this is our limited series ask an RD inside the Dr Shannon show where we ask registered dietitians some of your most pressing nutritional questions I'm Dr Shannon welcome to the show welcome back everyone I've got hope brand she is registered dietitian we're back for another Askin Rd today we are talking about reverse dieting which I um admittedly know nothing about so tell us what this is okay well an it is a little bit more Niche um and a lot of these terms originally are coming from kind of like the bodybuilding Community like early kind of bro culture um so and a lot of them are moving like a little bit more mainstream now and getting a little bit more nuanced and applicable to more individuals um but it makes sense to like have not really or not have a lot of experience with this um but reverse dieting is the concept of coming out of a period of being in a deficit very very slowly so you're reversing your intake up to your maintenance Point um and the theory behind it is that it helps you maintain the physique progress or like the body composition um progress that you've seen versus just jumping straight back to your maintenance point from being in a deficit I think the times where this makes the most difference and hints this coming from kind of like the bodybuilding Community is when you're in much more of a severe deficit so like picturing um the people who like compete in bikini competitions and things a lot of times they have to enter a very severe deficit to get to that body fat percentage that is super super low so when they're looking at returning to a point of Maintenance reversing their diet more slowly makes more sense than you know jumping from a a low calorie diet back to um a maintenance point for most of the population we should not be ever at a point where we're in a deficit that severe so reverse dieting I think has a lot less of an impact when you're in less of a severe deficit so it's not something that I recommend for a vast majority of my clients um most of the time when we're ready to pull out of a deficit we just kind of return to our maintenance point because it's really only maybe up to like a 500 calorie jump right um but I think reverse diet can be really helpful if you don't know what your maintenance point is so if you want to be meticulous about finding your newer maintenance point when you're coming out of a deficit the process of a reverse diet is increasing your caloric consumption by like 100 to 200 calories per week until you reach that maintenance point so if you're coming from a point where you're eating 1,600 calories in your deficit that would be taking you know four to six maybe to eight weeks to increase your calories by 100 each week returning then to a maintenance point where you are not continuing to see weight loss okay so that's how you know you're at maintenance when you stop Yes losing when you're coming out of a deficit to get to maintenance right when you stop seeing weight loss that's when you know you're in that maintenance Point okay this gets tricky if someone's also trying to build muscle at the same time huh because they might not see the scale change if they're losing fat and gaining muscle yes in I would say that's more of a rare population it's normally not like a one for one swap of like fat loss and muscle gain that would be a specific population who was like pretty untrained so they're able to gain muscle maybe more quickly or I mean I guess it could be in a sense where maybe they were trained and then went through a period of being untrained and then were coming back yeah yeah postpartum um but most people when we are seeing body recomposition we are going to see weight loss most of the time um because most people have more fat to lose mus than muscle to gain got it okay that makes a lot of sense that's really clarifying awesome he thank you hope we'll see you in the next episode