A reverse diet may just be the diet you didn’t know you needed.

Ever gained weight right back in half the time it took to lose it?

Or wondered how some people can end up eating so little without seeing the scale budge?

If so, read on to find out why this happens and why what you do after a diet is just as important as the diet itself.

This healthier amount is that at which your body and health thrive. 

But when you eat less than this amount, you risk becoming metabolically adapted. The bigger the deficit and the longer you stay there, the higher the risk.

Metabolic adaptation = a survival mechanism by your body to conserve energy that triggers negative responses like slowing your metabolism, unbalancing hormones, and even hanging onto — or storing more — body fat.

This adaptation is why you hit plateaus when losing weight, why you must reduce calories even more to see progress, and why chronic dieting or undereating can lead to major hormonal and health problems.

So reverse dieting is important for restoring health after unintentional undereating, which I’ve actually found to be far more common than overeating with active people, including my former self.

(The first time I tracked my food I realized I had been way undereating. Once I reverse dieted up, I was amazed at how much better I felt.)

It’s also an important process immediately following an intentional diet period because…

When you quickly go back to eating more, your body suddenly experiences an excess of energy and has to store some of it — yes, in body fat.

In fact, when you binge after a diet, you can end up with larger fat cells and more of them. This is why yo-yo dieting makes it far more difficult to keep the weight off long term.

To prevent this, reverse dieting helps our metabolism gradually adjust so we can maintain our new weight on more food… 

And more (healthy) food = better energy, metabolism, performance and health.

Because undereating is so common, I included a whole bonus guide on reverse dieting in my latest program The Paleoish Performance Detox that kicks off Sept. 9th. 

The guide breaks down how to properly reverse diet step by step, how to adjust throughout the process, and how it can fit into a periodized plan with other goals like strength and fat loss.

As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions on the detox or on reverse dieting.

To your evolution,

Hanna