To hear the TikTok girlies tell it, there’s a hack that will let you EAT MORE FOOD! While NOT GAINING WEIGHT! And it’s great if you are SICK OF DIETING! Never mind that one can achieve all those goals by a simple trick called “not dieting anymore.” No, it needs a name and a strict protocol: reverse dieting.
The basic idea of reverse dieting is that you slowly add a few more calories to your diet every week. So s you normally maintain your weight on 2,000 calories per day, but you’ve been eating 1,500 calories to lose weight. You might then “reverse diet” by eating 1,600 calories a day next week, 1,700 calories a day the week after that, and so on. Eventually you’ll be back up to 2,000 calories, or maybe even more.
This is not a trend that originated on TikTok. The term seems to have come from bodybuilders, whose sport requires that they engage in extreme cycles of bulking (gaining weight to gain muscle mass) and cutting (losing as much fat as possible before stepping on a stage). While the process can create dazzling physiques, it also fucks with your metabolism and overall health.
Reverse dieting is one approach for transitioning from an extreme cut, to maintenance or bulking: Instead of just pigging out the day after your bodybuilding show, you might rather slowly increase the amount of food you eat as you find your maintenance calories again.
This idea spawned the current trend of influencers pitching reverse dieting as the cure for all your diet-related complaints. But it doesn’t work that way.
The science behind reverse dieting
Some of the claims you’ll hear from thin women flexing their abs on TikTok, and from the bodybuilders saying to just trust them, bro, are true. Among them:
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- Your metabolism adapts to dieting, so over time you have to eat less and less food to keep losing weight (this is a known thing).
- After dieting a long time, you may be eating a miserably low number of calories.
- Eating more food will allow your body to stop being so stingy with the calories, and can increase the number of calories your body burns.
- After increasing your calories, someday you may be able to lose weight again while eating more food than when you were in the depths of your diet.
There are also a number of untruths and half-truths that come up. You may hear that increasing your calories too fast after a diet will make your body pack on fat, or that you can add 1,000 calories and still be losing weight, or something something hormones something cortisol. (Scroll long enough on fitness TikTok and somebody will explain that all your problems are due to cortisol. Take a drink.)
In any case, this is where “reverse dieting” comes in. Supposedly the cure to all of these ills is simply that you need to add 50 to 100 calories to your diet each week. The process is slow and requires patience, but stick to it and you too could look like this girl (imagine me moving my head to point at the before-and-after photos I’ve greenscreened behind me) on 2,400 calories instead of 1,200.
So what’s actually true about reverse dieting, and why is everybody so into it? Let’s take a closer look.
When it goes right, “reverse dieting” is just “not dieting” but with more rules
After reading all of those bullet points above, you might think, OK, so why not just stop dieting? You’ll get to eat more food, your body will burn more calories, and from there you can either diet again or—crazy idea here—just not diet anymore. Heck, you could give gaining weight a try.
And that is, in fact, the real answer. Just stop dieting. The world will not end. You can eat food again, and you will be fine. So why reverse diet?
As Eric Trexler, a nutrition and metabolism researcher, puts it here, the original