Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Reverse Dieting Is a Dead End for Metabolism Recovery | Ep 493

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Reverse Dieting Is a Dead End for Metabolism Recovery | Ep 493 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you just finished a fat loss phase, or maybe you've been dieting a long time, you've probably heard that you need to reverse diet.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: Add 50 or 100 calories a week, creep it back up, increase your metabolism, protect it, and stay lean while you do it.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: Today, I'm gonna show you why almost nobody can pull that off.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: It's not even a real thing, including for the most disciplined dieters.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: And those who manage to do it in some way often end up with repercussions like just being less recovered for even longer.
• 0:30
  Philip Pape: And finally, I'm gonna share what to do when your cut ends for the fastest recovery and the best result.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and reverse dieting is the topic de jour.
• 0:57
  Philip Pape: It is one of those ideas that took over the fitness world, but was never really tested properly.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: Or I should say that the evidence has never showed that it works in the way that we think it does.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: It actually came out of physique coaching, not really out of the science, which, you know, a lot of things come from bro science, a lot of things come from experience and lifters over the years.
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: But this one kind of came right out of the coaching world.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: And the promise is really beautiful.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: And this is probably why coaches love it.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: You finish a cut, or maybe you've been dieting many years, you've done the yo-yo thing, and you're being marketed to, hey, we've got a great program to finally help you fix your metabolism or to finally help you lose the weight the right way or whatever.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: But maybe you finished a cut and you're a little bit leaner, you're a little bit hungry, your training isn't as optimal.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: And what do you need to do?
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: You need to recover, right?
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you've been dieting for a long time, you've been in that dieting culture, and you're told, hey, the reason your metabolism is so low is because you've never reverse dieted.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: You've got to recover.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: And so what we need to do is add calories back slowly over time in a way that your body doesn't notice it as much, that your metabolism comes up slowly and gets to where it needs to be, and that you don't gain too much fat back.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: And so, yeah, your metabolism is gonna climb, your hormones are gonna come back, you're gonna get that recovery that you need, or what some people call metabolic restoration, or even fixing your metabolism, which is a complete misnomer, of course, because you can't break or damage it.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: And then you keep all your results, you keep your physique, or at the very least, you're gonna be in a better place to have a higher metabolism and lose fat from more calories.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: Probably sounds familiar, right?
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: So I've had a lot of people, especially uh, especially women, especially people over 40, tell me, hey, I was told to do this, or I had a coach that walked me through this, and it didn't really work like I thought it would work.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: Where I took six weeks in this reverse dieting phase, maybe I added 50 calories a week.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: You know, the actual jump depends on the coach.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: And I'm still hungry, I'm still afraid of food, I'm still watching the scale, I still feel like things are very sensitive there.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: I still don't have the body I want, I still don't look the way I want or feel the way I want.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: Don't the energy the way I want.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: Maybe I tried another fat loss phase and I tried another diet.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: It didn't seem any different than last time.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: Felt like I was cutting, restricting, et cetera, et cetera.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: And then it's this just fragile experience and fragile outcome that you don't feel well equipped to do fat loss the right way.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: And you may even feel less confident, right?
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: And the problem is not you, as always, with these situations.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: The problem is the approach, the protocol, the principle.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: And I want to walk you through the data on that today.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: Hence the title of the episode that reverse dieting is a dead end for metabolism recovery.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: Because I want you to recover your metabolism.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: I want you to be optimal.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: I want you to get the result in, I'll say as more efficient as a way as possible, but that's not it.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: If you stay around to the end, I'm gonna share a little trick about what happens after a cut and the math behind it and whether or not you're gaining fat so that I can help you come out of that phase properly.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: Uh, but we need to lead to that point before I could say, okay, here's what you do.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: So what we're doing today is talking about reverse dieting.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: Where did it come from?
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: Why does it sound so reasonable?
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna talk about the two biggest problems with it.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: They're two separate problems.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: One is can you even execute this?
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: And the other is, does it do anything if you do?
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: And a lot of this research is on very lean physique competitors, which chances are, dear listener, you are probably almost certainly not one of those.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: You might be, but you know, I'm talking to everybody here.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, what to do the week that your cut ends.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: What do we actually do about this?
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: So let's start with the origin of reverse dieting.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: It came out of bodybuilding coaching roughly in the 2013 to 17 windows.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: So we're only talking about a little more than 10 years.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: And, you know, it spread the way the good fitness idea spread, which is it sounded great.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: And somebody wrote a guide about it, probably an Instagram carousel or something, and some famous person, you know, I think Elaine Norton put out a full reverse dieting guide back then, you know, and he he's he's walked back at least some of the promises of reverse dieting.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: He may still call it.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: In fact, a lot of so coaches coaches still use the word reverse dieting, and they don't always mean that.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: So that's part of the confusion here.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: And from there, it moved out of the physique circles into general fat loss coaching, and then of course, into the midlife women's fitness, which is just so hot right now, where it got stuck onto the metabolic damage and the heal your metabolism type of conversation and culture.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: And I wanna be, I wanna be nuanced here as always.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: I don't want to accuse anyone of lying.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: I don't want to call people out who don't deserve it, but this is a great way to sell coaching, a great way to sell metabolic repair protocol.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: How often do you see metabolic repair protocols or detox protocols?
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: I put them all in the same category.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: They really sell a promise that seems like they're the only ones who can solve it.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: And it's gonna be some unique method or some unique approach.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: And if you do it, it's gonna set you up for success in the future.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: And oftentimes we don't want to do the hard thing that it really takes to be successful, so we go for these and they seem great, and they're just not gonna work for you.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: And the reason it sounds so reasonable is because part of the story is true.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: Dieting does suppress your metabolic rate, it does suppress your hormones.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: Absolutely true.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: The rest of it is where it gets fishy, and we're gonna get into that.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: So, in the study that I'm going to rely on the most today, natural physique competitors going through contest prepped, they dropped their free T3.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: That's your active thyroid hormone, so T3.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: And it dropped far enough that eight of the 19 athletes were below the normal reference range before they got on stage.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: So they got significantly hormonally suppressed.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: So the logic goes like this: going down slowly with your diet, with your calories, with your weight causes the adaptation.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: So going up slowly should reverse the adaptation in the same way that it's symmetrical.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: And, you know, if you got an engineering brain like I do, symmetry is very satisfying.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: It's very intuitive.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: You know, you lower the input in steps, you raise the input in steps, the system tracks back to where it started.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: But it's wrong.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: It's wrong.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: A lot of things in reality and real world systems are asymmetric.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: Asymmetric.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: We talked about this before with set point theory and how there's actually a floor.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: How, hey, it's pretty easy to gain weight and it's often harder to lose it, right?
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the idea.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: It's asymmetric.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: But it took me a while to understand this, and I used to talk about reverse dieting very, very early in my coaching career before I quickly realized it wasn't the thing that works practically, let alone supported by the science.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about the first problem that almost no one can actually do a reverse diet.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: Well, what do I mean?
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: Eric Trexler, who I have enormous respect for down at Duke, he's been on the podcast before.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: Um he was originally behind Stronger by Science and Macro Factor, which you guys know I love as an app.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: He is one of the sharpest people that write about this stuff and wrote a great article that created a lot of controversy on both directions, as these tend to do when they upset the apple cart.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: And he wrote recently that he's aware of exactly three studies that have ever attempted a to track a real reverse diet with lean dieters after a fat loss phase.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: So, in two of those three, the reverse diet just didn't work.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: It was so bad that the studies stopped being an intervention at all.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: The compliance was so poor that the researchers gave up on the protocol and they just switched to observing what the athletes actually did.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: So go ahead, do your best.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: That was the that was those two studies.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: Okay, now these are physique competitors.
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: These are people who are pretty disciplined compared to the average person.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: They weigh their food, they've run the protocol multiple times, they have coaches.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: If they can't execute a slow reverse diet under research supervision, then who is this being designed for?
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: Now, if you look at the newest study, the third of the studies I mentioned, Butel and colleagues published just this year, 2026, there were 19 natural drug-tested competitors in Australia.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: So we're eight men, 11 women, ages 18 to 45, and they tracked them from the back half of their prep all the way through to 12 weeks after their show, after their physique show.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: And their original plan was we're gonna do a controlled reverse diet, but it couldn't be done.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: What did they actually eat?
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: Well, in the final weeks before competing, they were down around 1580 to 1,720 calories a day.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: Two weeks after the show, they were at nearly 2,950 calories a day.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: So notice that that's not a reverse diet, right?
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: You can go from like 1,500 to 1700 all the way up to almost 3,000 calories within two weeks after the show.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: So that's basically a jump of over 1,200 calories a day immediately almost.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: And then 12 weeks out, they settled, they settled out a little bit lower, around 2560 calories, which is still way more than the roughly 1,900 they were eating at baseline before the prep even started.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: And that is often what happens when a diet ends.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: It's not because we are weak people that can't control ourselves, it's because our body, our biology, causes this to occur.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: Now, I know what you're thinking, okay, these are competitors at, you know, super low 5% body fat for men, maybe 15%, 10 to 15 for women.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: I'm a normal person.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: I did a normal cut.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: Does this apply to me?
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: Well, hold that thought.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna deal with that in a few minutes.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: But first, the one randomized trial that we have is Dr.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell's group at the University of South Florida.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: They ran this with Trexler, and I love the design of this, which I'm not surprised by two, you know, stalwarts in the industry who know how to do this stuff.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: Resistance-trained adults, 87% of them were women, average age was 36, and everybody dieted down until they'd lost 5% of their body weight.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Then I think it was 15 weeks in, or I'm sorry, they did this for 15 weeks, the dieting, across three different groups.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: So group one reverse dieted, so they had gradual weekly increases.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: Group two went straight to a calculated maintenance intake, and then group three went back to just eating normally, they didn't even have a target.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: So what happened over 15 weeks?
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: Well, the reverse dieting group, in terms of regain, weight regain, they regained 3.77% of their weight, so 3.7.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: The maintenance group 2.7, and the hey, just eat whatever you want group 1.3.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: Now they weren't statistically different from each other.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: So I don't want you to take these to be like massive differences.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: The group that didn't have the protocol, that last group, they actually rated their adherence as easier over the last six weeks.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: And, you know, part of that actually makes sense in my head when I think about it.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: If you're just kind of doing whatever you want, it's easy to adhere to just doing whatever you want.
• 11:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: Now, this study was presented at a conference.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: I don't think it's a full peer-reviewed paper yet.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: So take that caveat for what it's worth.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: But I think the key here is there was no clear winner in terms of the reverse dieting group.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: If anything, if you take the difference in percentages, they trended the worst if you count weight regain as a bad thing.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: And I don't want to necessarily say that that is in and of itself what we're trying to measure, because you do expect weight regain when you're going to increase your calories because of the fluid and the carbs.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: And it might not be the worst thing that your weight jumped faster and larger initially, given that it's not body fat, but it's associated with recovery.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: In other words, the reverse dieting group or the just eat normally group would have trended up toward that eventually anyway, potentially.
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: We don't know, because it's a function of how quickly you go.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: Now, what's interesting is reverse dieting by going slowly, why did they gain more weight?
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Well, again, there was not a statistically significant difference between these.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: So I don't want to give too much pun intended weight to the weight regain piece.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: I just wanted to mention that.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: The point is reverse dieting didn't stick out as anything magical or beneficial in any way.
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: So if you've tried to reverse diet and found this doesn't really feel great, I feel like I'm still dieting.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: That's one of the most common things that I see happen.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Like with just trying this with people, especially early in my coaching career, I tried this and they were like, man, something's off.
• 13:22
  Philip Pape: You know, I still don't feel great.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: Like I feel like I'm dieting, but I'm also gaining weight.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: It's kind of the worst of all the worlds.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: So, you know, when we talk about what do we do about this, the fix I'm gonna give you depends on knowing what your maintenance calories are.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: Because part of the issues with part of the reason people reverse diet as well in the past is they have no clue what your maintenance is.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: And they're like, this is the only way to find it, right?
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: Well, no, your maintenance, it's not a calculated number.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: It's not fixed, we know that, but it's also not a total mystery.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: It does change a lot, though.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: It changes as your weight changes, as your training changes, your activity, you know, it changes through the dieting and out of dieting, all of that.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: And so a lot of the reason people do this slow reverse is they're trying to be conservative.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: They don't know where that ceiling is, so they want to creep it up, which is going to extend the recovery.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about that in a second.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: But I just wanted to mention what I use for this with clients and use myself, the secret is out of the bag.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: I use MacroFactor for this as a food logging app.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: Still to date, I am shocked by this.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: It's the only app I know that calculates your expenditure dynamically and in a reasonably sophisticated way.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: I I there might be some apps that try to do that, but they don't seem to be very good yet.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: So, Macro Factor, you can use my code wits and weights, all one word, and get a free week, two, two-week trial.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: Try it out.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: Let me know what you think.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Again, wits and weights, all one word, go check out macrofactor.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: I'll include a link in the show notes.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: But the reason it works so well for recovery dieting instead of trying to reverse diet and guess your way up is it's looking at your weight trend, it's looking at your log calorie intake, and it back calculates here's what you must be burning.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: It doesn't need activity, it doesn't need anything else.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: If it knows how much your weight is changing and how much you're eating, that is sufficient to know how much you're burning.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: So then when you come out of a cut, you know exactly what your maintenance calories are right there at that moment, and you could just jump to those calories or a little bit higher.
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: I always recommend a little bit higher to kind of speed up that recovery a little bit.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: And that's really, really useful in this situation.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: Because one of the biggest fears of reverse dieting is what if I overshoot?
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: What if I gain too much fat?
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: And this answers the question using your data.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: It's why we do this type of tracking in our programs as well.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: Okay, so macrofactor, go check it out, go download it.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: If you're not using it, use my code Wits and Waits All1Word as a code.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: Please support the podcast.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: You don't have to use the code, you can just download it.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: But if you do, you'll get an extra week free trial and you'll support the podcast.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: All right, so problem one is hey, almost nobody can actually do a successful reverse diet, even just from an adherence perspective.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: But then that leaves the obvious question.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: What about people who can?
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: What if you're the exception?
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: What if you're the special snowflake who can do this?
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: Or what if you've just white knuckled your way through a reverse diet?
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: What actually happens?
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: Well, we have an answer.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: We have an answer.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: And it comes from a situation where it's really depressing, uh, but the compliance was essentially guaranteed.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: And I'll say this study gets misdescribed a lot and misused a lot, but I'm gonna throw it out there.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: And that is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment from 1944 into 1945.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: The participants were actually what we call conscientious objectors, right?
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: They were objecting to the war, the draft, and they were living on an army base, and every calorie they ate was controlled and provided by the research staff.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: So they were intentionally dieted down to about five to six percent body fat, and they were not lifting weights.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: And I think this matters.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna come back to that.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: That matters tremendously.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: They weren't lifting weights, but you know, they couldn't cheat or anything.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: They they had to do what they had to do because they were forced to.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: I mean, I think they volunteered as conscious as project.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: But anyway, we're not gonna get into that piece of it.
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: Okay, then after the diet, after the starvation essentially, came the refeeding phase.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this part, but it's interesting.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: The researchers split them into four groups with different rates of calorie reintroduction over 12 weeks.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: Not sure if you knew that, but we have some good data on this.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: So the slowest group started at 1930 calories a day, worked up to 3,000 over 12 weeks.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: And they were basically weight stable for the first six weeks.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: They gained like 1.2 grams of body mass a day.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And that is a reverse diet.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: It's a textbooked reverse diet executed flawlessly, you know, gradual increase.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: They had no choice, they did it.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: We know they did a reverse diet.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: The fastest group started at 2944 calories and worked up to just over 4,000 calories.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: So during their controlled phase, or I should say during the control phase of all four groups, the weight gain tracked to the calorie surplus exactly the way you'd expect.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: You know, energy balance.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: Like we we know that that works, calories in, calories out.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: The slowest group gained the least, fine, but then the 12 weeks ended and the floodgates opened, and they had eight weeks of unrestricted eating.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: So at the start of that window, the slow group was five kilograms lighter than the fast groups.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: And then after eight weeks of free eating, that gap had shrunk significantly to less than half a kilogram.
• 18:33
  Philip Pape: So, despite 12 weeks of what we can call perfect discipline, it basically just bought them eight extra weeks before they have a rebound.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: So they didn't avoid the rebound weight gain, they just postponed the rebound weight gain.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, and that's a very important thing to understand.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: Because on the metabolic side, and this is where it gets kind of interesting for the reverse dieting piece, in the buttol study I mentioned earlier, the researchers ran a model looking at whether athletes who increased their intake more after the show recovered their metabolic rate faster.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: So if they ate even more sooner than a reverse diet.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: And guess what they did?
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: Every extra 100 calories a day during recovery was associated with 16 to 18 more calories a day of metabolic rate recovery.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: Interesting, right?
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: So the typical post-show increase of 500 to 1000 calories a day correlated to somewhere around 80 to 160 calories a day of metabolic recovery.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: So more food, faster recovery, which is the opposite direction from the premise of reverse dieting, which is intended to restore and recover your metabolism, right?
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: Now, there were 19 people in the study.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's an exploratory analysis.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna build a religion on this or anything.
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: But the three separate studies, post-competition and physique competitors, all line up.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: They're all, they all line.
• 19:51
  Philip Pape: It's not a surprise.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: And then you throw in the Minnesota starvation diet, and we see that those who re-reintroduce calories and regain weight the most conservatively also have the slowest hormonal metabolic recovery.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: So that is a piece I want you to take away from this episode.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: Your metabolic rate is responding to two things whether you're in a deficit right now and how much tissue you're carrying, like actual body mass, but also muscle mass within that body mass.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: And that's mostly it.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: How much you weigh and how much tissue you have, and also whether you're in a deficit.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: So if you reverse diet and only add, say, 50 calories or 100 calories, and that's not nearly enough to get out of the deficit and you're still in a deficit, you're just in a smaller deficit and you're just extending the diet.
• 20:39
  Philip Pape: You're just going with a smaller diet.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: So you're not actually at maintenance yet.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: That's the that's the thing we got to get through our heads, right?
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: The person who quote unquote succeeds at reverse dieting, they might stay lean, if that's a word we want to use, or at least lower body weight, but their meta metabolism also stays suppressed.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: And honestly, these are two sides of the same coin, two sides of the same coin.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: Now, this shows up on the hormone side too, which is important for all of us, especially when hormones become more and more important as we age, especially for women peri postmenopause, right?
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: In that study, the same study of the seven naturally cycling women, four had already lost their period before the show.
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: And then six of the seven had lost it two weeks after.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: So amenorrhea, we call it.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: By 12 weeks, four had it back, but two still didn't.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: What did bring the their periods back was guess what?
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: Eating substantially more food and putting body fat back on, not creeping up with a reverse diet, right?
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: And that is, you know, somehow the people who say reverse dieting protects your hormones tend to point to this study and they've actually got it, it actually works against them.
• 21:45
  Philip Pape: You know, and one last thing on Trexler, just for cool little side stories.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: He co wrote, I think what he states, and maybe the first peer reviewed paper to ever use the term reverse dieting.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: You guys can look that up and see if he's right or wrong on.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: That.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: But anyway, he wanted reverse dieting to work.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Like he really hoped that it was a strategy that did work.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: He calls himself the banana guy.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: So back in like, you know, 12 years ago, whatever, when he was building physique competitor, he was sitting there after a show eating a bunch of bananas and a half jar of peanut butter, well past the point of fullness.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: And his conclusion now, after studying this for a decade, is that reverse dieting is a dead end.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: And that's, you know, following the evidence.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: His idea changed over time.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: So now I want to give you a caveat and then I want to help you fix this.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: I kind of already alluded to the recovery diet piece of this to do the fix, like to obviously increase calories quickly is the real goal here.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: But the people in the research that I just mentioned, pretty much all of those physique competitors and the Minnesota starvation diet, the people were very lean or shredded or whatever word you want to use, 5 to 6% body fat, semi-starvation.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: The Minnesota starvation diet, they didn't have any resistance training.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: Whereas in Butel's research, they were stage lean.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: So of course they were training.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: If you cut down from, let's say, 32% body fat to 27-7% body fat over 12 weeks while lifting, say three days a week and eating your protein, you know, you're not in that demographic, right?
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: You're not in that 5% body weight, body fat demographic.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: Not even close.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: I mean, I've had really, really lean clients and they still, unless they were planning to do a physique show, get down to for men, maybe 10%.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: 10% is extremely lean.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: I don't know what this thing about single double single digit is, as if it's some aspirational thing that many, many men can and should get to.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: Not even close.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: Most men getting to 15%, they're gonna see abs, they're gonna see plenty of muscle definition, they're gonna look great.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: 10% is really, really lean.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: So 5% is crazy.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: Now, for women, you add like 8 to 10% to that.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: Now, there aren't any trials on post-diet, calorie restoration, perimenopausal, or post-menopausal women.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: What a surprise, shocker.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: Anyone who tells you research says X about reverse dieting for menopausal women is just making it up.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: So, what is transferable here?
• 24:07
  Philip Pape: Like what can we actually apply to everybody?
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: Well, I think the feasibility problem is what transfers here, and it actually is worse for the general population.
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: In other words, if you've got 20 or 30 years of dieting history and a very fear-driven or nervous kind of mindset or system that where you've learned that food restriction is the answer, even if, even if you know it's not intellectually now, but you've kind of been conditioned to that, like we all have, then a six-month reverse diet is not gonna happen.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: It's gonna, that's gonna be so tough because you're basically forcing yourself to diet for that many months.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: It's not a reverse diet, it's still a diet, like we said earlier.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: You're still in you're still in a deficit and yet you're not getting a result, let's say.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: So psychologically, it's just brutal.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: Also, the direction of reverse dieting, when you think of recovery, recovery is associated with eating more and putting tissue back on.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: So the idea of gaining weight is is a problem for a lot of you, even though it shouldn't be when you understand what's being gained and why, and the correlation between that weight gain or weight regain and going back to full maintenance and recovery.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: Now, the good news is you tend to be in a much smaller hole than a physique competitor.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: In other words, you haven't dieted to a crazy ridiculous amount.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: So the amount that you've experienced in terms of adaptation is probably nowhere near what they have, which is a good thing.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: That's a positive thing, and in that recovery can take as little as just a few days to maybe a couple weeks, right?
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: It's not, it shouldn't take months though.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: It should not take months.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: So here's what you do when you end your cut.
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, five things.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: Here's the steps.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: Number one, go to maintenance as quickly as you can in as little as two weeks or less.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, so if you're using Macrofactor, like I mentioned before, use my code Wits and Weights, please use it.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: Log your food, log your weights, see how easy this actually becomes to say, okay, I'm done with my diet.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: I know when I started my diet, I was burning 2200 calories.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: At the end of my diet, I'm burning 1700 and I'm eating 1200, so I'm gonna jump up to 1700.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: Like that's it.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: That's that's what you're gonna do.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: Now, if the jump is too big on that first day where you feel distended or like gonna have gas or something like that, it's totally okay to stretch it out for a week or two.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: But that's not a reverse diet.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: That's just titrating up that amount that you know you have to jump to get to full recovery.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: So that's it.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: And we're not telling you to jump all the way to the 2200 that you started with either.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: That's why you need to track this stuff.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: We're not saying jump to your original maintenance, we're saying jump to your current maintenance.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: So that's number one.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: Number two is I would put most of those new calories into carbs.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Why?
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Because your protein should already be high at like 0.71 gram per pound of body weight.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: You should not have gotten into a diet in the first place if you couldn't reliably and consistently eat enough protein, right?
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: Now, if I'm talking to you and you you found this show after a bunch of unintended weight loss or crash dieting or GLP1-driven weight loss, and you weren't doing that, fine.
• 27:01
  Philip Pape: Now's your opportunity to come out, increase the protein and the carbs.
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: But if you did have the if you do have the protein up high enough, the change is mainly the carbs.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: Fats will drift up a little bit, but mainly the carbs, which is what you want.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: Carbs are gonna refill your glycogen, support your training.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: It's gonna help your thyroid, help your stress, help your energy, all of that stuff.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: Carbs are beautiful in this case.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: And in fact, that's what we do when we take diet breaks and refeeds.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: We increase carbs.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: So it makes sense.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: Number three, don't let your training drop.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: And the reason I say this is because in the Butual study, the training load fell below the baseline after their physique show.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: Now, that could be because of physique competitors.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: They really, really train all out really hard.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: They're motivated by the show, and then afterward they kind of slack off a little bit.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: But I would say for you, it's kind of the opposite.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: When the weight's coming back, you're gonna feel better and you're gonna get PRs and you're gonna feel like you can make progress again.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: So I probably don't have to tell you this because it's gonna feel like you want to train more.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: It should feel better, but but your training intensity should actually go up.
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: Number four, I want you to decide your sealing ahead of time.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: Now, what I mean by that is for the scale, I want you to decide: are you going into maintenance, are you going to aggressive maintenance, or are you going into a surplus?
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: And understand that there's gonna be at least two to three pounds of immediate weight gain from water and fluid that has nothing to do with body fat.
• 28:19
  Philip Pape: But then there might be another pound or two beyond that, not from overshooting, but really just from this extra recovery, maybe some muscle mass, some muscle mass coming back, kind of a variety of things.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: And there's a little bit of noise there, and you have to accept that.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: And it's totally cool because what you're getting for it is a much healthier body and physiology.
• 28:38
  Philip Pape: And then number five is I would recommend staying at maintenance for like two to three months before you think about another deficit, or maybe one month, maybe two to two weeks to a month if you're gonna go in a building phase.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: Like for a building phase, it's not that big a deal.
• 28:51
  Philip Pape: I just want you to stabilize first so you don't like way overshoot in the surplus.
• 28:56
  Philip Pape: But if you're gonna go on another diet because you have a, you're actually just taking a break, a recovery break, I like those types of breaks to be like two or three months long.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: If it's a week or two, then that's just kind of a normal interruption diet break.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: That's not what I'm talking about here.
• 29:10
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about a full recovery break.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: Now, I am not saying that gradually raising calories is quote unquote wrong, because eating from going or going from a deficit up to maintenance, as I mentioned before, you can titrate it up over a few weeks if you want, but you're targeting an actual number that's your recovery number, not just like dripping it up slowly randomly and guessing over time.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: I hope you understand the difference.
• 29:35
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that diet breaks don't work either.
• 29:37
  Philip Pape: That's a totally different thing.
• 29:39
  Philip Pape: A diet break happens during a cut, whereas reverse dieting happens after a cut.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: I just want to make sure you understand there they're two different things.
• 29:45
  Philip Pape: But even with a diet break, you need to know your metabolism so that you can break up to that immediately.
• 29:49
  Philip Pape: You're not, you don't want to reverse diet into a diet break because that would totally take forever and wouldn't even work, right?
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, I'm not saying, hey, you you just have to live with fat gain or fat regain.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: You do have to put some weight back on.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: You're going to because of, you know, water and glycogen and maybe a little bit of fat that your body needs to have on its frame.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: You're probably gonna look better though.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: In fact, when I tell people they have a beach event or photo shoot and then we're leaning out for that, we want to stop that cut a few weeks ahead of time and go right back to maintenance and refill that water and glycogen and kind of fills up the muscles.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: You actually have those muscles pop a little bit more.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: So the conclusion of this episode is that reverse dieting as it's sold doesn't do anything at advertises, it doesn't protect your metabolism, and it gives you a big price.
• 30:36
  Philip Pape: Months potentially of further restriction, months more of food fear, the fear of gaining weight, even though gaining weight is exactly what you probably need to do in the right way.
• 30:45
  Philip Pape: You delay your rebound, you delay the recovery, you delay the hormonal recovery, all the things it promises do it, it oftentimes does the opposite.
• 30:52
  Philip Pape: Now, before we wrap up, I I'm gonna give you a little trick about the scale math, or I should say some numbers around the scale math.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: So you really, really understand what I've been hammering on quite a bit lately, which is the weight gain that happens after a cut.
• 31:06
  Philip Pape: I wanna address that because it's so important.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: But that post-cut transition, it's where I see more people lose the skills and the progress they made than any other point in the process.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: Notice I said skills and progress.
• 31:21
  Philip Pape: I'm not talking about your weight or your body.
• 31:24
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm talking about the actual process and the skills.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: During the diet, people tend to be locked in, but after it, the transition is really, really important to sustain your results.
• 31:33
  Philip Pape: That that transition is why we have in our program, which is called Eat More Lift Heavy, it's 26 weeks long.
• 31:40
  Philip Pape: That's why we have a third phase that helps you actually come out and make sure you can sustain your results.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: You can check it out.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: If you scroll down at the bottom of that page, there is a, I forget what it's called, but it's like the program at a glance, the whole 26 weeks, and you can see each week what we cover.
• 31:59
  Philip Pape: And if you're doing a fat loss phase in the middle there in phase two, phase three is gonna help you come out of that and also learn to manage those skills for yourself.
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: So if you want to see how it works, go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: And if you haven't heard episode 491 about set point theory, I would listen to that one next, by the way.
• 32:15
  Philip Pape: If you're not following the show, episode 491.
• 32:19
  Philip Pape: All right, so the week that you stop dieting, the week that you stop dieting, the scale is going to jump.
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: And I'm just gonna say as much as three to six pounds.
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: Men, women, any eight, size, you know, if you're a 100-pound woman, it's probably on the lower end.
• 32:33
  Philip Pape: If you're a 300 pound man, it's probably on the higher end.
• 32:35
  Philip Pape: But I want you to be prepared for it.
• 32:36
  Philip Pape: I want you to know what that is.
• 32:37
  Philip Pape: I want you to be confident that this is totally cool.
• 32:40
  Philip Pape: Your body stores 400 to 500 grams of glycogen when you are well fed.
• 32:45
  Philip Pape: Every gram of glycogen holds three grams of water.
• 32:48
  Philip Pape: So if you refill that alone, you're gonna add three to four pounds.
• 32:53
  Philip Pape: Then you're gonna have more food sitting in your gut because you're eating more.
• 32:56
  Philip Pape: You're probably gonna have a little sodium that draws in even more fluid, and we get to our five to six pounds within a week or two of ending a diet.
• 33:04
  Philip Pape: Could very well happen to you.
• 33:05
  Philip Pape: In fact, if it's not happening, if you're not gaining weight at all, I would question if you're actually recovered.
• 33:11
  Philip Pape: That's the cool thing about it, is we can look at this and reframe it as a positive thing.
• 33:15
  Philip Pape: Now, let's give you some more math.
• 33:17
  Philip Pape: A pound of body fat takes 3,500 extra calories.
• 33:20
  Philip Pape: So, five pounds of fat gain.
• 33:23
  Philip Pape: In other words, if you gain five pounds after you're finished a diet and you're worried that it's fat, that would mean if it's actually body fat, it would take 17,500 calories above your maintenance in those seven days, which is 2,500 calories a day over your maintenance.
• 33:40
  Philip Pape: Not over what you were in your diet, but literally over your maintenance.
• 33:43
  Philip Pape: Do you think you did that?
• 33:45
  Philip Pape: No.
• 33:45
  Philip Pape: That's the logic I like to leave people with.
• 33:47
  Philip Pape: That's just so astounding in like fighting against the emotions in your brain about this.
• 33:52
  Philip Pape: A pound of body fat, 3,500 extra calories.
• 33:54
  Philip Pape: So if you gain five pounds in a week, you would have to have consumed 2,500 calories a day more than your maintenance.
• 34:01
  Philip Pape: And if you didn't actually do that, well, guess what?
• 34:04
  Philip Pape: It's not body fat.
• 34:05
  Philip Pape: So then you don't have to react to it, you don't have to cut back down, you don't have to go back into that diet, be all fearful about it.
• 34:10
  Philip Pape: Just wait about two weeks to three weeks, see what the trend's showing you.
• 34:13
  Philip Pape: Guess what?
• 34:14
  Philip Pape: You can always drift one direction or another.
• 34:16
  Philip Pape: Go get macrofactor to help you do this.
• 34:18
  Philip Pape: Use my code WITS and WAIS all one word, including the link in the show notes.
• 34:21
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 34:22
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your metabolism recovers when you leave that deficit and when you put that tissue back on your body, not when you slowly reverse diet.
• 34:35
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Ape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.