Reverse Dieting Strategies | ETP#154

In Episode 154 we discuss choosing the right reverse dieting strategy and the pros and cons associated with each. Reverse dieting involves gradually increasing calorie intake after a period of dieting to find a new maintenance level. We explore two strategies: the hard and fast approach, where calories are increased immediately, and the incremental and slower approach, where calories are increased gradually over time. We cover the psychological and physiological factors to consider when choosing a reverse dieting strategy, as well as the impact on training. This episode provides a comprehensive overview of reverse dieting and offers insights for dieters looking to transition out of a dieting phase in the best way for themselves.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Life/episode updates
27:33 - The concept of the reverse diet
30:45 - Strategy One: Hard and Fast
31:37 - Strategy Two: Incremental and Slow(er)
34:54 - Advantages of Strategy One
37:54 - Potential drawbacks of Strategy One
45:53 - Pros and Cons of Strategy Two

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Transcript

0:28

What's up guys? Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 154 and we are talking reverse dieting strategies. So we haven't recorded in about two weeks as I believe Brian had some travel or was sick and then I had some travel and now we're back into it. So we have some updates to dive into as always. Brian, can you kick us off please? Yeah, there's actually a lot of updates. It's been a long time. I've missed talking to all of you beautiful people. So I'll get through a few of them quickly and then I have a couple longer ones. But starting on 527, we're dropping new cycles for Paragon. I know that is still a few weeks out, but it's a strength cycle and it's the first strength cycle we've done for a while because we're just finishing up a 20 week hypertrophy cycle. As usual with all of our strength cycles, we offer a hypertrophy option as well, because there's a minority of our members that prefer not to do strength cycles, which I totally understand. So yeah, starting 527, we'll have strength cycles and a correlated kind of hypertrophy cycle along with that should be some fun new movements and bit of a different stimulus than we've been doing, you know, for the last 20 weeks. Just a little housekeeping note that Erin and I were discussing before the show, our buddy Shantae, the movement maestro, let me know that we still haven't finished our body part series and she's 100 % right. We have hamstrings and arms still left to do, assuming we're not really gonna do calves and traps and shit, just kind of throwing those in as part of. the larger muscle groups, but yeah, we'll do hamstrings and arms. So we have at least, you know, two more episodes of that coming up here, down the road. and then the last of my quick updates is, we have our misogi, which I've talked about on prior episodes. This is my big challenge. That's supposed to be a 50, 50 chance of success, a 50 % chance of failure. And, it's a long hike that I've been planning with a few of my friends as discussed on prior episodes. I don't think that this is actually a 50 50. I think it's more like a 80 20. Like I'm probably going to succeed. but it is like 17 miles of hiking with 6,000 feet of vert and all being done in one day. It's like four of the big hikes in Boulder back to back to back to back. so that's happening on five 19, today as we record is five seven. So, I guess it'll be a few days after this episode comes out. And then I'll update you guys on the next one about kind of how it went and if we succeeded and all that good stuff. So I have a few more updates, but I want to kick it over to Aaron. He has been traveling in Australia and maybe even somewhere else, somewhere in Asia. And I don't really know about his trip and I'm curious. So yeah, tell us how it's been, man. So I was in Melbourne in Australia for like four days there was supposed to be a Japan trip on the back of that got cancelled because of some unfortunate events with an injury for with it with an injury in Jackson and so he was planning to compete in Japan and then obviously that got kind of taken with with the injury so yeah it's it's It's pretty upsetting because it's the same injury that he suffered like well over two years ago at this point. It's like kind of come back to bite him in the ass again with that like back wound. So pretty kind of heartbreaking to be completely honest there. but no, it was my first time in Melbourne, second time in Australia and it was, it was cool to see, you know, I, I, I always feel I, I'm fortunate to be able to just like travel and stuff. However, it's, it's kind of ironic is I love the idea of travel. And then once I get like settled into it, I realized I just want to go back home. I just thrive on my routine like so much. I hate being away from it. And within like a day and a half, I just don't feel good. And then like, I'll have that one meal out that kind of like upsets my stomach. And then I'm like managing that. And it just all happens kind of kind of quickly. And I'm like, you know what? I really like my life. I can't wait to like get back to my normal routine and that sort of thing. But I again, I do feel fortunate. There was the plant. The trip was for numerous reasons. I've put on a bunch of weight. since January, since I started exogenous testosterone in my build and that sort of thing. And the biggest clothes sizes here in Bali don't fit me. I'll order like a double XL and it is way too tight. And then like, okay, well, I'll just donate that shirt. So I needed to do shopping. Same thing with the vans. They don't carry vans in my size here. And I was like, okay, I'll go to Australia and I'll get some vans. I find out being in the van store that they do not order an 11 and a half. in any of the van stores in Australia. They go, they order an 11 and the 12 and like, it was like a dagger to the heart when this dude told me this, cause I was like, I had it in my mind. I'm going to go there. I'm going to get all my staple van shoes. Like I'm going to be set for like six months, like no problem. And then I was like, of course there's no 11 and a half, right? And the 11s are too small and the 12s are like way too big. So that was pretty frustrating. The other part was my body weight just cratered being over. Even with like trying to like eat late and I went to the store and got like a bunch of like oatmeal packs and like fruit to be able to hodgepodge like meals together at night. I would eat out like three times per day and make sure to always eat like the larger things in it. And I think it was just the extra steps and how much I actually do eat. I mean, day over day, I was dropping like another, you know, pretty much kilo as I was there. Yeah. And now. 220 right now, is that right? this morning I was 218 .4 or whatever, but last Monday I was 223. Yeah, I mean, dude, I can't imagine how much food must go into even maintaining 220 pounds of body weight, much less to gain weight at 220. Because, I mean, for me to even get above 200, I have to feel like I'm constantly stuffing myself and even kind of go off the board with some unhealthier food choices. And yeah, I mean, another 20 pounds of muscle on top of that is insane. Like, I totally empathize with your plight. Yeah, I mean, it's it's manageable when I have my normal schedule, but like I eat, you know, 7 a 10 a intro workout, 1 p post workout, like three, six, eight, thirty nine. Like that's how every single day is to for and it's you just can't manage that when traveling. So that was I'm kind of frustrated, right? But I mean, it is what it is. And that's just the nature of it. But. kind of shining light of the trip was there's a pretty pretty cool brand of gym in Australia called Doherty's in most of like the major cities and just like cool bodybuilding you know gyms they had a it's either gen one or gen two i couldn't tell based off of like looking up photos because they they they seemed a little bit interchangeable but an old school nautilus leg extension right gen one or gen two so i'm talking Literally from like the early 70s, potentially late 60s. Yes. Yeah. It was amazing. And like my mind, I had seen them on like Instagram and stuff, but I'd never seen one in person and I used it when I trained legs. And it was so hard for me to like sit there and be like, they figured this out 50 fucking years ago, over 50 years ago. And we still have like these companies producing dog shit leg extension machines in 2024. And everything about it was wonderful. The seat was like reclined so that you could get the nice stretch in the rec fam. It would not bottom out. You could, I mean, you could insane stretch. It wouldn't top out. So you could go like, you could, you could like hyper extend if you had that kind of flexibility. It was, you could load it really. I mean, It was an amazing machine. And I'm like, this thing is literally over 50 years old. And he had it perfected so long ago. And then I put this up on my Instagram stories. I had my entire leg day, almost my entire leg day in that room. I watched no less than eight to 10 different people do leg extensions. Only me and one other dude who was a little bit older than me and a bodybuilder used the Nautilus. Everyone else was using like the shitty techno gym. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. was really hard for me to wrap my head around. But I feel fortunate that I'm privy to this information now. I get what I want out of it. My clients get what they need out of it. Everyone learns on their own time or never does. And that's just the way it works. Yeah, I feel like the new wave of machines is really targeting more gen pop, where they want it to be almost this spaceship experience, where they're going for comfort and visual appeal over function. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, I see this all across gyms now. These machines are getting bigger and cushier and comfier, almost like they look like a first -class seat on an airplane. or something like that. And what you really just need is that super compact one that actually has the dimensions and the function to get the ranges of motion that you want and load it properly. And it's just, yeah, it's unfortunate. Yeah, but it was very cool for me from that experience. other quality training sessions there? Or what was like, did you trade with some of your boys there? Or what was the story? Yeah, I trained with a friend Cade the first day the other two sessions I decide I trained by myself And I had really quality training sessions actually a really really good leg day I had a very solid push day the morning before the show I would and that's what I was traveling for there was the the the IFBB nationals in Australia I had some quality training sessions there for sure Are you still doing the steep incline interior delt press on your push day? with, I have it with a Smith Machine. Yeah. I know before you started your TRT, I remember we were talking about it and I think you were using... 36 is maybe 36 kilos, maybe it was 40 kilos, whatever it was. I remember it being slightly above what I was using. And so I was just curious as your strength and your body weight have gone up with the exogenous testosterone, you know, what kind of weights you're pushing on that now. And it was also brought up in a conversation I was having with Dave McConia and Abel, cause Abel just hit the 35 kilos for six. And we were talking about how strong you are on it. And, Yeah. Yeah. So sorry, I still do have the dumbbell interior delt press on. I have a shoulder day, but I do also have like a narrow one on on my push, which I actually did today. Almost two weeks ago was the last time I trained. Yeah, because I didn't do that day when I was traveling the dumbbell interior delt press. I did 42 kilos for nine. So I will do I will go up. because I topped the rep range two weeks ago. So I'll do 44s on Saturday, so in a couple of days. Sick. Well, 44s are going to be 97 pounds per dumbbell. So you're getting really dang close to the hundreds for a vertical press, which is, I feel like a super goal, like life goal, you know, to overhead press the hundreds is pretty cool. Yeah, it's been there's been some cool like training performance stuff. Of course, nothing that actually like fucking matters. Like my pendulum squat numbers have not drastically improved, nor my hack squat or anything like that. But like some pull down stuff for sure. The seated leg extension is one that I've gotten significantly stronger at. Like I'm full stacking it now, which is. Leg extension. The. The Arsenal leg curl is like one of the ones where they kind of just put the same weight stack on everything. And some of them are just like impractical, like on the prone lying leg curl. I don't even know if I'm like halfway down the stack, you know, but then I'm like the leg curl. I'm literally maxing it. So sorry. Yes. Like extension. I keep just word vomiting that incorrectly. Yeah. So that one's it's kind of interesting. Cool. Well, that sounds fun. Keep us updated on the overhead press. I know Abel is curious about that as well. Sick, do it up. Cool. So I will try not to belabor my updates here, but the last we spoke, I was sort of just beginning my adventure into cardio season, so to speak, and had gotten back from Costa Rica and begun my new prioritization five days a week of. biking cardio and two days a week of lifting. And so that's actually been going extremely well. The, well, I guess I'll back up. We did a mountain biking trip, a guy's trip to Fruto, which is this like haven of mountain biking in Western Colorado, kind of right on the Utah border. And we were there for three days this year. We only did two last year and got a ton of biking in. I think we went. and a half hours the first day. We did a double day the second day where we did three hours followed by two hours after lunch. So like five hours of biking that day. And then we hit another three, I think the next day. So that's the most biking that I've done in a three day period in my entire life. And I had been hearing on podcasts and stuff that these, they call them training camps where basically you just go and you double or triple your normal workload for. a few days, and then you recover. And you come back and you're supposed to see all of these new adaptations. And I had never experienced that before, but was curious whether I would. And so we did this thing, I performed really well, it was super fun. I had one small fall, but nothing like last year where I got this massive bone bruise on my humerus falling over my handlebars. So this year, much more success there, but came back and since then the biking, especially a few days like after I recovered and got into that week post the mountain biking trip, I had some of my best performances that I've had yet in biking at all, like even across the board. And so when I look back and compare my numbers to where I was right before my race last year, so I'm talking like late September, because my race was in October. And I compared those results to what I'm what I was putting out, you know, last week after the fruit a trip. And they're like really close, I might be like a few seconds behind like a percentage point behind on some stuff like one thing I did in 930 and it took me 940 this time. And like a bunch of stuff like that. And then to think that I am also 15 pounds heavier right now than I was at the end of biking season last year. And then I'm still being able to kind of match those numbers and that output. I think that that training camp, if you want to call it that is just a bunch of bros hanging out and, you know, drinking beer and mountain biking. But the training camp was was extremely effective and makes me think about kind of batching some of this training in the future. And then kind of on that same note, we had another trip planned this past weekend, I went to Moab, and we did some camping out there. And so for whatever reason, I had like two or three weeks, two weeks in a row after Fruta. where I only had four really hard training days during the week. And then I was forced into taking Friday, Saturday, Sunday off of lifting and cardio and just really hammered the four days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday before the Friday, Saturday, Sunday off. And that seems to have been an extremely effective approach for me as well, because like I think in the past I've leaned toward this idea of taking three days off is going to you know, be harder to get back into it, I'm going to lose adaptations, whatever. But it seems like the increased recovery from taking these three days in a row off have really helped actually create new adaptations. And some of my best biking has been like the day after these three days off. And so it's really, in a lot of ways, it's starting to shift my perspective on how much dose or volume is needed. and whether maybe I have been missing out on achieving adaptations that would have come faster if I would have given myself more recovery time. And this is really, it's a struggle for me. Like I very much want to be training and I feel like training is what's going to push me forward. Kind of like I think newbie, the newbie stage of lifting where you feel like the more you can go to the gym, the more results you're going to get. And it's been a process of me kind of figuring this out as I go through the cardio journey to and like what how much recovery is actually needed. So yeah, I'll keep everyone updated kind of on that aspect as as as it continues to go and I continue to learn. Let's see. Training has been great. As far as training, I guess it's all training. Lifting weights has been great. The two times a week full body is exactly like perfect for me. And and it's keeping my motivation to go lift high, which has been a nice revelation compared to last year where I was training four or five times a week with weights and really kind of dreading the sessions because of much exercise I was doing with the cardio and the weights. So two times a week has been really good. and I just yesterday tried something new on my program. So I kind of went off off my program and instead of doing my, what is mostly like a five by five or a four by six to eight for most of my movements, which means it's pretty heavy and I'm taking significant rest between sets. I increased the volume, but I shortened the rest and the pump that I got was insane. Like I guess I forgot what a true pump feels like in weightlifting because I always do these lower rep sets with these longer rest periods, which it's still in the hypertrophy range. Like five to eight is really where I like to train, but you know, they're so demanding that physically. I take such long rest between sets that there really isn't a huge pump that accumulates. It's like you'll get a pump briefly after a set and then it dissipates and then it comes back again, taking shorter rest. So yesterday I did 18 work sets in 32 minutes. So I just kind of had this nice antagonistic superset thing going back and forth. And I mostly focused on delts and back or lats and just kind of alternated between movements. They hit those muscle groups and the the pump that I had at the end of that session was the stuff of like newbie days. I felt so blown up. And everything was so tight and rigid. It was both kind of nauseating and invigorating at the same time. And, and so I think I'm going to experiment with doing a cycle this way, because it's been so long, and I've spent so much time. doing these low rep sets with these long rest periods that I think if nothing else, you know, being fun, potentially instilling some new adaptations from metabolite, if that's a thing, I don't really know it felt like a thing yesterday. So yeah, I don't know. Those are any thoughts on any of that? What do you do? What do you, how do you feel about the rest periods between sets and stuff like that? I was, I mean, Aaron of a few years ago was, it was definitely like, sometimes I would use like 90 seconds, whatever. Like now it's, I mean, everything's bare minimum two and a half minutes, two and a half leg days. It might be like four to five on some, like a hack squad or something. I just need it. Like my heart rate will still be super high at a three minute, you know, point. I do think there's some utility to it. even if it's just the enjoyment factor, right? And that's like something where earlier on, when I didn't really like to take longer rest times, it's because I didn't enjoy it. And like just having that pump, like it feels good. There's a, I don't know if you know who Dom Mazzetti is, but he was like, used to be a very big like internet, early like Instagram comedy kind of person. But there's always this line that he had, he's like, the pump is the biggest you've ever been and the biggest you will ever be. Hehehe that it was like a really funny, catchy thing, but it's true. Like you just feel better because the whole thing, like, I mean, maybe not for some of the women and stuff listening, but the whole point of going to the gym and stuff for a lot of us where it's like, you just want to be jacked and you want to feel jacked. And the pump is like, it's like a 10 % bump on what you have and you feel like it's like a 30 % bump. So I do think there's even if it's just from an enjoyment standpoint, like you just, it feels good for the most part. I have. unfortunately experienced some incredibly painful pumps over the past few months. And it was like overdosing on a good thing, you know? I'm like, this feels horrible now. So typically a lot of fun, but it can unfortunately be very painful as well. I agree on on leg days, especially if you are really pushing sets close to failure at heavier loads. I do think if you went like more for that pump approach and you were doing sets of like 15, but you were doing say constant tension reps and maybe five RIR, which is still a really hard set, but like 15 reps at five RIR, you can get a massive pump in there, but have it not be quite as debilitating to your soul as doing a set of like seven to one RIR or something like that. And so, Yeah, I don't know. I'm still kind of ruminating on all of this and what that would mean, but I enjoyed it. And I think it's at least worth exploring for like a six week messo cycle potentially during my biking season, just because it's, I think part of it, what I really liked is that it was way less demanding from like a central nervous system standpoint. And granted, like I only did, like I said, delts and lats are back. So, I was alternating, initially I did like cable Y raises with a single arm lat pull down and I did some rear delt pull downs and I did some, some cable laterals and did some pull ups and some pushups. And so, I mean, alternating between upper body stuff like that is not going to be nearly as fatiguing as doing that with leg work would be. But yeah, felt cool. So I'll keep you guys updated. If I did add it into the program, it would be part of, the Brian's program thing, obviously. And I have two tracks for that. I have like the optimal hypertrophy track, which is in the middle of a cycle right now that won't be touched. So it would be for like Brian's program two, which is basically what I'm doing now, which is my kind of two times a week full body program. So anyway, keep you guys updated there. And last thing, man, this is really dragged on. I, every couple of years, I get the desire to back squat with a barbell and just, do it because I want to make sure that I can still do it. And so that was what I did last week. I did my biannual back squat through 315 on the bar and just kind of see how it feels. I did three sets of two and it felt really, really heavy. It looked fast on video. Everyone is like, that was like, you crushed that. You know, that was like eight RIR or whatever. I'm like, man, it did not feel like eight RIR. But. But it was cool. Like I think there is some value in just making sure that you can still put heavy ass weight on your back and sit down and stand up with it every now and then. And just kind of one of those funny things, you know, meet head times, but something I enjoy doing every now and then. I'm going to let my my ego not get the best of me and create and let that creep into my mind. Just not doing that. I cannot believe I forgot this. This is by far the coolest update I have. So I met the bodybuilding show on Melbourne in Melbourne on Saturday. The real we were there to see one of our friends compete in classic music. That was pretty much the reason we were there. That had ended. Bodybuilding was on like my friends had all left and I was like, I'll just hang out and watch some some bodybuilding, you know, and just sit here and see how much I can learn. So I'm just sitting there by myself and some guy comes up to me and he's like, hey, excuse me. Is your name Aaron? And I'm like, yeah. And he's like Aaron for me, train, prosper. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, I was literally listening to your podcast as I drove over to the show. And I was like, no fucking way. So then he sat down and we talked and is this guy named Chris in Melbourne and it was like a very very like wholesome cool moment and it was just like thank you like the podcast is awesome I learned so much, you know blah blah blah and it was one of those like yes, this is really really cool I don't think I said it on the podcast also, but maybe like Three or four weeks ago when I was leaving the gym some guy came up to me and he was like, hey Are you Aaron from Eat, Train, Prosper? I was like, yes And it's just wild. Like it's happened to, I don't know, maybe like maybe like six times since I've been in Bali where someone's like walked up to me and asked me, Hey, are you, are you Aaron? And I'm like that. Yes, that's me. Which is just like wild to me, but it was, it was very, very cool. I was happy to sit there and, you know, have a conversation with him. And it was one of those things where it made me really happy that we do the podcast, you know, and like obviously. You know this, Brian, but like we don't make any money off the podcast. We spend thousands of dollars per year to produce the podcast. And it's really just like a labor of love and a camaraderie thing. Of course, I love getting to speak to you and hang out still. But it was a very cool, like full circle moment where I'm like, I'm very happy that we produce this project and what we do it because people do take a lot of value from it. And that made me feel like very just like. warm, complete, whatever, you know, whatever kind of feeling that I can't seem to find the words for, but it was very cool. dude, that warmed my heart completely as you were saying it. I just get so giddy inside thinking about that impact and how cool that is for you to be like this little micro celebrity. All of it, a teeny little micro celebrity. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just super cool. I'm really glad you shared that and awesome that Chris and everyone else will come up and say something because... That does really make it worth it. Like if you see Aaron or I out in public and you want to chat at all, you know, always. 100%. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, we, so dude, I was looking back at episodes because I thought we addressed this reverse dieting thing at some point when it was a really big deal. Stronger by Science put out a really big thing maybe a year or two ago about how reverse dieting is basically a scam and it's not really like a real thing. And I mean, they love to take these really like polarized views of these things to get clicks, of course. But I thought that we had covered it, and I couldn't find the episode. So maybe I just didn't go back far enough. But either way, I know that you have some thoughts on it, definitely some probably updated thoughts since that all went down a year or two ago. So I'll kind of let you jump in and introduce it. Yeah, so it came from a question, right, which is obviously how we end up talking about a lot of these things. But the concept of the reverse diet, if you're not so inclined, it's effectively exactly like it sounds. So with a typical diet to write a caloric deficit, we are incrementally reducing calories to, I mean, the goal isn't to get calories low. That's just a step that's needed to produce the outcome of lower body weight, less body fat. The reverse diet's kind of the opposite. We are starting effectively at the end of a diet, and we incrementally increase calories up until finding what would be a new maintenance, or potentially you just keep going into a build, or whatever the goals are. That is the concept of the reverse diet. Now, with kind of the question here, and I guess I can read it a little bit, but. the person said, hey, I'm finishing a deficit 15 pounds down. So we don't have the context of how much of that of a total body mass loss that 15 pounds is. If it's maybe a male at 200 pounds, it might be eight or so percent of total body mass, not a significant. If this is like a smaller male who maybe started at 160 or a female who maybe started at 150, obviously significantly larger relative depth of a deficit. And... by the way, just for context, this is a bigger guy. I believe he's over six feet and probably in the 200 pound range when he started, 215 pound range when he started would be my guess. Okay, I'm glad you said that because that changes a lot of things. But I will kind of finish. And the reason it's important is going from 215 to 200, and let's say six foot, 215, you're gonna be about maybe like 18 % body fat unless you're kind of like a genetic kind of freak sort of thing. If you were someone a lot smaller and you're going from like 150 to 135, that is a significantly larger relative delta in total body mass. And the amount of metabolic adaptation that you may encounter can be significantly more large. And that can impact which side of the fence of the approach that you take. And this is all really, really contextually important. So we kind of. Like I said, have two strategies, right? Strategy one is the hard and fast, which is effectively not a reverse diet. Let's say your maintenance calories are 3000 for a very simple example purposes. You end your diet at 2000 calories and it's like sick diets over, you know, tomorrow I go back to 3000 calories, right? And that would be an estimated 3000 based off of your new estimated maintenance calories from your body weight. Let's say, This gentleman, his maintenance calories were 3 ,000 at 215 pounds. Now he's 200 pounds. The maintenance calories will not be 3,000. They'll be pretty close. Like it's not gonna be a massive delta, probably still 2 ,900 or something like that. That is kind of option one. Or sorry, strategy one, hard and fast. Strategy two is incremental and slow -er. Using that same example, Let's say maintenance is now effectively 2,900 calories. We end our diet at 2 ,000. And we could do a number of different ways. You could do over nine weeks, you increase your calories, 100 calories every single week. That would be kind of the slowest I think I would go. I wouldn't see any reason to go any slower than that. Another approach is you could do a larger jump one, maybe from like 2 ,000. to 2300 and then you have like an extra six weeks of a hundred calories or something like that. There is no, there is no hard and fast rule of like X happens then Y happens. So those are the kind of two strategies. And then how I kind of compartmentalized it here to explain it is then we offer the pros and the cons of each strategy. Brian, before I dive into those, do you have any feedback or anything? Yeah, I just think I'll double down on what you said about the context of it mattering between, you know, what body weight is, where you started and that 15 pounds, how significant that is, but also, and it's somewhat related to that, is how lean you actually got. So just because someone started at 150 and lost 15 pounds doesn't mean that that person is a ridiculous lean shredded 135. They could have been over fat 150, lost 15 pounds, and they're still 15 % body fat as a male or 17 % body fat after losing 15 pounds. So the context here is, is how lean did you get? Like if you got shredded down to bodybuilding style, stepping on stage shredded, that might require a different approach coming back up than somebody who went from 20 % body fat to 14 % body fat or something along those lines. Yep. And the reason it's contextually important is there are negative adaptations to a natural human physiology that happens as you get very, very lean. The most common ones here, we get significant impacts to your daily energy levels. Typically a pretty large reduction in sex drive. We see this in both males and females. This is something full disclosure, like I experienced this a lot. Like when I get super lean, I want nothing to do with sex remotely. To me, it feels like a labor. I'm like, my God, okay, yeah, but like I'm not happy about it. It's that sort of thing, which is wild. Training performance, it's really, really hard to perform from a training standpoint and kind of just like a general wellbeing. Like you just don't feel. that great because you're at it, you've been living in a constrained energy environment for a number of weeks to produce it. And there's detriments to how well you produce thoughts and your ability to think quickly and perform mental tasks. It bleeds into pretty various aspects of your life when you get super, super lean. So with that, I guess I'll get into kind of the pros of the hard and fast strategy. If you do get very, very lean, lean enough to where you have these very real, tangible negative impacts in the quality of your life, it makes more sense to raise calories faster, pretty much overnight, a light switch sort of thing so that we can faster reverse some of these adaptations that have begun to take place, right? Another reason that I like this strategy for those those individuals is because we get to take advantage of some super compensation. And this is something I mean, you will see it to smaller degrees if you're getting like shredded, let's call shredded 10 percent and under as a male. Like you'll have clearly defined abs, probably some like veins in the abs, but no like walnut glutes or Christmas tree in the back sort of thing yet. We get this super compensation where let's say, okay, diet's over. You were eating 2000 calories, diet's over. Monday, you can eat like 600, 700 grams of carbs, like way overshoot the maintenance calories. And you might wake up even lighter the next day. Like we see it in the bodybuilding perhaps a lot. And this is something for me, like I have a personal fascination with this concept because from my understanding, and I could be wrong, we still don't have a good. mechanism of action explaining how it works. Because what we do understand with like, hey, a gram of glycogen is also going to store, you know, an accompanying 2 .7 grams of water, we can put approximately in like a, you know, let's call it a 200 pound size male, 400 grams of glycogen in between the liver and muscle. Okay, we multiply that by 2 .7, let's call it three, we get an extra 1200 grams, we should be up, you know, effectively. about 2000 grams, there's two kilos. So let's call that 4 .4 pounds just from loading that. But that's not what we see. People will wake up lighter after pushing 700 grams of carbs, which is hard to actually wrap your head around. So I think the hard and fast one, we can take advantage of that, which is it's cool to experience and it's kind of fun. You get to have this day where you just, it helps a lot of the hunger energy levels like training performance will improve pretty quickly on the back end of that. And it's a great start to us feeding up. and the other prong is pro is it provides a quicker transition into a gaining periodization if desired, right? From a, from a, from a, an investment on time. If you, if the goal is, Hey, I got lean and now I want to go into a build, you're not wasting, you know, effectively eight weeks of slowly incrementing calories that we know isn't actually going to be sufficient enough to produce the positive hypertrophic adaptations that were. So that's another pro. I don't know why I keep trying to mix pro and con together. Now, getting into some of the cons for this, it's hard to execute well, right? And a reason that like Brian brought up with a body fat being a potential decision factor, if you had the... adherence ability to get super, super lean, you are typically going to have the skills, typically not always, to be able to execute this well, but not always. If someone was dieting, starting at like 20 % body fat, I'm speaking about as a male, you don't really have a good grip on your nutrition, typically, if you're like 20 % and plus, right? And the example I like to use is like giving someone the keys to a Ferrari. Right. If it's just like you've been driving a Toyota Corolla and like tomorrow, I'm like, hey, here's the keys to this Ferrari. Most people are going to crash it. Right. And it's the hey, you've been at 2000 calories managing tomorrow. Three thousand deal with them responsibly. A lot of people will fuck that up and way overshoot in their sort. Their dietary adherence and stuff will fall by the wayside. And then they start rapidly putting body fat back on. So it's. A lot of people unfortunately cannot be trusted with an immediate increase in a thousand calories, for example here. And it's again, yeah, just not being able to properly self -govern and self -manage. And this is something that happened. This happens to a lot of people and bodybuilders, mostly in like obviously your beginner ranks and stuff that prep for shows is they just cannot deal with the keys to the Ferrari, right? And they crashed the Ferrari because of that. Yeah, part of that's probably just because they got so lean that they almost, they needed it. So maybe the reverse diet for that person isn't the right strategy. And so it's a con, but it's a con as a result of the fact that they were so lean and maybe the slower reverse diet is maybe the wrong approach for them to be taking anyways. It's a it's a it's a very interesting dynamic between we have a battle of like physiology and psychology, right? The the beauty in the reverse in the whole utility in the reverse has effectively zero to do from a physiologic standpoint, and that is what that that old stronger by science article in an argument is, and I am in full agreeance with that. But it's. humans do not exist in a vacuum. And we know that the human psychology is pretty much the end all be all, right? So many people are either that they are the greats because of their psychology or they constantly self sabotage because of their psychology. And from kind of my standpoint, being a coach that works with a lot of people, there are a lot of clients that cannot handle the keys to the Ferrari. You know what I mean? Even though that that is the physiologic best approach to, you know, manage those adaptations. And we take the reverse dieting approach purely from a human psychology standpoint, because of that. So I feel like you brought it up. It's a wonderful point. And that's really the basis of this entire episode and conversation is like, how are you wired from a psychological standpoint? Can you manage, hey, you just wrapped up the diet, but now we need to diet another. eight weeks just at a increasingly shallower depth of the diet or, hey, we've been driving a Corolla. Can I hand you the keys to the Ferrari tomorrow and can you keep it on the road? And that's it's a massive, which side of the fence are you on from a psychological standpoint? Yeah, not to create too much of a tangent here, but I feel like sometimes when the people take the slow reverse diet, it seems like going into it, their goal is almost not to gain weight. Like they're like, how long, how much, how many calories can I add into my diet and still maintain this body weight that I got to at the end of my deficit? And so, It is like you can do this. You will see someone say they end their diet at 2000 calories and they creep it back up and it's like 2100, then 2200, then 2300, then 2400. And maybe like two months later, they're at 2500 or something like that. You can see this happen where people will maintain body weight despite eating 500 calories more per day than they were eating prior. But to Aaron's point, I think what you're doing in that case is you're just prolonging the diet. because you're not actually getting your body back into like a good anabolic state. And so you're still in this state of sense of depletion. And you're just maintaining that depletion, even though you're giving your body a little bit more food. And so yeah, it's super interesting that battle of psychology and physiology and then kind of how that plays into each person's individual context. Yeah. And it really, using the example you used, I will say it like some people just, Hey, like, let's say someone has like a belly, you know, and like, Hey, I just want to get the belly gone and get back to like a healthy body composition for the podcast listeners. I'm using air quotes because that's highly subjective. If we're dieting, you know, from like overweight to like a down to like a 20 % body fat, which I wouldn't even really say is still like that healthy. You get to, let's say, OK, whatever, using the same exact example, 215 to 200. But let's for all intents and purposes say that this guy is like a really, let's say, to like 12 % body fat, which still really isn't abs yet. But like you're you're like athlete ask shape, you know, not physique athlete, but can make a general athlete. Maybe that's one hundred and eighty five pounds or about 15 pounds over that. You're you're not really going to run into the. the kind of the objectively negative metabolic out of patients, you might have a little bit of like constrained, you know, energy expenditure. Your body might be running a little bit lean in terms of the efficiency of how it distributes heat and energy sort of thing, but you're probably not tanking your sex drive, not probably not increasing your food focus to like a significant degree, those sorts of things. Excuse me. But for those people like you can, if, hey, I'm at 200, but my goal is still to be less than that. I think like, you know, let's say that that maintenance is a true 2900. If you work back up to like 26 and that's kind of your baseline and then you might have two free meals per week, you know, where you go get, I don't know, burger and a couple beers or whatever like that is a very realistic way to maintain that 200 without that 200 turning into like 201. 203 six weeks later. And then like the next thing you know, you're back up at like a 208, 209. And we see this a lot. So it's there are, there is like the objective. Yes, this is the right answer, but it is in the context of like, your adherence is 100%. You don't have food focus, like you're psychologically built to do this where that's like, that's that stance that Stronger by Science argued in. I agree. I think they are objectively correct. but we know that most humans don't exist in a vacuum and a lot of these psychological things are heavily, heavily influential. And to make the best kind of overall recommendation for practice, for humans in practice, I think we have to bring in that psychology because it just plays such a significant role. Yeah, no, I agree completely. Where are we at in this? Because I know one of the things that he asked about as well was training during this stage. And so we don't have to jump into that yet, but just want to kind of keep that on the radar. Yeah, I'll just run through the pros and cons, which I may we may. I think we've already kind of covered some for the for the incremental and slower strategy. So from a mental and psychological standpoint, you are still dieting. You're just not as deep into the deficit as you kind of reverse out. And that does help with compartmentalization of it all. So that's a pro. Life gets incrementally easier each week as you get more food, less hunger, you know, a little bit, little bit bits of training performance increases come. And it's easier to manage, right? So the slower increases in speed limit using that same Lamborghini analogy and less incident risk of crashing there. Cons, extends the total length of dieting. If we do 16 week diet and eight week reverse, we are effectively dieting for 24 weeks, right? Instead of the 16. And it does not yield any true physiologic benefit. It doesn't allow you to like, ramp up or rev up your metabolism or some of these things that people say. The benefit is actually from being able to better manage your human psychology and not give you keys to the Ferrari on day one, pretty much. just to be leaner for longer. Be leaner for longer and reduce the risk that you have these large caloric overages that start putting body fat back on faster. Yeah, yeah. So that's the kind of pros and cons that I have listed out here. And then like Brian said, there's a part about training. Yeah, so I actually am really curious on your thoughts because you are more meticulous with with the dieting aspect and you work with nutrition clients. That means you have a lot more experience with reverse dieting in general. And so like my knee jerk reaction to this is training doesn't really change at all. But I'm curious if you have any nuance that that maybe would be added into that. No, I mean, so something that I like to do, so I guess I actually have to back up a little bit. First, it needs to come to your goal, right? What's the goal? For the overwhelming majority of the clients that I work with, like they enjoy the gym. They want to look good, but they don't have any like very rarely like actual strength goals or anything like that. Just, okay, I want to train. I want, I want to, I don't want to have a dad bod. I want, and I want to look, you know, the way that the way that I want to look. So it's not like, Hey, we're reverse dieting, so we're moving from like low reps to high reps, or I don't typically change anything like that. And most often what I do is I like to kind of allow these real world applications of things so that clients can kind of discover or not necessarily discover, but watch or experience things unfold in real time. So what I like to do is I don't like to change training after we end the diet. I like to keep us on the same training program for maybe like another eight weeks or something because I want them to see all these training performance adaptations like violently come back where it's like I've been grinding at, you know, trying to get the sixth rep of that bench press for like the last, you know, maybe six weeks of my diet. And now food's been back up for two weeks and instead of six weeks, six reps, I'm at nine. Right. And then they report in the check and like, holy shit, the strength and performance, it changes. profound. And it's just that's something I really like to use just to illustrate like, yeah, like you can see now how the food and how the energy environment and that sort of thing like really does impact recovery, training performance, all of these things. So that's typically what I do. And it's really a really cool learning experience for clients. And that's the main reason I keep it in. Yeah, no, I love that. And I think that that's exactly kind of where my head was going to is if you're going to take that slow and steady reverse, then you mostly want to keep training the same so that you can see the impact that food has on your training. The other side of the coin would be the person that skips the reverse and goes kind of right back up to maintenance calories immediately. And so I think in that case, you could definitely keep it the same and you would see the same immediate, probably even stronger immediate positive impact on your training. Alternatively, and I think this is. a lot of hypothetical at the moment, but if you're putting a bunch of extra food into your body, say an extra 800 to a thousand calories, you know, from yesterday to the next day, and that's kind of your way forward. Maybe a short metabolite metabolic type block could be effective where you're taking shorter rests, doing same muscle group, supersets or higher rep sets, something along those lines. maybe some more short overload movements. And this could help with nutrient partitioning, shuttling blood into the muscles and things like that. And so I think in that case, maybe you see some benefit to the metabolic style training for a few weeks before going to going back to your standard straight set hypertrophy approach. But I do think if you're going to do the slow and steady reverse, that you don't really get the same benefit from doing metabolic training, and it might actually have a negative effect because you don't actually have enough food coming in to really take advantage of shuttling that into the muscles effectively. So that's kind of my thoughts on the training side. No, it's a very good. I mean, from again, I don't think I've seen anything in practice on that. But theoretically, I agree 100 percent. I think it makes perfect sense, especially for the person who like does want to immediately return food up, but is potentially like fearful of fat gain. It's a it's a kind of it's a cover your ass per se will increase energy expenditure and, you know, in carbohydrate oxidation through this, you know, glycolytic training modality or training, I guess, pathway. it's a little bit safer there. There was one con that I forgot to add on the hard and fast ramping calories up overnight. So I wanted to make sure I added that, because this one's pretty important, digestive capacity. As you diet, right, you will produce less hydrochloric acid in your stomach, right? The body adapts to the environment that you are providing it. And if your food volume is way down, like you'll produce less, less, stomach acid, less digestive enzymes, those sorts of things. If you just flip a switch and like triple your food volume, you may get incredibly bloated, your digestion will slow down like crazy, you might have some constipation and things like that. That's another con of the flipping the switch and a potential reason that the slower and steady approach can work because for people who've just spent however many weeks getting really, really lean. And then in 48 hours, they're all bloated and gassy and they don't even look like they have abs and stuff anymore. Like that can really, really fuck with some people mentally. And that's another where if if a client I know has like iffy digestion will will do a slower, not necessarily like 100 calories per week. But I'm like, OK, here's 300. And I'll pay really close attention to what digestion has been like and give them specific instructions like, hey, Do not have the fucking pizza or the burger or whatever, because this is what's gonna happen. And then you're gonna feel like dog shit, because you think you just ruined your reverse sort of thing. But the digestive capacity is another variable in this. Yeah. I just have one question about that because thinking about my own situation here, selfishly, I'm still eating a ton of food because I'm doing all this biking. And so I wonder if someone were to use cardio as a primary tool to create their deficit, but not restrict food as much. So say they are at 3000 calories and then they just, add more cardio to lose their body weight, to get to their goal. Instead of going down to 2000 calories, they maintain 3000 calories the whole time and just increase the dose of cardio. This person then is in a deficit, but they're not in a deficit because food volume is lower. They're in a deficit from outside factors. And so if that person then were to, to stop as much cardio, but keep eating the same amount of food, they would essentially create the reverse effect. So it would be almost like a reverse diet without changing calories, but by incrementally decreasing the amount of cardio you're doing. And it really has the exact same effect. And so I wonder if we would experience any of the same disruptions that you mentioned in that case, or if that would probably mitigate it because the food volume hasn't really changed. I don't think you would encounter disruptions to the digestive capacity, but I still think you would run into the metabolic adaptations of the sex drive, those sorts of things. I have a client that we're dealing with this right now. He got very, very lean. We went through the reverse diet. Calories came way back up. I want to say we're at like 3 ,700 calories. He's 186 -ish pounds. and still had severe, you know, metabolic adaptation signals. We got labs, labs were all sex hormones across the board were in the gutter. Sex drive was still low. Like we read and what we had to do is we had to pull back activities because we were kind of bumping up to where like he couldn't we couldn't push more food. Right. Like the food, like digestive capacity was starting to be problematic. The timing, you know, he's has like a nine to five. Can't just eat every two and a half hours at home like I do. And we literally had to. pull his activity back so that we could start to allow like some of those adaptations to start to come down. So it's kind of like that. The way in the research is best described as like the female athlete triad was like, you know, your young girls, they don't eat, they're playing all these sports, they have, you know, I forget the specific terminology, but the loss of cycle through like the, the activity level sort of thing. It's the same kind of scenario exists in males. But it's like with if you're just, It's the same concept, it's just the activity versus the food. Those are like two gas pedals, you know what I mean? So. Just because I just looked it up, we did do an episode on reverse dieting and it was the one round table we did with Jeremiah Bear. That was a good episode too. It was, so that is episode 92 and it was from November of 2022. So I didn't go back far enough initially. Yeah. I do think though, I mean, I'm sure the episode is probably very similar, but I do think we maybe got into the nitty gritty a little bit more in this one. Yeah. was a very female focused episode too, because I know Jeremiah works with with a lot of females too. So I think today we took more of like a male kind of approach to the problem. So even though I think it does work across the board. Do you have anything else to add to kind of wrap up here? No, but I guarantee someone's going to ask a question and I'm like, you know what? I completely missed that and I apologize. And maybe we'll update it in the next episode. But no, I think we cover this one pretty comprehensively. And I think we provided the you know, the listeners a pretty good informed route of which may be most appropriate. And I really think like you said, if you're like on the fence, it's body fat specific. If you got very, very, very lean, faster is better unless. you got very, very, very lean and psychologically you think you're going to like binge and stuff, then you need to like stay a little bit more controlled and save yourself from yourself. Yep. Love that. Yeah. So I think that was pretty well covered. if you guys all, if anyone has questions that they want answered in kind of long form and not just like, you know, two to three minute answers in our Instagram Q and a, we always love kind of getting topic ideas like that. And then I'm sure going forward, we'll see the hamstrings episode and the arms training episode because we have to finish up our body part series and, we'll have another Instagram Q and a. for May as well. So a lot of good stuff in the works here. Yeah. And I'll wrap this one up with what's really cool is our YouTube is actually kind of starting to finally get some traction. We're getting a lot of comments and stuff there. So if you're happy to listen to this to like, you know, Spotify, Apple podcasts from the other ones, please just drop us a subscribe over on YouTube so that we can just get things into typically the younger generation who is more poorly informed as we were when we were young. So get them a little bit more. better information. So appreciate everyone as always. Brian and I will talk to you next week.