Living Lean
Understanding Weight Fluctuations When Reverse Dieting & Transitioning to Maintenance
To Apply For Coaching With Our Team: CLICK HERE
To ask us a question for the next Q+A episode: CLICK HERE
Read Our Free Blogs: CLICK HERE
📲 Follow Our Team On Instagram:
- ELEVATED COACHING SYSTEMS TEAM PAGE
- JEREMIAH
- ANDREA
- NATALIE
- TASS
- CHELSEA
To Apply For Coaching With Our Team: CLICK HERE
To ask us a question for the next Q+A episode: CLICK HERE
Read Our Free Blogs: CLICK HERE
📲 Follow Our Team On Instagram:
- ELEVATED COACHING SYSTEMS TEAM PAGE
- JEREMIAH
- ANDREA
- NATALIE
- TASS
- CHELSEA
Hey team, welcome back to the show. Today it is Coach Andrea, aka Coach Angela, and myself working through understanding weight fluctuations during reverse dieting and transitioning to maintenance. This is a topic that comes up a lot. I think we both get a lot of DMs about this constantly and we actually got several listener questions that were in a very, very similar vein. So I just wanted to turn this into one episode to address a couple of questions. But again, this is something that comes up so frequently because post-diet.
Speaker 1:I think that post-diet is one of the hardest phases for most people, especially if it is like this is the first time I've dieted extremely well and really gotten close to the physique I want or achieved the physique I want. I know we see that with so many clients where that initial fat loss phase, when it's like I really did the thing for the first time, that is so rewarding. But after the diet is over, it can be a scary thing, right? Because it's what if I lose my results? What if I like? Especially because we will see the scale increase some, we will see more weight fluctuations and things of that nature. Really understanding how to interpret those is so important for being able to continue your journey. Because, because this is such a scary thing for a lot of people, the mistake so many women especially make is well, I'm just going to keep dieting, I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing. I try to keep calories as low as possible and that's just not a sustainable way to live or your quality of life or building muscle tissue. That'll hamstring you there From a hormonal perspective, your metabolic rate all these things suffer so much. So eating more food is such an important part of your journey. That's why we talk about these phases constantly because, again, really, that fat loss phase should by no means be the majority of your year. We want to spend so much more time maintenance and potentially even a slight surplus than we are in the fat loss phase, and that's really where your physique will change the most if you give yourself permission to actually fuel yourself better and build muscle.
Speaker 1:But transitioning to this phase can be so hard, so really wanted to specifically talk through just understanding weight fluctuations during reverse dieting. So, again, this really stemmed from a couple listener questions and, as always, we appreciate you all tuning in and listening and asking questions. These came in in the question box which is in the show notes for the podcast and I believe it is in the both of our bio links on Instagram as well. But we had two questions here Now the first one is from Shondi. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1:I did make this question a little bit more succinct just so we could make it very easy to grasp for listeners. But basically what she asked was after implementing a reverse diet and strength training routine, my weight has slightly increased after adjustment macros. I'm not sure, and I think she said like her average weight was up. She had slowly reversed, dieted, pulled back cardio. I know she was doing a lot more cardio before and she'd actually continue to like stay in a slight deficit during that time and continue to lose. And just very recently her weight on average was up about 0.1 kg. So still up a very small amount. But she mentioned I'm unsure whether it's due to water retention from transitioning to maintenance or if I'm now in a surplus. I plan to eventually go into a muscle building phase and want to find my maintenance intake first. Should I hold my macros for a few more weeks to allow my body to stabilize or should I decrease them? Any advice on how to interpret recent scale weight changes and manage my nutrition and training.
Speaker 1:And then we got another similar, similar question which was enjoyed, your fat loss series. Next, can you go into what happens after the fat loss phase, how to navigate maintenance and getting to maintenance? So again, we appreciate the questions and let's go ahead and dig into the topic. So, first and foremost, to kind of just touch on the importance of transitioning to maintenance, again like post diet that is so huge and we already kind of alluded to this. But from a hormonal perspective, right First, making sure you have a healthy amount of body fat is very important. Now, I don't think in either of these cases it's necessarily referring to someone who like, hey, maybe you got so lean that you're below, like what a healthy level of body fat was for you, and we talked about that on like a very recent podcast, deciding whether you should cut or build first. But alongside that, just having adequate food intake, for example, like for a healthy, consistent menstrual cycle, your carbon intake and your fat intake those are going to be very important factors there. Have yourself well fueled in your training to be able to best recover from muscle protein synthesis perspective, all those variables like us being at maintenance at least, or again, at least at least at maintenance, and sometimes on a site or plus, depending on, like, where the client is at and if it makes sense to her true building phase or not. That increase in food is going to be so important. There. All your biofeedback really is going to be better and again, it's just going to be such an important part of being able to sustain the result long term.
Speaker 1:Because when people are kind of just trying to stay in that deficit again, typically what happens is eventually you just get so sick of trying to eat Again. Not only do we see metabolic down regulation right, so your body, your metabolism, will continue to down regulate hormonally. Again your hormonal profile will suffer. Sex hormones will really typically suffer quite a bit as well. So again, like your mood, energy, libido, things of that nature, will suffer. And then again your ability to build muscle will also suffer if we're seeing things like testosterone in a poor place, which again is going to be more common if we are constantly dieting.
Speaker 1:So it's going to be very important to transition to maintenance, but again, at the same time, most people are in this place where it's like, hey, I want to avoid gaining body fat. So again, this is a very, very common struggle. So first let's talk through kind of how to go about finding your maintenance intake. So, andrea, can you give us a high level overview of like when we're trying to find someone's maintenance intake? How do you approach that? Like coast diet, how do we approach this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So most likely through this fat loss phase you will have lost weight on scale. So your new maintenance is going to be different than it would have been before you lost that weight, because your body weight in general is going to be a big determiner of what your basal metabolic rate is. So if you were maintaining on 2,200 calories before and you jumped straight up to 2,200 calories again because that's where you maintained that before, then most likely you're just going to see your weight slowly creep up until you get pretty close to the point that you were before. So in order to find your new maintenance, what we'll typically do is have an estimated maintenance in mind. So let's say it's 2,000 calories is about where you think that person is going to land afterward. So we also don't jump immediately up to 2,000 calories for a few different reasons, one being that if you are overestimating, then you're going to start adding body fat back. But also, just if you're going from, let's say, 1,400 calories straight to 2,000 calories, digestively habits wise, like a lot of things, are having to adjust back to eating more food.
Speaker 2:So what we'll normally do is and then there also is that adaptation that we're reversing at the same time, and so you will jump back up to say 1,750 calories or 1,800 calories, something that is conservative but much closer to where that maintenance is ultimately going to land. And then from there we'll walk it up more slowly, say 50 to 100 calories at a time. And when we make those slower adjustments up is a lot dependent on how things are going. So it might be every single week. We're able to month those things up because your body is responding really well, you're feeling really good, you're able to put that energy into the gym and things like that, or we might see more weight fluctuations on the scale, or you're struggling, maybe digesting this extra food, and we need to dial some more things in before we make those next adjustments up. But that's how I'll typically walk someone up is make that more aggressive jump at the start, but to a place that you know isn't going to put them in a surplus, and then more slowly bump things up from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll dig into a little bit more like when and how to make adjustments in just a moment. But yeah, and that's, of course, exactly how I approach it as well. But when we're looking at like, how big of an increase should we make from the initial deficit, I really typically like to look at what was your rate of loss beforehand over the last three or four weeks. Again, and I think an easy way to look at this is let's say you're losing about a pound per week on average. Okay, we know that you're probably. We know that to lose a pound of body fat, we need to be in a roughly 3500 calorie deficit, right? So let's say a pound per week, you were probably eating about 3500 calories below your maintenance intake across the course of that week. Or if we were eating the same intake every day, hey, we could probably. So basically, we could safely add in about 500 calories per day. 500 times seven is 3500. And that would put us at roughly our maintenance intake. And again, this year is important to look at it as like, how many calories I'm adding back in weekly versus. That's really kind of going to be the best way to look at it, because it might be for, like a lot of our clients, is like we're having high load days so again, maybe we're going to add in like 400 500 calories on both the low days and the high days, but still let intake. Day to day is going to be different, but I digress. So to bring it back to that then, as you said, we want to be certain that we're not over shooting maintenance, but it is a good idea to make a pretty large initial jump, Like I. There are very few cases where it's like okay, the deficit is over, we're only going to increase you by like 50 to 100 calories. The one instance where I might take a more conservative approach like that is maybe you weren't losing, right, and realistically, this probably is just stemming from adherence suffering. If that is the case because again, we can be pretty confident if we actually want to make any changes there you probably weren't actually in that large of a deficit, right? So thus we would maybe go something more, like 100 to 200 calories. But again, if it's like this is a number that should be a large deficit for me and I'm just not losing, it's just a slight increase in calories, like 100 to 200 calorie bump will typically improve our adherence and we'll see. Okay, the next week, oh, maybe I did suddenly start to see things lose, or I didn't gain and we can bump that and take up a little bit more. Or if it's like, truly we've adapted down that much, then again, we would just want to be a little bit more conservative for those increases.
Speaker 1:But again, as you're eating more food, your metabolic rate will also increase. Right, your body will be burning more calories through the process of digesting. You will have more energy, you'll be more pacing, fidgeting, blinking, you'll probably be pushing harder than the gym. So also, we'll equate to the dust your maintenance calorie. Your maintenance calorie range is also increasing as a result of eating more food. So then you can likely handle more food again in the future.
Speaker 1:But again, typically I'm looking at okay, what was the rate of loss? So let's say, I think their maintenance is probably like 500 calories higher than where they're at currently. Okay, I'm going to jump up to like 80% of that number, right? So if I think like, hey, their maintenance and this is again like maintenance is a range, there is at least going to be a couple hundred calorie range for most people as far as how far we can increase their calories before you actually start gaining body fat, which in this case is going to be different from just seeing the scale increase gaining body weight. But in that case, if it was a 500 calorie deficit, okay, cool, probably going to bump up about 400 calories and see how their body responds, which from there really leads us into how do we interpret the weight fluctuations and how do we adjust macros.
Speaker 1:Okay, so when we're getting into this, we made that initial increase, which is kind of where the question, the asker of the question. We said we're going to come up with a different term than the question asker last time. That's kind of where she's at currently. So within that we're looking at, we want to gauge how does the body respond right, and that's where we're making future adjustments from. So the most important thing to understand here is that, no matter what, when we're leaving a deficit, we will see we should see an increase in weight. I typically say like most women will probably see weight increase like one to three pounds. It really depends on how large your body is, but most women will probably see weight increase like one to three pounds. Most men it'll be somewhere closer, like three to even six. What would you what's like what? What would is the standard number you expect there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll usually say anywhere from like zero to five pounds with women, because it's such a large range and it just depends on so many things. You have to remember the majority of the, the things that you're adding back in, are going to be carbs. So your carbs you just are eating more carbs overall than you are fats typically, unless you're in like a keto diet or something like that, and so that's where a large amount of the food is going to be pulled from. So that's also where we're going to add quite a bit back to whenever we're we're adding food back in and a reverse diet and each gram of carb pulls in about three grams of water, and so it's very unlikely that you're going to add in like 50 to 100 grams of carbs and not see your scale weight increase.
Speaker 2:If you don't see a scale weight increase, I don't think that that's like there's anything wrong there either. Sometimes you'll have a decrease in cortisol because you're adding stress. Adding carbs back in it lowers stress, so you drop water weight and so it kind of offsets itself, but most of the time you're going to have more water weight. You're going to have more food just sitting in your GI whenever you step on the scale in the morning. So it's it's a pretty wide range and it just depends on that person's metabolism and how fast they're digesting foods and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but in the long term, as he said there and this is, it is important to look at other metrics and just the scale, which we'll touch on in just a moment as well. But most people, you should expect to see weight increase, and that is not a bad thing. That's not. That initial increase isn't body fat gain, as you said. You literally are eating more food, so thus you have more food in your stomach, so your body will be heavier it should be heavier just because we actually just have more food in our stomach. Also, as you said, we're eating more carbs.
Speaker 1:Part of our goal in this phase is we want to improve your training performance, your ability to build muscle. Those carbs are going to be stored as muscle glycogen, which is going to increase your training performance, but we will have more full muscle glycogen stores than we did before. That's just carbs stored intramuscularly and again they'll be used as fuel in your training. So that means basically, think your muscles are heavier. Those carbs also again, per gram of carb soaks up about three grams of water, which in turn again just makes your muscles look more full. It's not a bad thing, but there is more water or carbohydrate, more food in your system. So weight should increase a bit, right, and we expect again to see a little bit of an initial jump there. That's not a bad thing.
Speaker 1:And again, for really this is where it's important to look at other metrics outside of just the scale weight. So, alongside this, it's very important to look at multiple data points and trends over time. So we're also looking at body measurements, and really, in body measurements, what we're looking for, so we'll have clients take, and this depends on the client, because we won't use body measurements at all. For some clients, though, and if this is something where you are someone who is a little bit more data driven and you don't mind taking these data points, it can be very helpful. I also think, though, sometimes this can be detrimental.
Speaker 1:I think it's too easy to almost get too focused on so many different data sets, and sometimes it's like we need to just loosen the grip just a little bit, and sometimes the additional stress of all this is actually detrimental, but so it very much depends on the client. But also, looking at chest measurement Two inches above the navel, navel, two inches below the navel, hip, thigh and bicep measurement, and typically what we're looking at here is that two inches below the navel mark, that will be the one that's most impacted by your GI content. So because you are eating more food, the thing is no matter what. Literally there's eating more food, there will be more food sitting in your belly. Thus we will have a little bit more blow, I guess we could call it in that two inches below the navel mark. So typically, alongside that increase in weight, there will come an increase in that two inches below the navel mark. We're really looking for most everything else there with that initial jump in calories to stay very similar. But we're also looking at how are your progress pictures looking?
Speaker 1:And for most people what we'll see is, as we increase food here, especially in like this first couple of months, we'll typically just see your body composition improving right, and this is again we also have to understand as we're feeding more, as we're able to train harder, push harder, potentially, handle a little bit more volume, a little bit more intensity, you'll also be more predisposed to being able to build muscle tissue. So that also is going to cause a scale to increase. If we're not in a deficit, we're not losing body fat, so thus we're not really like recombining and weight saving the same, we're building muscle and losing fat. We'll probably see the scale go up a little bit just due to the fact that you're adding some muscle tissue to your frame. So again, looking at, like, your body weight, your body measurements and also your progress pictures, and are we seeing body composition improve?
Speaker 1:Right, and I think this is one of the most important things here Again, especially with so many of the women we work with, where it is so easy to just look at that scale data. But I would say, like for me in the reverse diet phase and like in this maintenance phase, because so much of it can be, it's so context dependent, even body measurements where, like, hey, your hips, your hip measurement is increasing, but is that because we're building your glutes or is that because we're gaining body fat? I really would say progress pictures are probably one of the biggest things that I adjust macros around in like this reverse diet maintenance phase. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, even with that two inch below the navel measurement, that's one where you'll see it increase, at first with the largest jump in your food, but then beyond that, if that starts to continually creep up. That's where I'm more concerned with that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the thing is. At maintenance people typically have a little bit more food variety as well. Typically, people do work in a little bit more dietary flexibility, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But with more variety in your food will also come more fluctuations in your scale weight from day to day. That will also come with more fluctuations in all those navel measurements. So we also want to look at again.
Speaker 1:It's very important in a phase like this to not take too much stock in the week to week trends Because again there will be like had a little bit more food variety this week, so maybe the scale fluctuated up and down a little bit more. Or maybe this week several women measurements are up like a quarter to a half inch around my navel. So there we have to look at, okay, from a food perspective, did you actually eat like thousands of calories over plan to where you actually could have gained back a lot of body fat, or could this just be due to these other fluctuations? Right, and again, how our progress picture is looking and how is our biofeedback looking? How are we feeling in our training and we have to use, because it's way too easy to like oh shit, my measurements are up just a bit this week from last week, I need to pull back my food.
Speaker 1:But almost always what we see is like, hey, if we stay the course, I would say for most clients in like this phase, typically what we'll see is like okay, my, some of my navel measurements are up this week like a quarter inch to a half inch.
Speaker 1:Cool, let's just stay the course. Let's not necessarily increase food based on this and then a situation like that, I typically won't increase food, but I also want to pull it back. Let's see what happens next week, and it's almost always okay. This week they actually dropped back down to where they were, or actually dropped it back down a little bit below to where they were, and that's again like we have to look at kind of the macro rather than the micro, at least a couple of weeks worth of data when we're trying to make decisions here. So, from there again, like really progress pictures, though, are really what I would hone it on. Progress pictures and biofeedback, I think, are the two most important variables here. From a biofeedback perspective, what are you typically looking for as far as like, hey, here's the sign we need to increase food.
Speaker 2:Hunger is a big one. So if we're rating hunger on a scale of one to 10, anything or I guess we are we doing.
Speaker 1:I use one to 10 or one to five, it doesn't matter though.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's one to five on one thing and one to 10 on the check-ins Anyways. So anytime I see that as more than like a five, I am probably going to look at increasing food depending on where everything else is and asking the client with some more context in. That is important too, because you should even at maintenance, you should have some hunger leading up to your meals and probably in the morning when you wake up too. Like you know, your goal is not to feel stuffed full all the time. But if you're feeling excessively hungry or you're getting energy dips because of hunger some people will feel energy dips rather than that like belly hunger feeling Then that's a good indication that you need to increase food.
Speaker 2:Training performance is another big one. We really I mean, if our goal is to change our bodies, then a lot of these things are focused around improving your training performance. So if your training performance is suffering, then that's a really good indication. As long as peri workout, nutrition is on point hydration and all those things sleep, then we probably need to increase food further to improve training performance as well. And then, of course, we're keeping an eye on things like your digestion and your sleep mood and things like that, but those other ones that I mentioned are the biggest, in my mind too, if we need to increase food or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And that again like if it is, hey, my measurements are staying stable, my weight is staying stable. Now, on the flip side, if it's like there is just an element of hunger, no matter what, like post diet and this also depends on how lean you got but typically like the hunger is. So if it's like, hey, I'm maintaining very, very well, but hunger is higher than we want to see it, I'll increase food. If it's man, I like we're seeing things straight up a little bit, but there's still some hunger present, it depends on the case. Some people will just need to increase body fat and if that's the case, we'll also oftentimes increase food. But sometimes there's an element of like, hey, this hunger is manageable and every week is kind of turning out, and there is a time element of just getting your body used to eating more food again after we lost a good amount of fat, where sometimes we do still want to hold that.
Speaker 1:But typically, if it's like, again, we're maintaining well, but training performances in a good place, hunger is in a good place, that's a sign that we're going to want to increase food and again, that's typically where we would make is probably going to be something like a smaller, 50 to 100 calorie adjustment, depending on the size of the individual, that training performance as well as such an important variable here that we need to consider again, like your goal in this phase is to improve body composition, to build muscle, we don't want you to hungry during that time Muscles, very calorically expensive. We want to make sure you have plenty of food and you're sending it at your body the signal that it's okay for us to add this calorically expensive tissue and again, that is literally going to be your fuel going into those training sessions. So, really, looking at where our training performance is, there is such an important variable and, again, if it's like, hey, progress pictures are still looking great, we still have a lean body composition that we feel great in, but my biofeedback is, or your biofeedback is, telling us that we do need to increase food, then, like, we need to, like, give yourself permission to be okay with increasing more, right, because again, a lot of times that's just your body telling you like, hey, we do need to increase.
Speaker 1:Now the food quality is also something that's very important here, where we also want to make sure you are eating a nutrient dense, mostly whole foods diet. There is room for flexibility. But on the flip side of it's like I have my diet foods and my off diet foods and these are drastically different. Right, if we're eating like lots of filling whole foods, we're eating plenty of fiber when we're dieting, and then suddenly it's like like most of my meals are just like Chipotle and all of like the foods that I missed the most when I was dieting, and it's mostly like highly processed foods or meals out and things of that nature. You'll be hungry even at maintenance. It will be so much harder to fill yourself up, which is why it is so easy, like in the environment we live in and the food environment we live in, to gain body fat Because we're eating like almost exclusively highly processed foods.
Speaker 1:It's just going to be very hard to ever be satiated.
Speaker 1:So your food selection there is also very important.
Speaker 1:But if we have that in a good place, then, like, really using that hunger or training performance or energy levels Alongside our progress pictures, how our body measurements are changing and things of that nature is such an important variable for really determining do we or don't we need more food.
Speaker 1:But really, again, like from listening to this, I think one of the biggest takeaways is, yes, we are looking at the scale data, but I don't really I would say for both of us and again, we definitely keep this in mind but for both of us, like, if the scales increasing more than we expect but progress pictures are in a good place, or just typically what we'll see is, while your training performance is great now, your biofeedback is good now, and if body measurements and body measurements progress pictures, those things are still in a good place and we're liking what we're seeing there and those things are improving, especially progress pictures typically improving. We're okay with weight training up a little bit quicker. What do you agree with that? I would say it's almost like the last the way is the least important variable. Now I think it's easy to hear that and think like oh, my coach is just going to let me gain like 15 pounds in the first couple weeks of their verse diet, which isn't the case.
Speaker 1:That won't happen. But that's never how it goes. I think there's like a fear that I'll be able to like in a month I'm going to gain back all the weight that I lost and that's just not the case. But again, it's so easy to like, hold on so tightly and, like I know in her case it was like my average weight is up like 0.1 kg, which is what like 0.22 pounds, like a quarter of a pound.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's incredibly normal and that's just like a very, very small fluctuation. That could literally be like we trained a little bit harder and there was a little bit more inflammation than normal. You did a little bit more volume, you ate a little bit later than I, before a couple of nights of the week, or something of that sort. There's so many factors that could impact that that we just need to really look at all these variables, not just how the weight is shifting, anything else to add to all that before we wrap it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds like in her case in particular she was, like she had said, in a deficit before and then all of a sudden she's near enough to maintenance that now she can see those fluctuations up on the scale rather than that being sort of disguised by under eating her maintenance, if that makes sense. So now, like when she gets up close to her maintenance intake, if she did have a bigger meal or she is near her cycle, now she's going to see that elevation above that baseline, whereas she wasn't seeing it before.
Speaker 1:Right? No, absolutely, and I think it's so valuable to see. Even when you are truly at your maintenance intake, your weight will fluctuate. It will never be like the exact same weight. It'll always fluctuate plus or minus a couple pounds, so that is very, very normal. I also think that most this is one of the best times to work with a coach.
Speaker 1:If you've struggled to maintain your results or you don't know how a lot of like we just posted Sarah, who you two have done an incredible job so far, and shout out to you Sarah, she is shredded and it's crazy, like her story where she lost 80 pounds on her own, but it was like I don't know how to maintain this. Now I want to learn how do I actually maintain this? How do I read my biofeedback? How do I tell when I need more food versus when don't I? How do I distinguish between like is the scale weight that I'm seeing come back on? Is this body fat that I'm gaining or is this muscle growth that's happening?
Speaker 1:And really I think that like trying to, because a lot of this, as you can tell, we haven't given like extremely clear. Like you should make this adjustment at this time because it is so individual and it's based on a multitude of factors, not just your weight, but also your measurements, your progress pictures, your biofeedback, your training performance. That it is very individual and again, I really think, understanding this, this is the most important time to be coached. I'll like die on that hill where.
Speaker 2:Well, she did do it without a coach the first time. Remember when she gained 20 back and then died of that off again and then we were both dieted together. Just having that accountability and having somebody take that decision off with your hands is really, really valuable.
Speaker 1:And learning how to like, really read and understand, like all these different signals your body is giving you. So I truly think that, because many people have been able to lose weight, it's really the maintenance side of things. And then understanding, like, how do I feel myself? Well, how do I optimize my ability to build muscle, my hormonal profile and things of that nature, without it being I'm just gaining back a lot of body fat or it's body fat that I'm gaining rather than muscle. That is something that it does just take time to learn and you will speed that process up if you work with a coach, of course. If you wanna work with us, link is in the show notes. But before we wrap this up, anything else you wanna add?
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, as always, we appreciate the question. We appreciate everyone listening. Hopefully this was helpful and we will catch you guys next time.