Reverse Deiting

The more and more consults I do the more I realize how so many individuals, women especially are really struggling with constantly undereating. For whatever reason, maybe a diet magazine, maybe a fad, maybe a social media influencer that tells you to, but your ALL Undereating!

Undereating can cause and contribute to the following:

• Poor Sleep Habits
• Under recovering, constantly sore, constantly inflamed
• Decrease HGH hormone production
• Increase metabolic damage
• Halt’s fat loss in hopes to protect the body
• Affects mood swings, sex drive, depression and anxiety, stress management.
• Affect lean mass building

Now I know your thinking Whats undereating really?? Well if you figure out your BMR and your eating below that you’re really going to be hurting. Your BMR is the number of calories your body needs to just lay on the couch and watch tv. It allows your body to work. We then add the stresses of working out, going to work, going to ball practice, shuffling lunches, making dinner, getting groceries… etc etc. and NOW your body needs more fuel! So this is where the reverse comes in.

• BMR for Men = 66.47 + (13.7 * weight [kg]) + (5 * size [cm]) − (6.8 * age [years])
• BMR for Women = 655.1 + (9.6 * weight [kg]) + (1.8 * size [cm]) − (4.7 * age [years])

So what are the benefits and why do we have to reverse? Well if your only eating 1200 calories, which before you snicker I can promise you many of you are eating that, and your BMR says 1600, and your maintenance numbers are 2600 you’ve got a lot of work to do to bring your numbers up no matter HOW badly you want to lose body fat. As you read from the symptoms above undereating HALT’s fat loss. So each week or ten days we are slowly going to add more calories in hopes of restarting metabolism, correcting your sleep, increasing energy, increasing HGH (human growth hormone), fixing the loss of periods, loss of sex drive, depression and everything else that you have done to your body. By slowly going up this should limit the amount of weight gained, in some cased clients start losing weight.

At the peak or top of the reserve I personally like to hold clients there for a few weeks, I want to make sure their biofeedback form is perfect across the board,( I’ll paste that in below) and I want it there for a few weeks (3-6) because when we do start active fat loss biofeedback numbers on can start going down but we don’t want that within the first few weeks. On our way down we want to go slow and steady in hopes to keep the calories as high as possible, again think of it this way.

Would you rather???

• A) Eat 1200 calories feel like shit and not lose weight OR
• B) Still be eating 1700 calories, losing weight and feeling damn good?

See what we did there? Because we reversed dieted you to a new steady state when we started taking calories away your body was okay with that, it knew it wasn’t starving and it knew that you wanted to shed body fat. Now don’t get me wrong MANY outside factors can affect how fast or slow your reverse/active fat loss can go… for example:

• Food Quality. Eating like shit even though it fits into your macros won’t get the job done
• Gut health. If you have digestion issues, and leaky gut, and aren’t pooping, you’re not losing weight
• Not sleeping for 8 hours. Yes sleep is one the BEST ways to lose weight
• Not drinking enough water! Do you know how much you should be drinking? Well if you’re not drinking enough water allowing your body to hydrate and transport those nutrients around your body, you’re not going to get the recovery and results
• Drinking water at the WRONG time! Keep it AWAY from food intake! 15 minutes before and after you eat don’t drink water. Your stomach needs to digest, don’t dilute your stomach acids. 
• Stress. How you perceive stress and deal with it. Training A LOT can be a factor, that hefty debt on your credit card, running kids, your job, they are all stresses that can contribute to lack of results.
• Hormone profile, plain and simple, if you’re not wanting to have sex, your hormones need some MAJOR fixing! This tells us if your hormones are out of order, your body is out of order.

Is Reverse Dieting easy?? No, definitely not. You come to me telling me you want to lose weight and I’m like great you have to eat more, we like the idea of eating more but overcoming that fear, and trusting the process and being willing to pack on a few extra pounds first can all be very scary. I understand that because I also had to do it, and I am so thankful I did because my life is much better eating 1800 for fat loss and 2400 for maintenance vs 1200 I was eating and dying a little more every day.

Vital Biofeedback form: This is the form we use every 10-12 days to see improvements in our bodies and lives that have nothing to do with the scale. This chart is the MOST important tool.