You know that weight that your body feels most comfortable at? The weight you sit at when you are eating intuitively and your body isn't changing? That is called homeostasis. Our bodies only change if we force them to. They like to be comfortable and will always fight to sit at homeostasis. So many factors contribute to where you naturally hold weight/body fat, including: dieting history, genetics, activity level etc.
So what if you want to eat intuitively and naturally sit at 140 pounds instead of 180 pounds? You need to reset where your body sits at homeostasis. Most people want to achieve their "goal physique" in one diet attempt. I mean, who wouldn't right? That mind set completely makes sense however, sometimes our short term goals need to change in order to realistically achieve our long term goals.
When you have a significant amount of weight to lose, or want to maintain a pretty lean physique eating a good amount of calories, it more often than not will take multiple cycles of dieting and reverse dieting to achieve this goal.
Your metabolism is adaptive so in order to continue weight loss you have to continually drop calories and increase activity throughout a fat loss cycle. When your calories get too low, exercise too high and your body isn't responding anymore, that is a good indicator it's time for a reverse diet. Reverse dieting allows you to add calories back in slowly overtime so your body can adapt to a higher food intake with minimal fat gain. While you are adding calories back in, you can put on lean body mass in the process. Lean body mass is the only way to increase your RMR (resting metabolic rate) which is the amount of calories you burn on a day to day basis just at rest. Everyone has a different RMR but it can be increased by adding muscle to your body frame. That is why it is so important to have phases of putting on lean body mass to improve your metabolic rate so you can maintain a leaner physique eating more food. Every girls dream right? (;
Once you are done with a fat loss diet and have then properly done a reverse diet, you want to allow your body to really adapt to higher calories by maintaining that body weight for some time (I typically recommend 3-6 months depending on how long your previous fat loss phase was) Here is an example of what this overall process may look like - You started your first cut at 180 pounds You successfully lose 15 pounds in your first cut and are now sitting at 165 pounds, eating a low amount of calories and doing a lot of cardio. You then reverse diet, start adding calories back while tapering off cardio, in very slow increments each week for 3-6 months. You gain a total of five pound in your reverse diet (this is just an example, everyone is different) so after your reverse you are now eating the caloric intake you were before your original fat loss diet but are now 10 pounds lighter at 170 pounds! Then you can diet again to 150-155 and reverse slowly after that as well. See the cycle? This will allow your body to adapt to different weights, change, grow and improve overtime.
If you have any questions about fat loss or reverse dieting I would love to help you! You can email me at rachelhughesfit@gmail.com
Comments