Reverse dieting is the practice of raising your calories slowly at the end of a diet instead of all at once. You add something like 50 to 100 calories a week, watch what the scale does, and keep going until you reach maintenance. The idea is to get your food back without getting the fat back.
Why the end of a diet is dangerous
Most weight regain happens in the weeks straight after a diet finishes, and the reason is not weak willpower.
You finish a cut with a body that is smaller, an appetite that has been turned up for months, and a habit of moving slightly less than you used to. Go straight back to your old way of eating and you are now in a surplus, because the old way of eating maintained a bigger body.
Reverse dieting is an attempt to manage that transition deliberately rather than letting it happen to you.
How to actually do it
Work out where you are. Track honestly for a week at the end of your cut, because the calorie figure you have been aiming at and the one you have been eating are often not the same number.
Add a small amount. Fifty to a hundred calories a week is the usual range, which is a slice of bread or a spoon of peanut butter. Small enough that a bad week does not undo anything.
Weigh yourself several mornings a week and use the weekly average. Daily numbers are noise, especially when carbohydrate goes up, since each gram of stored glycogen brings water with it. Expect a kilogram or so of that early on, and do not panic about it.
Hold if the average climbs for two or three weeks running. Otherwise keep adding.
Stop when you reach a maintenance figure that feels sustainable. Our calculator will give you an estimate to aim at, though what your own scale tells you over a month is worth more than any formula.
Where to put the extra calories
Carbohydrate first, for most people. It is the macronutrient that gets cut hardest during a diet, and bringing it back tends to restore training performance and mood fastest.
Keep protein where it was, or close to it. It is doing the job of protecting muscle and keeping you full, and neither becomes less important as calories rise.
Bring fat back gradually. It matters for hormone production, and going too low for too long has costs, particularly for women.
What it can and cannot do
Here is where the honesty matters, because reverse dieting gets oversold.
It will not rebuild a metabolism that was permanently broken, because that is not what happens to metabolisms. What does happen is a modest downward drift during a long diet, some of it explained by simply being smaller. Eating more does bring expenditure back up, partly because a bigger body costs more to run and partly because you unconsciously start moving more again.
It does not let you eat at a huge surplus without gaining fat. Nothing does.
What it does well is behavioural. It gives you a structure for the most fragile period in the whole process, it stops the free-fall back into old habits, and it lets you find your real maintenance level by walking up to it instead of guessing.
How long it takes
Anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, depending on how deep and how long the diet was. A short, mild cut needs very little unwinding. Six months of hard dieting needs considerably more.
You do not have to be perfect about the increments. Missing a week or adding a slightly larger jump will not ruin it.
Mistakes to avoid
Going too fast because progress feels slow. The whole method is the slowness.
Reacting to a single weigh-in. Use weekly averages.
Treating the finish line as the start of the next diet. Spend real time at maintenance once you get there, because that is where the weight actually stays off. Our piece on why a maintenance phase matters makes the case in full.
Doing it after a diet that was never that aggressive. If you cut gently for six weeks, you can probably just return to maintenance and get on with your life.