Reverse dieting is a strategic process used after a period of calorie restriction to gradually increase food intake and restore the body’s natural metabolic function. This methodical approach helps maintain weight loss while preventing the rapid rebound weight gain that often occurs when returning to higher calorie levels too quickly. By slowly increasing calories, the practice aims to re-establish a higher daily calorie allowance, or new maintenance level, without accumulating significant body fat. The goal is to achieve metabolic health and sustainability, allowing the body and mind to recover from the stress of dieting.
The Science of Metabolic Adaptation
When you maintain a calorie deficit for an extended time, your body initiates a survival mechanism known as metabolic adaptation, or adaptive thermogenesis. This response causes the body to become highly efficient at functioning on fewer calories than predicted based on weight loss alone. This metabolic slowdown involves decreases in both your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).
The BMR, which accounts for up to 70% of the TDEE, drops partly because a smaller body requires less energy to operate. This adaptation goes beyond simple body size change and can reduce your expected energy expenditure by an additional 5-10%. Several hormones also shift in response to prolonged restriction, contributing to this metabolic change and increasing hunger.
For instance, leptin, a hormone that signals satiety, decreases significantly during dieting, while ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite, increases. Thyroid hormones, particularly triiodothyronine (T3), which govern the metabolic rate, also become suppressed. These hormonal shifts, combined with a reduced BMR, create an environment where you feel hungrier but burn fewer calories, making weight regain highly likely if calories are abruptly increased.
Practical Steps for Calorie Increases
The first step in initiating a reverse diet is accurately determining your current maintenance calorie level, which is the “diet exit” point you maintained to achieve your final weight loss. From this baseline, you begin a slow and calculated process of increasing your daily intake to allow your metabolism to adjust without storing excess energy as fat.
The recommended rate of increase is small, starting with an addition of approximately 50 to 100 calories per day, per week, or every two weeks. This incremental increase acts as a gentle stimulus to your metabolism, encouraging it to increase its energy output gradually. You should monitor your weight trend over a week or two and only increase calories again if your weight remains stable.
When deciding where to add these calories, prioritize carbohydrates and fats over protein, as protein intake should remain high to preserve muscle mass. Increasing carbohydrates helps replenish muscle glycogen stores, which improves energy levels and physical performance. Fats are also important to increase strategically because they play a direct role in supporting healthy hormonal function.
A common approach is to add the 50-100 calories by increasing either carbohydrate intake (12-25 grams) or fat intake (5-11 grams). The reverse diet process continues for several weeks or months, with consistent, small increases until a stable, higher maintenance level is reached. This new, higher intake level signifies that your metabolism has successfully adapted to a greater energy load while maintaining your current body weight.
Monitoring Progress Beyond the Scale
Focusing solely on the scale during a reverse diet can be misleading and counterproductive, as minor weight fluctuations are a normal part of the process. An immediate increase in weight after adding carbohydrates is often due to increased glycogen storage and associated water retention, not body fat gain. Each gram of stored glycogen binds with several grams of water, which temporarily increases the number on the scale.
To gain a clearer picture of your progress, you should track weekly average weight trends rather than daily weigh-ins. This smooths out natural daily fluctuations, providing a more accurate representation of your body’s response. Tracking non-scale metrics offers insight into your metabolic recovery:
- Energy levels
- Sleep quality
- Strength improvements in the gym
- A return to consistent hunger signals and improved mood
Body measurements, such as waist or hip circumference, and how your clothes fit, are excellent non-scale indicators that track body composition changes. If your weight is increasing slightly but your measurements remain stable, it suggests you are successfully increasing your calorie allowance without accumulating significant body fat.