What is Reverse Dieting and Is It for Me?

Are you having trouble losing fat even though you exercise and eat super healthy? Have you felt like you’re not eating a lot but still not losing weight? For our purposes right now, let’s assume I’m just speaking to those of us looking to lose a few pounds and let’s address one of my favorite tactics to improve that - Reverse Dieting.

If you need some help understanding the question, “What is reverse dieting?” and how reverse dieting might help you lose weight, you’re in the right place.

This is really the only “diet” I subscribe to for anyone when it comes to fat loss/body transformation goals and to be honest, it’s not a “diet. It’s a lifestyle change aimed to increase the amount of food your body uses.

The process of reverse dieting isn’t complicated, the complicated part is understanding it, and sticking to it.

(Ps. if you subscribe to my newsletter, I promise to let you know when I’m going to post a step-by-step process of how to do it properly)

The key here to keeping it effective and helpful is to understand the process.

The two questions to answer in order to understand the process are; “What is Reverse Dieting?” & “Should I Reverse Diet?”

“What is Reverse Dieting?”

Simply put, reverse dieting is a way of increasing how much food your body is used to burning off naturally, without adding weight/fat in the process.

A couple reminders:

  1. When we want to lose some weight we need to burn more calories than we take in - this is called a calorie deficit.

  2. The more we burn, the more we should lose - bigger deficits mean more weight loss.

Now, here’s an example:

Let’s say that you currently eat a certain amount of food - for argument’s sake, we’ll say two meals per day, maybe 1,000Cal overall but you’re not losing weight yet.

It’s pretty hard to say “let’s drop 300-500 Calories per day in order to lose weight” because at that point, you’re going to be starving yourself half to death by eating 1/2 as much food! Right? Right.

Cutting your food intake in half isn’t a long term solution unless you’re drastically overeating and even then, it shouldn’t happen all at once.

Glad you follow so far, let’s keep going.

Instead, if you were eating 3-4 meals each day, or just bigger meals each day, and say, around 2,000Cal, it’d be much easier to limit your calories temporarily (remember, calorie deficit = fat loss).

Now, if we want to drop 500Cal to lose some fat, instead of that equalling 50% of your food, it’d only be 25%!

Don’t worry SO much about the numbers there - here’s the takeaway - if you have a bigger base of food, you have more food to potentially pull from when you want to drop a couple pounds.

Change is scary - less of a change to your intake (or less of a change in anything, really) is always going to be easier to adhere to.

To get to that point, where you’re eating more food without gaining weight and you’re ready to start cutting back to drop a few pounds, you need to move your food intake up slowly. 

You wouldn’t throw 200lbs on your back and start squatting just because you saw someone say it’s good for dropping fat, right? …at least I hope you wouldn’t.

I hope you’d first understand what a squat is, whether you’re ready for it, and how to get to a place where using that weight is appropriate!

Let’s approach reverse dieting like a heavy squat - something super beneficial but deserving of some respect.

Now, here’s the more important question:

“Should I Reverse Diet?”

I don’t know… should you?

As with seemingly everything in health and fitness, it depends! The three questions I tend to ask are these:

Are you under-eating? This can’t be answered off of a feeling, this has to be answered after looking at the details of your nutrition, and your body, and objectively understanding where you’re at. If you’re under-eating, maybe this is for you!

Do you have a stable relationship with food? If you’re fighting an eating disorder of some sort, this probably isn’t for you until you can find a way to mitigate the risk of falling into that realm of thinking. No matter what, your mental, physical and emotional health are more important than any general fitness goal. If there are no issues here, maybe this is for you!

Are you thinking long term or short term? Reverse dieting is like building wealth - unless you’re lucky, chances are you’ll have to work pretty hard for a while before seeing any real results. Like with wealth though, when those results start to show themselves, they tend to multiply faster. If you’re comfortable with the process and can keep your focus long term, maybe this is for you!

There’s no clear cut answer I can give you personally without talking to you one-on-one, but I can say without a doubt, as I’ve seen proven with many past clients, this process can work.

If you want more or you’re not sure, connect with me and we’ll set up a coaching call to see what the best steps would be for you.

Until then, share this with someone you think it could help!