What is the diet after the diet?

You may have heard that diets don’t work. There are some studies that have shown that 97% of people who lose weight on a diet gain a considerable amount back within the first year, some gain more than they lost. So what’s the point? If you want to lose fat, are the cards stacked against you?

Well the good news is, there are some science-backed methods for keeping the weight off. Diets do work, it’s what you do after the diet that makes all the difference. First let’s look at metabolism. Our metabolism (the sum of all the things your body does to burn calories) is made up of 4 things: 

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - calories burned for involuntary bodily processes (heart pumping, breathing, etc.)

• Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) - calories burned during food digestion. Certain foods take more calories to digest than others.

• Thermic Effect of Exercise (TEE) - calories burned exercising

• Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) - Calories burned through movement that is not exercise (walking around, fidgeting)

As you diet, your metabolism decreases or adapts. This is because:

1. Your body is smaller, so BMR is slightly decreased

2. You’re eating less food, so TEF decreases

3. TEE decreases because it takes fewer calories to move your smaller body

4. NEAT generally decreases because dieting makes you feel lethargic due to lower calories.

So our body fights us a little bit during the dieting phase, and the leaner you get, the more your metabolism adapts. Once you have lost the weight, our bodies are primed to gain fat back. Meaning, if you lose a bunch of fat, then go off the rails and eat whatever you want, your body wants to fill those fat stores. But you can’t diet forever, and you don’t want to live your life on super low calories. So you lost the fat, you want to eat more, and you don’t want to gain it all back. What do you do?

That’s where Reverse Dieting comes in. Reverse dieting is a slow increase in calories to encourage metabolic adaptation while minimizing fat regain. Instead of going back to eating whatever you like, you’re eating a little more each week. As you eat a little more each week, your TEF, TEE, and NEAT will naturally increase because you have more energy (food is fuel!). Your metabolic rate increases, and as you move more (and you continue to push yourself in the gym), the extra calories are expended or used to gain muscle instead of only stored as fat.

Reverse dieting is best for someone who has been in a prolonged calorie deficit (fat loss phase/dieting phase) or has a history of yo-yo dieting and wants to either increase their metabolism or maintain their results while enjoying a higher calorie intake.

So you’re bringing up your calories incrementally week over week, allowing your metabolism to positively adapt at close to the same rate that you’re increasing calories. Here’s a graph (from Precision Nutrition) that illustrates both the effects of yoyo dieting on metabolism and weight gain and how reverse dieting helps mitigate fat regain.

I hope this is helpful. Diets do work. And changing your lifestyle and eating habits is possible long-term. It takes practice and change and time.

And if you’re thinking, “Shoot Megan, I still haven’t figured out how to lose the weight in the first place!” you can sign up for my email newsletter here or download my Nutrition Guide for Beginners.

As always, I’m here if you have questions.