By: Chris Gates

Reverse dieting is one of the biggest buzz words in the health and fitness space today.

It’s easy to understand why, because a reverse diet is often billed as “a way to eat more calories and still lose weight!”

And while that is partly true, it also leaves out a lot of context. And it probably has you asking a lot of questions.

• Is it true you can eat more and lose weight?
• What is a reverse diet, really?
• How does it work?
• What’s the best reverse diet plan?
• And how can you use it to see progress?

I’m going to answer all of those questions for you, and more, in this article!

Let’s start by talking about what a reverse diet is, and then we can dive into the specifics about the best reverse diet plan for you.

Check out some of my amazing clients who transformed their physiques through fitness and nutrition to see amazing results!

The Best Reverse Diet Plan: What Is A Reverse Diet?

A reverse diet is a pretty simple strategy that’s intended to transition you out of a calorie deficit without gaining too much excess weight or body fat.

In other words, it’s a way to end your diet and maintain your progress.

Because facts are facts, and once you start eating more calories, you’re probably going to gain a little bit of weight. That can be hard to accept after months (and potentially years) of hard work.

Reverse dieting is a strategy that was initially popularized by bodybuilders. They’d lean down and cut a ton of body fat for a competition, and then want to “stay shredded” afterwards to maintain the look they worked so hard for.

Some bodybuilders also use it as a way to mitigate the effects of a slow metabolism. As you eat less food and lose a considerable amount of body fat, your metabolism will slow down.

So the theory is that by adding very small amounts of food back into your diet over time, you’ll help increase your metabolism while gaining as little body fat as possible (admittedly, there’s very little research suggesting this works).

This approach has bled over into the more general health population, where people like yourself want to do everything they can to maintain their physique after a weight loss transformation.

So they do a reverse diet, and slowly add a small amount of calories back into their diet week by week.

The Best Reverse Diet Plan: It’s Not Magic

Hopefully from that description you can see that a reverse diet is not magic.

Because what I encounter all the time is people reaching out on social media asking about what a reverse diet is, and what they need to do to eat more but still lose fat.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misleading claims about reverse dieting. And honestly, this concept is ripe for marketing.

Think about it…

• “Eat more and lose weight!”
• “It’s the opposite of a diet!”
• “Stay lean all year long!”

People love that stuff. So you gravitate to it, because it sounds like the diet secret nobody’s been talking about.

But it’s not.

It’s not magic at all.

In the early stages of a reverse diet, you may continue to lose weight while you introduce more calories into your diet.

But that’s because, despite adding calories back in, you’re still in a calorie deficit.

Eventually, as you add in more calories, your weight will stabilize, and eventually go up a little bit.

You can’t hack your own physiology.

The Best Reverse Diet Plan: How To Do It

So a reverse diet is a very conservative way to add calories back into your diet.

The way you go about doing that is really up to you, but most people go about it in one of two ways.

• Option No. 1: Add very small chunks of calories back into your diet each week.
• Option No. 2: Add slightly larger chunks of calories back into your diet every couple of weeks.

Neither of those two options is better than the other. They both get you to the same place over time.

Adding slightly larger amounts of calories will just get you to maintenance a little bit quicker.

Here’s a step-by-step example. Let’s say you’ve been dieting on 1,500 calories and you want to work your way back up to 2,000 calories (purely hypothetical numbers).

1. You could add 50 additional calories back into your diet each week over the course of 10 weeks.
2. You could add ~150 calories back into your diet every 1-2 weeks over the course of 3-6 weeks.

Both will get you up to 2,000 calories.

One will be a bit quicker (and probably more enjoyable) than the other.

Neither is magic.

Should You Do A Reverse Diet?

It’s hard for me to tell you exactly what to do without knowing anything about you, but for the vast majority of people who ask me about reverse dieting, here’s my answer…

Don’t do it.

Honestly, I think reverse diets are pretty pointless. Whether you’re a bodybuilder or the average Joe who recently lost 30 pounds, I don’t see a huge advantage to doing a reverse diet.

Now I know, I know. This article is titled “The Best Reverse Diet Plan to Lose Weight.” I should map out an entire week-by-week program, right?!

Honestly, I think the best reverse diet plan is to not do one at all.

At the end of the day, you’re going to end up in the same place, regardless of the approach you take.

• You’re going to eat more calories.
• You’ll gain a little bit of weight back.
• It’s completely normal.
• You’re still going to look amazing.
• Nobody will care that you added 2-5 pounds of water weight.

And so the most enjoyable way to get out of a calorie deficit is to immediately get out of it, and give yourself a bunch of additional flexibility and freedom with your diet.

Adding really small bits of calories back into your diet for another 5-10 weeks sounds exhausting, and it’s not going to make a noticeable difference to your physique.

But it WILL prolong an already long calorie deficit, which seems excessive.

How To Actually Eat More Food And Lose Weight

Before I let you go, I want to talk about how you actually CAN eat more food and lose weight.

Because it IS possible.

It’s just not wrapped up in a reverse diet.

High-volume foods are your friend, and if you don’t know about them, I’d like to introduce you…

Tons of research has shown foods that are high in protein, fiber, and/or water content are the best for helping you to feel full.

So lean meats like:

• Chicken
• Turkey
• Fish

And high-fiber foods like:

• Salads
• Berries
• Potatoes

There are other snacks that can really help, too:

• Greek yogurt
• Cottage cheese
• Oats

You can eat a very large amount of those foods, for an extremely low amount of calories. And that’s exactly what a high-volume food is.

They’re essentially the opposite of foods like cookies, candy, and pizza, which are more calorie dense. One small piece or serving of those foods come with a very high amount of calories.

If you want to learn more about high-volume foods, I’ve got an entire section dedicated to them in my article about how to make your calorie deficit easier.

I’ve also got an article on how to feel more full, which will help you out.

I Hope This Helps!

Thanks so much for stopping by and reading this article! Really, I hope you learned two main things…

1. A reverse diet for weight loss is not magic. It’s just one way to end your diet.
2. It’s not necessary to do at all, but if you’d like to there’s a lot of freedom for you to set it up however you’d like.

At the end of the day, losing weight is all going to come down to your diet and whether or not you’re in a calorie deficit. The method you use to get there is completely up to you.

And if you’d like some help with your weight loss journey, I’d love to work with you! I coach people all over the world to build muscle, burn fat, and achieve their fitness and nutrition goals 🙂

Head over to my coaching page to learn more.

Have a great day!

~ Chris