Transcribed using AI transcription, errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification

00:12
Hi everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday and today I want to talk about a reverse diet, the diet after the diet. Now, obviously I talk a lot about fat loss, I have many experts I speak to, and indeed just over the last couple of weeks I had the pleasure of chatting to Coach Dave Mathis about reverse dieting and the health restoration diet.

00:41
And subsequent to that, I've been having a number of conversations with clients, people on my Facebook page and friends about an exact protocol for the reverse diet and why you need one in the first place. And while, of course, Dave goes into a number of reasons for reverse diet and who it might be suitable for, I just thought it might be quite handy to have it all in one place in terms of...

01:09
You know, some of the things to consider if you're a dieter, if this is the approach for you, and then what is a protocol? So I see this a lot in the health space. As I mentioned in the conversation with David Mathis, is that you see a lot of people claim that a reverse dieting is this magical way with which you can stay lean, but eat several hundred calories more than you would have if you didn't reverse diet after the diet phase.

01:39
And it's very popular with strength and conditioning coaches, physique coaches, and potentially macro coaches. It's not really a thing that I heard talk about a lot in my space, nutrition science, it is largely overlooked. Or at least that's the perception that I had for it. And in fact, this diet after the diet is almost more important than the diet itself. So when I was chatting to my friend, Tom, about it, he

02:08
mentioned a YouTube clip from Renaissance Periodization, which details the protocol that I'm about to talk about here. My friend Anastasia, who's also been a guest on this show, put Tom onto that. And so I use that as sort of the protocol foundation, acknowledging that there are many different ways with which you can reverse diet, and this is just one. But there are some important elements to it, which are common regardless of which way you go about it.

02:38
So just to sort of prime you, a reverse diet is for anyone that has been on very low calories for a long period of time. And the aim of it is to work towards increasing calories without too much gain of body fat. So this is something, as I mentioned, that has come from that physique space where they must go through quite an extreme or aggressive diet and training regime to reach their physique goals. So their body fats might be down at like,

03:05
You know, women might be down to 9 or 10%, males might be down to 4 or 5%. However, the reverse diet isn't just for the physique athlete. It is for anyone who has been on very low calories for an extended period of time to reach their goal weight and now feels really stuck and unable to eat more food and feel more relaxed around it without gaining weight. In addition,

03:33
They've also got severe diet fatigue, they might have massive cravings, their hunger could be out of control, and they may not recover well from the training that they do. So if you need a reverse diet, that's not just a psychological problem about how someone feels around food and wanting to take those steps into including foods they would have restricted throughout their diet approach.

03:58
there are actual changes to physiology that do drive this increased risk of fat gain as your body does try to defend a higher body weight set point to what it is currently set at. And I did talk about body weight set point on another mini micropedia which we will link to here. So the issue really becomes that it's unsustainable to stay at this very low calorie intake and still be healthy and therefore there is this increased likelihood of overeating.

04:28
Overeating can then result in feeling guilty around the food that you eat and then food restriction occurs after that. And then this is like this perpetual cycle and it's really hard for someone to find balance. When you diet, the body becomes super efficient at saving calories because your metabolism responds to the reduction in energy and intake by slowing down.

04:52
First, it's because there is less mass than you were carrying around, so your body isn't required to burn as many calories as what it was prior to your fat loss phase. Then, as the dieting continues to get you to your goal weight, whatever that looks like, you do need to add in extra work because your body becomes more efficient at conserving energy. So it's both in everyday life, but also in your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And what I mean by that is it's both your

05:21
voluntary incidental activity so you're less likely to go for that walk or you're less likely to park the car at the sort of perimeter of the grocery or supermarket store to then get your groceries. You know you're trying to save energy and it might not be this sort of conscious thought but subconsciously this is what you're working against. But we do know that this metabolic adaptation can occur through potential changes in the mass of your organs so they don't work as much and this

05:51
which I know sounds weird, but there's something I heard on an Iron Culture podcast with Eric Trexler, because he's now part of Herman Ponce's lab that looks at energy expenditure. And they think that this metabolic adaptation or downturn in energy that occurs when dieting isn't just non-exercise activity thermogenesis, it really is changes in how that lean mass operates on a day-to-day basis. And lean mass isn't just muscle, it is organs as well.

06:21
Anyway, if you've ever done an extreme diet and then you went back to eating somewhat normally and noticed an immediate increase in your body weight, particularly body fat, you aren't actually imagining this because fat loss, it's a controlled form of famine, basically where we restrict calories to lose weight. And when this happens, and as your fat cells shrink as a byproduct of the diet, because that's what happens when you diet, you do become more insulin sensitive.

06:49
Insulin is a nutrient delivery hormone and it will deliver nutrients to where they're required. And so if you're insulin sensitive and you increase your fat intake, that fat is very readily stored back into those fat cells and people don't think about that like that. Now also the other thing to be mindful of is our leptin drops and leptin is a hormone that is largely regulated by our fat cells.

07:19
and it tells us when we are full. So it means that hunger is increased with this leptin drop. Usually, and most of the time, especially if blood sugar regulation is an issue, an increase in insulin sensitivity is a good thing. However, at the end of the diet, when you have significantly reduced your weight and body fat, it can cause a massive increase in hunger because of the lower leptin.

07:44
and your body is primed to increase its body fat levels because you are insulin sensitive. Your fat cells are much more willing and able to take up dietary fat, dietary triglycerides, from your dietary fat sources. Other things that go on under the hood that you won't necessarily see is that your fat metabolism and fatty acid metabolism can become impaired during and post an aggressive diet phase. Your rate of fat oxidation in the adipocytes, which are fat cells,

08:14
become quite low through dieting, which makes it much more easily stored. If you notice that you are hungrier after a diet, what is happening is called an anabolic drive signal. It's where your gut, your liver, and your other organs send a signal to the brain that the body requires growth and the hormones that are produced encourage both an increase in hunger and an enhanced metabolic efficiency in the body, as I was discussing with insulin and leptin.

08:42
These signals from the periphery convey to the brain that energy stores are depleted and nutrient availability is low. So this impacts on energy balance regulation. The response to these integrated signals is that appetite increases and energy expenditure declines. And our thyroid, our immune system and so forth. That's that metabolic adaptation which can occur. Or all of this is metabolic adaptation. This difference in calories has been referred to as the energy gap.

09:11
And it's the difference between what is being consumed to maintain a new lower body weight set point and where the body feels it needs to sit in order to feel like it's not in famine. This is also described as more energy desired than required. So you've got this imbalance. Your body feels like it really needs this absolute influx of calories. So your insulin sensitivity is high, your hunger is high. You've got this impairment in the sort of brain signals.

09:41
but you don't actually need as many calories as what your brain is sort of telling you you do. So what do you do? Here's a sort of step-by-step protocol that Renaissance periodization suggests that people go through. And I thought it was really well laid out, so I wanted to lay it out for you here. So the first important point is that your new maintenance calories, the calories required to maintain your weight, will be less now than when you started dieting, because it's just less of you. So.

10:10
The first important point is that the maintenance calories will be less now than when you started dieting because there's less of you and I know that you know that's not news to you. So we need to know your new maintenance calories at your new body weight and this is a bit of a guesstimate and you can use a calculator but perhaps a better way is to know where you were at hopefully prior to dieting.

10:39
Your maintenance was 2800. And then know where you're at in order to lose weight. So where were your calories at at the end of your fat loss phase? And this might require just tracking for a week or two, if you're not currently, to get a handle on how many calories you're eating in order to drop the body weight. So for example, maybe your maintenance was 2800 and you were using a diet of about 2000 calories

11:08
to be able to lose four kilos, and now you're four kilos lighter. So with this information, we can calculate an estimated new maintenance calories. We divide 81 new weight by 85 old weight, times 2,800, which is your old maintenance, and we get a number which is 2,668, and this is where eventually you...

11:35
could be at the end of your reverse diet. That's what you're working towards, 2668 calories a day. And remember your fat loss calories were 2000, so that's quite a jump, but you don't just go there. What you do is you choose the middle point. So right now we've got an estimate of your maintenance body weight, and we've got your calories finishing at a fat loss phase. Those numbers are about 2000.

12:05
and 2668 and we take a midpoint of that. And that's where we start this diet phase. So this might be about 2330. The reason why we don't immediately jump to the 2668 is because as I spoke to Dr. Martin about on a previous podcast about metabolic adaptation,

12:29
At the very end of a diet phase, your body is still in that metabolic adaptation. You're still really hungry. You've got these cravings. Your metabolism has slightly been turned down. So we need to work with the adaptations to help bring everything back online. And this is where you start your first week of your reverse diet. In week one, you track your weight, your hunger, your training responses daily. You could still feel really hungry.

12:55
and you could still have a lot of diet fatigue, and this can take some time to resolve. Don't panic and don't stray from the calories that we've just set, that 2330. You wanna stay the course. Note that your body weight will also likely bump up in that first week due to increased food, increased glycogen, which is carbohydrates stores, so you just need to expect this. So whilst we are tracking your weight, you sorta wanna ignore it as well in that first week. And then,

13:25
We have another week at that level of the 2330. Yet now we start to notice what's actually happening with the weight. Is it stabilizing? Is it reducing or is it increasing? And depending on what is happening in that second week, we then make some adjustments as follows. If you're losing weight in the next one to two weeks, you wanna increase those calories.

13:52
that 2330 by 15%. Remember that weight loss isn't the goal here. It is very difficult for some people to get their head out of that weight loss phase and accept the weight maintenance and their weight is gonna jump up. But you do have to do that. And remember what we're actually aiming for is weight stability, but more than that, we're looking for changes in that biofeedback. We're looking for changes in hunger, cravings, energy, sleep.

14:22
vitality, we're looking at changes in all of that. If you are stable in the next one to two weeks, you still actually increase the calories, but you do it by 10%. And the reason you increase calories is because your body is adjusting to increased energy intake, and your metabolism is coming back online. Therefore, we need to fuel the fire. So you're increasing your need, you're increasing your outputs and your workout. And if you kept your calories the same,

14:51
What could happen is that you could drop your body weight in the next couple of weeks, and that's not the goal here. If you're gaining weight after that one to two weeks, then you reduce your calories by 10%, wait until your weight stabilizes, then try to increase these again, and allow for the body to catch up to the increased fuel. And don't panic if you do gain weight in that next one to two weeks. Everything is reversible, right? And your body could still be taking its time

15:21
turn that dimmer switch up on your metabolism, your thyroid, physiology, etc. So everyone is quite individual in that respect. So this process can take maybe six or eight weeks, where you reach a point that for three to four weeks your weight is relatively stable at a given calorie intake, and then further increases by 10% may result in an increase in the scale weight.

15:47
which then resolves when you remove the added 10% calories. So when that happens after a period of stability, you can be pretty certain that you've reached your new maintenance. And this should be not too far away from the number that you calculated, but it might not be the same. So just be mindful of that. Could be lower or it could be higher because your body is dynamic and we miss these individual factors when you're just using a calculation.

16:14
In addition to the weight stability, you should also have resolved any crazy hunger or cravings, a lot of the fatigue, like ridiculous fatigue during training, and you should feel like sleep is really good, energy is stable and all of those sort of things. So that's the reverse diet protocol. We calculate a new maintenance, we take the midpoint between your fat loss calories and your new maintenance, we start there.

16:42
And then we adjust across the course of maybe eight weeks to determine your actual maintenance calories whilst resolving a lot of the metabolic adaptation that occurs during dieting. Here's just a couple of the common mistakes. People might just assume their exact maintenance and not adjust and then panic if they just start eating, you know, I don't know, 600 more calories because that's what they decided and then they're gaining weight. If you are continuing to gain weight, then this is

17:11
is a likely sign that this is not your true maintenance. The other mistake that people make is staying too long in a deficit. They have small incremental increases by maybe 50 or 100 calories a day, which is a lot of work to maintain, keeps you in a deficit and continues to extend the fatigue, the hunger, the cravings and the metabolic adaptation. You want to resolve those things as quickly as possible.

17:38
Another mistake people make is panicking when the scales go up in the first week. That is always going to happen with an increase in food and glycogen. So this is why we ignore the first week, even though we track the first week of weight, we don't really look at that data beyond disinterest. And then the final mistake is people let the qualities of your diet slip. Remember you are more insulin sensitive, fat cells are so much more vulnerable to just taking on board that fat that we want to be mindful of our choices. So

18:07
keeping protein high. That's a really important piece of this puzzle. You might even wanna bump it up from whatever you were at to being slightly higher. And of course there may well be room and it should be room for extra treats in your diet, but your reverse diet, like your fat loss diet, needs to be versions of your forever diet. So you need to account for quality first and foremost, and then just check in with yourself as to how these added food choices

18:36
are actually impacting on your cravings. Because you don't wanna just go dive into some hyper palatable food and subsequently have issues with too much fat gain and the food guilt and the over restriction and all of that that I was talking about at the start of this episode. So that's reverse dieting, Renaissance periodization style. Do note that variations of this absolutely can be successful. But the foundation is to have

19:05
the numbers correct, it's to really check in with your biofeedback and it's to stay the course and recognize that this is almost as much work as the fat loss phase itself. But hopefully you're up for it if you've gotten this far because what you don't wanna do is be lingering in these sort of fat loss calories forever and then not really reaching your health goals. And ultimately, we just wanna be healthy, right? And strong and fit and capable and all of it. All right, team.

19:34
That's reverse dieting. Questions, comments, feedback, hit me up @mikkiwilliden on Instagram, threads, and Twitter. @mikkiwillidennutrition on Facebook. Head to my website mikkiwilliden.com, send me an inquiry. You guys have a great week. See you later.