Can you lose weight whilst eating more? Dietitian Lucy Carey explores reverse dieting – what is it and does it work?

Okay, I admit it: I was scrolling.

And I came across a curious question from a personal trainer. “My client is only eating 1200 calories per day, but she’s still gaining weight. Should I really tell her to cut it down even further?”

The question had elicited hundreds of responses, the most popular of which were “Try reverse dieting”.

So what exactly is reverse dieting? How do you do it? Does it work? And is it truly the best answer to the trainer’s question?

Reverse dieting is popular with body builders, but it’s growing in popularity all round. Basically it is slowly and carefully reversing a diet (increasing calories) to try to increase metabolism and reduce fat gain.

Let me explain.

So this trainer’s client had gone on a heavily restrictive diet. I say heavily because 1200 calories is not much at all. It’s like toddler amounts of food. So her body had gone into a protective mode to try to slow and stop weight loss.

Our bodies have evolved over thousands of years with one goal in mind: survival. And historically, weight loss has not been a good sign. So of course the body kicks into gear to try to prevent it.

Hormones become altered. Appetite increases. The body stores as much fat as it can so that it withstand further restriction of food. And adaptive thermogenesis slows metabolism.

These are all reasons why dieting doesn’t work long-term, and we haven’t even mentioned the psychological effects and the emotional rollercoaster this all entails.

When the diet is no longer working for weight loss (or when a bodybuilder’s competition is over), the goal of reverse dieting is to restore metabolism back to normal whilst gaining as little adipose tissue as possible. Many people hope to continue to lose weight, in fact.

Does it work?

Yes and no… Eating more than 1200 calories per day is clearly a good thing. The body can start to repair some of the damage the diet has done. But I would still absolutely recommend AGAINST reverse dieting. Here’s why:

• It’s still a diet. Calories are still being heavily controlled and restricted. There’s no listening to the body, there’s no honouring hunger and fullness cues. It’s a system where your client will still be counting calories every day, becoming more and more obsessed with food, more and more terrified of the scales.
• It encourages yoyo dieting. It actually actively encourages heavy restriction, then easing the restriction, then restriction again, then easing again. This yoyo pattern has huge impacts on hormones, health and happiness. None of them positive.
• Relationship with food and body are further eroded by this approach. Diet culture is further entrenched. We are only teaching clients that they cannot rely on their own body, they cannot rely on their own hunger and fullness cues, they cannot be trusted with knowing how much to eat, they can barely be trusted to eat at all. It’s a joyless, disordered way of living.

So what would I suggest to the trainer who was concerned about her client?

Stop calorie counting and start moving her towards intuitive eating. This is easier said than done. To take a dieter and tell them to eat whatever they want is always going to be messy and it’s not going to feel good for them. They need to be supported through the messy in-between stage so they can come out the other side knowing how to listen to their body, how to eat to make their body and mind feel good, and how to resist falling back into the dieting trap.

If you want to know the exact framework I’ve developed to take my clients from yoyo dieting to intuitive eating, register for my upcoming free masterclass:

If you have clients like the trainer, who have wreaked havoc on their bodies through dieting, and you’re at a loss as to how to repair their relationship with food and you have no idea how to put weight loss into the equation at all, then you’ll love this masterclass!