phase. Like for a building phase, it's not that big a deal. I just want you to stabilize first so you don't like way overshoot in the surplus. But if you're gonna go on another diet because you have a, you're actually just taking a break, a recovery break, I like those types of breaks to be like two or three months long. If it's a week or two, then that's just kind of a normal interruption diet break. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a full recovery break. Okay. Now, I am not saying that gradually raising calories is quote unquote wrong, because eating from going or going from a deficit up to maintenance, as I mentioned before, you can titrate it up over a few weeks if you want, but you're targeting an actual number that's your recovery number, not just like dripping it up slowly randomly and guessing over time. Right. I hope you understand the difference. I'm not saying that diet breaks don't work either. That's a totally different thing. A diet break happens during a cut, whereas reverse dieting happens after a cut. I just want to make sure you understand there they're two different things. But even with a diet break, you need to know your metabolism so that you can break up to that immediately. You're not, you don't want to reverse diet into a diet break because that would totally take forever and wouldn't even work, right? And then, of course, I'm not saying, hey, you you just have to live with fat gain or fat regain. Of course not. You do have to put some weight back on. You're going to because of, you know, water and glycogen and maybe a little bit of fat that your body needs to have on its frame. You're probably gonna look better though. In fact, when I tell people they have a beach event or photo shoot and then we're leaning out for that, we want to stop that cut a few weeks ahead of time and go right back to maintenance and refill that water and glycogen and kind of fills up the muscles. You actually have those muscles pop a little bit more. So the conclusion of this episode is that reverse dieting as it's sold doesn't do anything at advertises, it doesn't protect your metabolism, and it gives you a big price. Months potentially of further restriction, months more of food fear, the fear of gaining weight, even though gaining weight is exactly what you probably need to do in the right way. You delay your rebound, you delay the recovery, you delay the hormonal recovery, all the things it promises do it, it oftentimes does the opposite. Now, before we wrap up, I I'm gonna give you a little trick about the scale math, or I should say some numbers around the scale math. So you really, really understand what I've been hammering on quite a bit lately, which is the weight gain that happens after a cut. I wanna address that because it's so important. But that post-cut transition, it's where I see more people lose the skills and the progress they made than any other point in the process. Notice I said skills and progress. I'm not talking about your weight or your body. Okay, I'm talking about the actual process and the skills. During the diet, people tend to be locked in, but after it, the transition is really, really important to sustain your results. That that transition is why we have in our program, which is called Eat More Lift Heavy, it's 26 weeks long. That's why we have a third phase that helps you actually come out and make sure you can sustain your results. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. You can check it out. If you scroll down at the bottom of that page, there is a, I forget what it's called, but it's like the program at a glance, the whole 26 weeks, and you can see each week what we cover. And if you're doing a fat loss phase in the middle there in phase two, phase three is gonna help you come out of that and also learn to manage those skills for yourself. So if you want to see how it works, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. And if you haven't heard episode 491 about set point theory, I would listen to that one next, by the way. If you're not following the show, episode 491. All right, so the week that you stop dieting, the week that you stop
Scale math after a cut
Philip Pape 32:23
dieting, the scale is going to jump. And I'm just gonna say as much as three to six pounds. Men, women, any eight, size, you know, if you're a 100-pound woman, it's probably on the lower end. If you're a 300 pound man, it's probably on the higher end. But I want you to be prepared for it. I want you to know what that is. I want you to be confident that this is totally cool. Your body stores 400 to 500 grams of glycogen when you are well fed. Every gram of glycogen holds three grams of water. So if you refill that alone, you're gonna add three to four pounds. Then you're gonna have more food sitting in your gut because you're eating more. You're probably gonna have a little sodium that draws in even more fluid, and we get to our five to six pounds within a week or two of ending a diet. Could very well happen to you. In fact, if it's not happening, if you're not gaining weight at all, I would question if you're actually recovered. That's the cool thing about it, is we can look at this and reframe it as a positive thing. Now, let's give you some more math. A pound of body fat takes 3,500 extra calories. So, five pounds of fat gain. In other words, if you gain five pounds after you're finished a diet and you're worried that it's fat, that would mean if it's actually body fat, it would take 17,500 calories above your maintenance in those seven days, which is 2,500 calories a day over your maintenance. Not over what you were in your diet, but literally over your maintenance. Do you think you did that? No. That's the logic I like to leave people with. That's just so astounding in like fighting against the emotions in your brain about this. A pound of body fat, 3,500 extra calories. So if you gain five pounds in a week, you would have to have consumed 2,500 calories a day more than your maintenance. And if you didn't actually do that, well, guess what? It's not body fat. So then you don't have to react to it, you don't have to cut back down, you don't have to go back into that diet, be all fearful about it. Just wait about two weeks to three weeks, see what the trend's showing you. Guess what? You can always drift one direction or another. Go get macrofactor to help you do this. Use my code WITS and WAIS all one word, including the link in the show notes. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your metabolism recovers when you leave that deficit and when you put that tissue back on your body, not when you slowly reverse diet. I'm Philip Ape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
