Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 228: Reverse Dieting Does Not Work (Or Does It?) With Dr. Eric Trexler

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. In today's episode, I am joined by a guest we've had on before, Dr. Eric Trexler. When we had Dr. Trexler on previously, it was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was recording in my living room on my Yeti mic plugged into the USB of my laptop. Dr. Trexler and I discussed metabolic adaptation, specifically metabolic damage, which is adaptation that constrains the metabolism or makes it work in such a way that it tries to stay within the guidelines and constraints of a lower energy intake. Meaning after dieting, you have to operate on less calories.

We unpacked what you can expect with that level of metabolic adaptation. And in this episode, we're talking about reverse dieting, or essentially the exact opposite thing, which is how can intake of food, if it's incrementally increased, cause a more robust and powerful metabolism? Can you rev up your metabolism by slowly eating more? Should you reverse diet after you diet? If you are having a hard time burning fat at your current calorie intake, do you need to reverse diet? Dr. Trexler is my go-to source when it comes to metabolism, so I'm honored to be joined by him today. Sit back and enjoy.

Eric, how you doing, man? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing well. For those of you who are not familiar with Dr. Eric Trexler of Stronger by Science podcast fame and Mass Research Review fame. He's actually been a guest on the podcast before where we discussed metabolic adaptations and the way your metabolism changes as a response to dieting, being in a calorie deficit, and losing body fat mass. That's kind of one half of the equation as it pertains to how our metabolism can adapt. But today, what I wanted to talk to Dr. Trexler about is changes in metabolism when

we reintroduce food, changes in metabolism as we maybe increase activity, and what many people call reverse dieting. And I'll kind of hand things off to you, Dr. Trex, because I was listening to your podcast about two weeks ago, and I learned that you are the father of the term reverse dieting, or at least the person who popularized it in the literature. Is that correct? In some capacity, your fingerprints are on this. So I'm not the father of it. I was the first person to, to my knowledge, use the term in a peer reviewed paper. People had created the idea and had been doing it in practice. And I was the, as far as I know, the first person to actually acknowledge that in a scientific paper. And yeah, there was a review

paper a couple months ago that got published and it was looking at basically everything we know about recovering from a pretty aggressive diet, like a pretty brutal diet. And they did a systematic review. And, you know, this was just an area of research where I really wanted to dig into it early. And so of the 12 papers they reviewed, I think I was a co-author on like six of them. Wow. So, yeah, this is an area that I got into early and often when I was still like more active as a researcher because, you know, I come from a bodybuilding background. I coach people who do fat loss diets. And we see all these adaptations and hormonal changes when we diet.

And of course, anyone in that world would have an interest in saying, okay, well, how can we effectively recover from this? And how can we turn short-term weight loss into long-term weight maintenance? You know, what kind of strategies can help? So yeah, I use the term reverse dieting in like 2014 in a paper and then 2017 and then 2019 and so on. And in hindsight, you know, in 2014, I had a lot of optimism about it. And, you know, there was basically two use cases that were really being popularized in the industry, not in the scientific literature. And the two main use cases were quite different. One use case was you are a physique athlete,

bodybuilding, figure, physique, whatever. And one use of reverse dieting as it was proposed was, One use of reverse dieting as it was proposed was what if we got you to recover from all the nastiness of that diet where, you know, your thyroid hormone is low, your leptin levels are low, your testosterone levels low, your menstrual cycles disrupted. What if we could start to unravel all those adaptations and reverse them without a precipitous amount of fat gain or even a meaningful amount of fat gain? What if we could have our cake and eat it to stay lean and recover from the diet by just very slowly enhancing energy availability? So that's the one use case. Yeah. The most popular probably, I would say. The most commonly, when people use the term reverse diet, it's often in that context. Yeah, yeah. Now, the second most popular use case, which is getting bigger and bigger as the term goes

from being a very niche term in the bodybuilding world to more general population folks are hearing about it and having interest in it. The second use case is the following scenario. This is at least theoretically how it goes. You have a history of dieting. You suspect that because of this history of dieting, regaining, dieting, regaining, you have some kind of persistent adaptations that are constraining your metabolic rate. You have a low energy expenditure and because metabolic adaptation, this lower energy expenditure is a massive, almost insurmountable hurdle to weight loss. You're in a tough spot. And if you want to pursue weight loss again, successfully in the future, what you have to do is this reverse dieting process of just working your calories up, shifting your maintenance calories higher, and basically building what people would call metabolic capacity. So undoing

this kind of persistent, almost like semi-permanent metabolic adaptation that you've caused. So we build up this metabolic capacity, work up to a higher maintenance level without gaining fat. capacity, work up to a higher maintenance level without gaining fat. And then when you diet from there, it should be much easier. Now, I just made that set of claims as if I believe them to be true. But the the gist of the podcast you referenced and a huge article that I published a couple weeks before that is the fact that for both of those use cases, after a bodybuilding show or trying to build metabolic capacity to make future weight loss easier or more successful, I don't believe that the evidence supports either of those two common applications. I actually think that the evidence very moderately strongly contradicts both of those claims. Uh, and so, you know, if I could go back

to 2014, um, I probably, when introducing the term into the literature, I introduced it in a very neutral way and said, Hey, here's what people are doing. Does it work? Who knows? Maybe we should look into it as scientists in hindsight. I'm glad we looked into it, but I wish that I had introduced it with a higher level of skepticism written into the text rather than just, hey, maybe it'll work. Let's see. So I'm glad we did the work. I'm glad that event. I'm glad that it was introduced into the scientific world so that people could more thoroughly scrutinize it and poke and prod and test to see if it looks to be effective. But ultimately, what is it, eight years later? Eight years later, I look back at the evidence that's come up, and a lot of it's come out in the last three or four years, And it's becoming increasingly just really difficult to justify those two use cases.

I wasn't at a point in my fitness career and scientific literacy where I was taking in anything from the scientific literature at that point. Almost everything that I was taking in in 2014 and 2015 was from the bro science anecdotal side of things. It's just what I was capable of taking in and what I was the most receptive to. And I specifically remember it being sold or marketed, the ability to reverse diet or the effect of reverse dieting as, to your point, being able to kind of permanently expand the capacity of the metabolism by just slowly adding more food while you lift weights. And many fitness influencers championing their maintenance calories of 3,000, 3,500, 4,000,

4,500 calories a day. I maintain ridiculously low levels of body fat with ridiculously high amounts of food. I actually need to eat food that isn't even good for me just to maintain this physique. I had a very minimally effective bullshit detector at the time. So I didn't think, Hey, maybe this person's lying or maybe this person's maintaining their physique with drugs. I just figured, okay, obviously if you just eat small amounts of food, uh, more than you were the week before forever, your, your body just figures it out and you never gain fat. Um, and you know, to your point, not only as the literature expanded, but the more I tried to do it with myself or the more I tried to do it with clients, the more I

realized like, hey, this isn't working as well as I'd expect it to work in either use case. And what I kind of determined was for those who felt the need to remedy a metabolic downregulation or disruption from dieting too much, oftentimes they weren't as severely metabolically adapted as they thought. They were just not doing a very good job of calculating what it was that they were eating and keeping track of things. And the same was true on the other end, which was people were kind of grotesquely inflating what it was they were actually eating so as to project to their audience this new and exciting way to eat. And I found it over the years in practice, I don't use it as much if ever, because it's more effective in theory than it actually is in application. Would you say that's true for kind of both use cases, not just as a coach, but as a researcher? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, kind of what you're hinting at, there's that big article that I wrote, maybe a small percentage of folks might

want to read it. It's kind of a lot. It's very, very long. We'll link it here because they might, you know. Yeah. I wrote it in a way such that I would never have to speak about it again. Basically, just like, here's everything I've ever thought or felt about the topic. But in that article, I mentioned four illusions about why reverse dieting seems like it works. You mentioned some of those anecdotes that have really popularized it and you hit on, on, on a couple of the big ones, which is that, uh, you know, the four illusions, you know, one of the ones that's really important is just with reverse dieting. Oftentimes people say the intervention, the thing that is changing your, your physiology, the thing that is doing adaptations, you know, is adding 10 grams of

carbohydrates a day, right? So if you have an intervention that tiny and that insignificant, it insists that you are tracking with a level of precision that you have never tracked with before. If you really believe that being off by five grams of fat or being off by 10 grams of carbs one day is all of a sudden going from doing the intervention to not doing the intervention by default, you are tracking with a level of precision that you've probably never tracked with before, even if you're a pretty intense tracker. Uh, and so a lot of times what we'll find is, and there's even research showing, they've brought people into the lab and said, we are looking for people who are only eating 1200 calories a day. And for some reason they are resistant to weight loss and people, you know, they found

people in that position and what they found out, but just by actually studying and measuring was they were underestimating their energy intake by about 50% and overestimating their physical activity by about 50% and overestimating their physical activity by about 50%. And when they accounted for those, they said, physiologically, everything is exactly as we would predict here. There is no anomaly. Um, and so like one of the pieces of pushback I've gotten, uh, and the article has been really well received in general, but some people have said, well, then how do you explain these people who are eating 800 calories a day and they're not losing weight and they're doing all this exercise? And I'm like, well, it's, it's been explained empirically. Like there, there is

direct research on that situation. And it is, you know, pretty much always, uh, an instance of there's some kind of miscalculation or, or, or missing, uh, the calories are somewhere they just need to be found, whether it's we're inflating physical activity or we're underestimating intake. Um, and, and another thing that comes into it, you mentioned people kind of inflating their energy intake on the other end saying, wow, look how great this is working. There's two things that go into that. First of all, sometimes people represent like a weird day of eating as being their normal, which if ever there was a more common way to get clout on social media than projecting one day of eating or one day of training as if it's your entire life, I've yet to find it. I've actually

considered making content where I show imperfect eating so as to normalize how challenging it is, even as somebody who knows a nutritious body composition centric way of eating, like how you still have to make tons of adjustments on the fly. Like it's very much misrepresented and I'd say misproported on social media at least. Yeah, absolutely. And another thing that goes into that though, like let's say, you know, you're a big fitness influencer. Probably you have an above average physique and that's what has enabled you to become a pretty established fitness influencer. You probably, um, you know, metabolically in terms of your body composition and how much you're able to eat without gaining fat, you're probably just in an, in an advantageous spot to start with, which is what has allowed you to get there to that kind of elevated status. But another thing that, that influences everyone that, that impacts

everybody, uh, and causes some of these anecdotes that are surprisingly enthusiastic is just a genuine. There's a bit of an illusion where someone says, oh, over the last two months, I've worked my calories up from 1800 to 3600. Like this is incredible. And I haven't even gained that much fat. I've gained like three pounds. But weight gain is a cumulative thing. And how much you ate today is an instantaneous thing. And so we'll often see people who ramp their calories up over a relatively short time scale. And they say, I can't believe I haven't gained. I've never maintained this body composition at this many calories. And it's like, well, check back in 12 months.

If you continue eating that many calories for the next 12 months, the weight gain will follow, but it's cumulative in nature. You know, I mean, it takes 9,400 calories to store a kilogram of fat. So yeah, you can ramp things up pretty quickly. And over the course of a few weeks, you're not gaining a lot of fat. Is that, that's actually really helpful. So 9,400 calories is approximately 2.2 pounds of fat. Yeah. Yeah. So there's different ways of doing this. People have talked about, you know, well, how much is just calculate the number of grams of fat in a kilogram, a kilogram of fat, and just do the raw calculation. There's a paper by Kevin Hall, who's like the top nutrition researcher at the national Institute of health.

who's like the top nutrition researcher at the National Institute of Health. He's like really mathematically savvy. Yeah, I'm familiar with a lot of his work just by virtue of kind of slowly poking my way through the literature over the last five years. You see that name a lot. Dude, we did when I was working on my PhD, I collaborated with a mathematician and we did some research on body weight modeling, uh, using a lot of his stuff. And like, you'll open one of his papers and you'll find like 65 equations in the supplementary files. And they have Greek letters. I've never even heard of, like, I mean, he's, he's just incredible, but he's so good that we, we publish this paper, uh, with some, some pretty nuanced body weight modeling, kind of predictive models.

And almost immediately after the paper was published, he emailed us and said, hey, you made a mistake. And we were like, dude, that thing just got out. How could you, first of all, have read it already? And second of all, identified a mistake. And so he was right. There was a little mistake. It was ultimately inconsequential. The mathematician corrected it. Um, and it wasn't a big deal. All the conclusions held up. It was just a really minor thing, but like he is so mathematically savvy that like even the most inconsequential tiniest little issue with one of your 35 equations, he'll be like, wait a minute, that's out of place. But anyway, he did a paper where he was calculating not just how much energy is in a kilogram of fat, but what is the energy cost of losing or gaining a kilogram of fat? Because those are two slightly different questions. But

I believe if memory serves, the number he settled on was 9,441 calories. And he was working in mega joules because that's what the real nerdy scientists was working in, in mega joules. Cause that's what the real nerdy scientists do is they work in mega joules rather than kilo calories. But, uh, but yeah, so that's how the conversion works out. But the, the, the, the main point is it takes a lot of calories to store a kilogram of fat and those calories have to accumulate over time. So if you're putting yourself into a 500 calorie deficit, and you simply you simply don't know it yet. And you're doing that aggressively, and a lot of stuff is changing, you might get to a spot where you believe you're maintaining,

but you're actually well on your way to starting the process of accumulating those calories over time. And, and they will eventually get stored, you know? So I hear a lot of anecdotes from people who say I've been reverse dieting and I just can't believe how much I've revved up my metabolism and I'm staying lean and it's unbelievable. And I say, that's awesome. But also how long has this been going on? And they say seven weeks. And I, what I don't hear is people who say I started using reverse dieting 18 months ago and it changed my life. There's like this really consistent observation that the longer you've been reverse dieting, the less excited you are about it because eventually overfeeding leads to fat gain.

And one of the points I make in my article is that there is research on metabolic phenotypes. Okay. And this is a really important concept. So some people have a thrifty metabolic phenotype, and that means they're really good at conserving energy in both directions. So if you intentionally overfeed someone with a thrifty phenotype, they very efficiently store fat. They're able to hold onto it for later. If you put them on a diet, they experience greater magnitudes of metabolic adaptation. Their body's better at conserving energy and reducing energy expenditure in the interest of being thrifty. Now, someone with the opposite, someone with a spendthrift metabolic phenotype, if you put them on a diet,

they actually don't experience that much metabolic adaptation. They don't have these big reductions in energy expenditure, but when you overfeed them, they actually have kind of a, the opposite of metabolic adaptation. They do increase their energy expenditure to offset some of that overfeeding. So if you've ever known someone who's just really resistant to fat gain, like, and you're just like, what is happening there? It's very possible that they are, they're more on the spendthrift side of that metabolic phenotype spectrum. But the reason I bring that up, and to me, this is the most important thing is that it tells us if you're someone who actually can do intentional overfeeding in a way that

increases your energy expenditure, that kind of tells us indirectly you have a spendthrift metabolic phenotype. So you're probably not experiencing metabolic adaptation anyway, so you really aren't the person who's looking into reverse dieting and saying, oh, that's what I need, right? I mean, this is not for you. But here's the problem. If you're someone who does experience metabolic adaptation and you are the person who's going, what can I do about this? What can I possibly do to proactively circumvent this or reverse this? You find reverse dieting.

You say, wow, that sounds incredible. You are almost by default, extremely unlikely to observe any of those adaptations. So the people who stand to benefit don't need it or want it. And the people who really want it or need it don't stand to benefit. Uh, and that ultimately is, is one of the biggest limitations for the way that reverse dieting is marketed is that you, you ultimately get to this point where you say, well, who is this for in the first place? And I haven't found a good answer to that. Well, you often hear people, you hit on it, but you'll hear people describe themselves as having

a slow metabolism or having a fast metabolism, or they'll compare themselves to a friend who can reportedly eat whatever it is that they want without gaining a pound. Are those kind of the archetypes of individuals who might fall into these different camps? Because this is worth expanding on because I think we talk a lot about the mechanisms and the physics of weight loss. We know that it's going to be driven by energy expenditure and energy consumption. But I've learned quite a bit from people like Dr. Stefan Guillenet about the different neurobiology between people who struggle with their weight versus people who perhaps have an easier time maintaining a more normal body weight. You know, are these

like pretty cut and dry? Do you think people have the ability to make the assessment like, hey, I'm a little bit more spend thrift, so I have some flexibility or, hey, I'm a little more thrifty, so I need to be tighter. Or is it a spectrum or is it, is it binary or a spectrum? Well, I definitely think it's a spectrum for sure, where, where you're either more thrifty or more spendthrift. And most people are by default kind of in the middle where they're kind of not, not super far in either direction. Uh, and so most people, you know, might experience a little bit of this, a little bit of that in either direction. Um, and so then you're thinking, well, then maybe I have some of that spendthrift stuff. And I, I, after a diet, I can utilize reverse dieting, but that's the second major issue, which is that there's a lot

of research indicating that yeah, overfeeding from your natural body weight. That's one thing. And yeah, you might experience some increase in energy expenditure yeah, overfeeding from your natural body weight, that's one thing. And yeah, you might experience some increase in energy expenditure, but overfeeding after a diet is a completely different animal. And it's very, very clear based on the research that you will preferentially and very efficiently regain fat if you try to overfeed after a weight loss diet. Ask literally anybody who's ever dieted, right? I mean, that is yo-yo dieting, which is the struggle of dieting for most people. So, um, so yeah, it's very odd how all of a sudden we're kind of like, without putting the term on it, we're like reframing

yo-yo dieting is like, oh man, this is incredible. It's the next, the next best thing in dieting. And it's like, no, that's the old worst thing in dieting. But I'm sorry, what was the Oh, yeah. So the question was, are people good at kind of assessing, you know, which one they are? And to what extent is that really helpful? Yeah, determining, you know, how people are going to succeed. I actually think that people are not good at doing the self assessment with one exception. I think there are people with very spendthrift metabolisms who are interested in building muscle and they know it because they're like, dude, I can't like it. Anyone who's like, I'm a hard gainer. Most likely you are, you do have a spendthrift metabolic phenotype and that's become very,

and that's become very apparent, quite resistant to weight gain. For most people, I think it's a little bit harder to identify. And I suspect that that's because, like you mentioned, a lot of those neurobiological aspects of weight regulation are, in my opinion, much more impactful and much more powerful. And so what that means is there are a lot of people who say, man, when I try to diet, my hunger goes through the roof. I'm lethargic. I'm fatigued. It's a subjectively terrible experience and they're not wrong. But when we get those people in a laboratory and measure their energy expenditure, it's often pretty normal. And actually one thing that's quite surprising is there are now a couple studies indicating that paradoxically, unexpectedly, people with thrifty metabolic phenotypes actually tend to have higher resting energy expenditure at

baseline. And so one of the reasons they experience a bigger drop is because they are starting from a higher baseline. And that's, that's another kind of crushing blow to reverse dieting is the fact that it's like, you know, we need to build up this metabolic capacity, but it looks like the people who have these thrifty metabolisms, baseline metabolic capacity is not at all the issue. Uh, and in fact, it looks like their, their baseline starting from their kind of natural body weight, their, their resting and total energy expenditure is similar, if not higher. But where we see the difference or the divergence in these phenotypes is when we start actually manipulating energy intake and we go into an active phase of weight gain or an active phase of weight loss.

So, no, I think people are generally not super able, uh, myself included. Like it's, it's very difficult to try to assess that objectively with, without, um, or, or subjectively without putting hard numbers on it. I think it's very difficult to tell. I think the neurobiological factors of your perceived kind of subjective experience dieting, uh, really cloud our ability to assess, uh, our, our own metabolic phenotype, but more importantly, and this is probably the most important thing I'll say in this entire podcast. Um, when I was presenting the idea of building up metabolic

capacity, people often sell this idea, uh, and I use sell as a strategic term there. They try to sell this idea by saying, listen, you're struggling with weight loss because of metabolic adaptation. You need to build up your metabolic capacity so that you can circumvent this or overcome it. When we look at studies that actually quantitatively say, to what extent did metabolic adaptation truly hold you back in the dieting process? It doesn't seem to be that impactful of a factor. to what extent did metabolic adaptation truly hold you back in the dieting process, it doesn't seem to be that impactful of a factor. Now it exists and it has a tangible impact. So I'm not saying it's meaningless, but the magnitude by which it predicts dieting success is very

modest. And so there've been a couple of great studies by Martins and colleagues where they've looked at truly quantifying this and saying, okay, for every X unit increase in metabolic adaptation, how much did it hinder weight loss or how, how much longer did it take you to get to your weight loss goal? And when we look at the actual numbers, it's fairly inconsequential and you can basically look at it and say, well, if you were working with a decent coach who would have just dropped your calories by an extra 50 or 75 a day, you would have sailed right through it. You know, you could easily circumvent this by simply going a little lower and, you know, you can get around this easily. It's not some insurmountable roadblock.

And the same thing goes with, um, there was one study where they, they had a fixed target for a percentage of body weight loss. And they said, well, instead of seeing how much weight you lose or don't lose, let's just see how long it takes you to get there. And again, uh, it's the type of thing where someone with a lot of metabolic adaptation could easily say, oh, I thought we were going to get there in 12 weeks. Let's do it in 15. And that is literally the extent of circumventing, uh, the, these challenges. And, uh, I know a lot of people are going to say, well, but that means I have to go lower or I have to be in a deficit longer. And that's going to make the dieting process feel way more challenging. And I actually don't necessarily think that's the case. What we see when we look at how am I allowed to use a little bit of profanity here? Oh, all day long, my friend. So the question is, okay, how shitty do you feel on a diet?

Right. Uh, a lot of times people want to reduce it down to, well, if I could diet on 2100 calories, I would feel way better than dieting on 1700 calories. That's not necessarily true. And the most important factor about how shitty you're feeling on a diet is first of all, how close to essential body fat levels are you? So if you're a male and you're dieting at 19% body fat, that feels very different from putting the finishing touches on a diet at 5% body fat, right? So that's one factor. The other factor is the relative gap in energy.

So it's not, are you eating 2,100 calories or 1,700? It's relative to your energy needs. Are you under eating by 500 calories or under eating by 1,000 calories? That is relative to your energy needs. And when you have metabolic adaptation present, your energy needs necessarily go down. present, your energy needs necessarily go down. And so that thing, oh man, how do endurance athletes even survive eating their like 4,300 calories per day? And it's easy. They burn off a ton of calories. And so for them, you know, appetite kicks in. It's usually not that hard to sustain that, that, that level of intake, you know, because it's, it's all relative to expenditure. Right. And so we see the same thing during

dieting, which is that the relative size of the energy deficit is far more impactful than saying, oh, I used to diet at 1,800 calories and now I diet at 1,700 calories. I mean, that's an amount of food that's physiologically inconsequential and the size of the deficit is far more impactful. Yeah. And so kind of what I'm gleaning from this that I think would be most helpful is to understand that a lot of these variances and the way in which adaptations are often sold by fitness media, content creators, trainers, coaches, these adaptations perhaps aren't as impactful as we might think. We have regulatory mechanisms in place that kind of work to keep us on track. And so much of this spinning of the wheels that happens because people are well-intentioned and

they want to lose weight and they want to take care of their bodies might be better served by simply being more diligent over a longer time horizon rather than attempting to try multiple different activities to get small jumps in capacity or to perhaps limit the accretion of body fat after a diet, you might just be better off simplifying the process and using that extra brain power for compliance with lifestyle factors, macronutrient tracking, et cetera, and maybe not so much the X's and O's of how it is I'm going to go about either adding in five carbs and three grams of fat every other day for the next three months. Is that a fairly accurate assessment? A lot of overcomplication, well-intentioned overcomplication, oftentimes sold by maybe even

well-intentioned influencers. I don't think in many cases fitness influencers are trying to mislead people. They're trying to position themselves as helpful, but they might be muddying the waters. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I mentioned in my article about these four illusions of why reverse dieting seems effective. I think it influences people on the user end, but also the influencers that promote it. I think a lot of them genuinely have misattributed certain effects to reverse dieting and truly believe it to be very efficacious. And I think there are much simpler explanations for what they're observing. So it's not to say that, oh, there's a bunch of scammers out here who are trying to do you harm. That's not the case. But nonetheless, I think it's important to

take a very critical look at the research and say, does this theory seem to pan out empirically? And the answer is no. But what you mentioned, yeah, I think a lot of it does come down to simplifying things, not trying to look for some unique physiological hack or strategy. There's a lot of research indicating that acceptance-based approaches to weight loss are very, very helpful. And so I know that's not what people want to hear, but it can be very powerful when you diet to work on how you accept and frame hunger as part of the process or being more lethargic as part of the process. And those acceptance-based approaches, like I said, they're quite effective. And it's a little bit ironic that a lot of people will go into dieting and they'll say,

I'll do anything. Give me the hardest intervention. Whatever the diet is, whatever the training is, I'll do all the hard stuff. And sometimes the hardest thing with dieting is interacting with reality and recalibrating expectations and recalibrating, uh, your perception of what the road is going to look like. And sometimes just wrestling with the unpleasant realities of life are the hardest thing we can do. And, you know, we were prepared for a lot of hard stuff, but nothing that hard. Um, but acceptance-based approaches are, are really, really helpful for people who are, uh, dealing with some of this friction and weight loss, whether it's hunger, slowing metabolic rate and dealing with, you know, okay, how do we view

that in a way that isn't, you know, catastrophic or overly negative or deflating or something that's going to lead to motivational collapse? How do we accept that and move forward strategically and successfully? And a lot of it comes down to slowing down, resetting the target date, you know, giving ourselves more time, making some adjustments. And yeah, it's never some miraculous hack or some, you know, enormous amount of concentrated effort, you know, for some crazy workout or crazy diet. It's always consistency over time. And, you know, we've got a diet app called Macro Factor. And one of the things that we show, like a real main focal point of the app is your daily energy expenditure. And it's an algorithm that updates your daily

energy expenditure on a daily basis. And it's totally deterministic. So even if you have fluctuations in activity level, dietary intake, it still gives you this up-to-date reflection. And one thing that I didn't quite expect was how helpful that has been to people when dieting, which it makes sense in retrospect, in hindsight. But when someone is dieting and they don't have any kind of analytics like that to lean on, the diet was working and now it isn't. Yeah. That's very stressful.

But what's really fascinating is one of the most stressful elements is the unknown. Why is this happening? What can I do about it? And when I try to do something, is that something, is that strategy actually working? And so what's really interesting is we've had people who are on these longer term diets and they start to inevitably experience some metabolic adaptation. They watch their expenditure curve go down and they say, oh, that's why the app told me to eat fewer calories. And then it keeps working. And eventually they see, oh, it went down more. And so that's why my calories went down a little bit. And just that little bit of clarity, just seeing, oh, I see what's happening. Yeah, my total daily energy expenditure is down. The app is going to recommend fewer calories.

But if I want to, maybe I'll add a 15-minute walk at lunch, and maybe that'll help me out so I don't have to have such a big calorie drop next time. And just seeing it, just having that tangible feedback has been more effective than I anticipated. And I think a lot of that does boil down to some of those core elements of what you try to achieve with an acceptance-based approach to dieting and just seeing, oh, this is a thing that's happening. That's reality. I would have preferred it going a different way, but it's not catastrophic.

We can measure it. It's tangible. We can put a number on it and the number is not infinity. So a lot of times with metabolic adaptation, people view it as a brick wall. So a lot of times with metabolic adaptation, people view it as a brick wall. I am now in metabolic adaptation, which means no matter how I adjust my calories, further progress is not going to happen. And when you actually quantify the magnitude and look at it, you say, oh, here, taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method, and more specifically, our one-on-one, fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for Core Coaching Method for a while. myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person, online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years,

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And you can use the code Danny15 to save. Back to the show. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from the show to tell you about our amazing partners over at Elemental Labs. Elemental Labs makes a flagship electrolyte product known as LMNT Recharge. Recharge is amazing. It's got bioavailable forms of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which can really help you train, contract your tissues, and get hydrated. I love having it in the morning before my fasted training because oftentimes I wake up without an appetite, but I want something in my stomach so I'm not flat, I can get a pump, and I can get hydrated in the gym and still perform my best. I also love to sip on my recharge when I'm on the golf course

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amazing flavors like raspberry salt, orange salt, citrus salt. My favorite is the mango habanero or mango chili and the leban habanero, which I take in the sauna. There's flavors for everybody and you can check them out by going to drink element T slash coach Danny. They'll send you every single flavor and an individual packet. You can try them out completely free. Just pay shipping drink element t.com slash coach Danny. Get your sample pack today completely for free. Just pay shipping back to the show. Right. Yeah. It's like I have adapted, but, um, you know, having a quantification or, or an actual number that's small, like it's, I don't care how many calories you were eating before. Uh, even if you were eating 1200 calories,

uh, 60 calories of metabolic adaptation, I think every human being could look at and go, I'm resilient enough to overcome this. I'm resilient enough to adjust to this. But if it's a esoteric figure that feels like you've run into a brick wall and you're like, oh shit, I'm stuck. I don't know by how much. I don't know where. I don't know how high to climb, how low the hole, how deep the hole is. I'm just simply stuck. The power of having a figure there, a number is immensely, immensely beneficial for the dieter. And I've, I've actually used macro factor. I used it for two months to get in shape in shape. I should say to lose body fat, uh, to look better and feel better about my physique about a year ago, um, before I went to Cancun and

the user interface is phenomenal. So for those of you who are in the market for a calorie tracking app, a diet app that does a little bit more, it's, it has substantially more robust features than something like a MyFitnessPal. And, uh, you know, even if you want to just be able to kind of tell your phone about what it is that you ate, because there's a AI feature that I quite like, um, I really do recommend it. Uh, and, and trust me, Eric has not sent the check yet. It's not in the mail. This is not a sponsored plug. Like it's a good dieting app for, for many of you who might think, ah, man, I just, I run into the same recurrent walls. And, you know, the idea of,

of having a quantification there might, might help me better manage my emotional state. Cause so much of dietary success is being able to string multiple days of frustration together long enough to see change. It's like, it's probably never going to be fun. It's probably never going to be easy. And you'll probably feel some discomfort and some hunger and being okay with that and having a little buddy like in in your phone's you know user interface you're like okay it's okay i'm i got this it's only a few calories here there that that can be really helpful so i can't recommend that enough if you're in the market for a calorie tracking phone app and that's kind of your jam like i think macro factor is top top of the list as far as the ones that i've used i would like i really appreciate that feedback i don't

mean to cut you off but you you called it your buddy in in your pocket and and that we do frame like we literally call it a diet sidekick you know because uh and it's awesome because you know we've talked about metabolic adaptation but the expenditure curve, a lot of people have fun learning about themselves with it. So there have been people who say, oh, I changed jobs and my energy expenditure went down 150 calories a day and I had no idea. And you start to see how these little behavioral things and habitual things, you say, oh my God, it's right there in the data. And if I didn't know that, I would have said, what the hell is wrong with me? Why am I gaining weight? I, nothing has changed, you know? Um, but, but yeah, so that's enough plugging the products and stuff. I do appreciate the kind

words, but yeah, we have, we have business to do here. Well, yeah, I want to throw some like case studies at you, uh, as to, uh, as a coach over the years, you know, you, you do the best you can with the information that you have. And I somewhat know the answer to these questions, but you'll be able to answer them and flesh them out better than I could. And so what I want to do is I want to throw at you some cases where I've used reverse dieting archetypically, just no client specific. And I want to tell you what I think happened. And I want you to tell me what probably actually happened. And so the first is the archetypical client who comes to me and says, Danny, I am eating 1,400 calories religiously.

And I would like to attempt a reverse diet. And I say, OK, we're going to attempt a reverse diet. And we'll start at 1,450, 1,500, 1,500, 1,600. We're going to attempt a reverse diet and we'll start at 1450, 1500, 1550, 1600. We're going to go up 50 calories a week. Now, after four to five weeks of doing this, this client is reporting better body composition and actual weight loss. And I've seen this time and time again, which our client's going, I actually needed to eat more to lose weight. And this is a very popular selling point for coaches. And I can speak completely transparently. I don't sell it anymore because now I know what's happening. But at the time, I thought I was a wizard because my clients

were losing weight, eating more. When we see this phenomenon, what is actually happening here? weight, eating more, when we see this phenomenon, what is actually happening here? Because I believe I know the answer and it is quite common. When people start reverse dieting and eating more, they lose body fat. Yeah. Usually when you hear about eating more as an impetus for weight loss, almost always what we're talking about there is simply there were a lot of calories missing initially. So when they thought they were eating 1,400, and they were not lying. There are two common things, either some of those things that normally you track just stop getting tracked, sauces, condiments, eating a couple bites bites of your kid's food, cause they're a picky eater and you don't want to waste food, which I totally understand. Uh, some of those things, when you start saying, I am hiring an expert to fix my metabolism, all of a sudden you say, I better

calculate that sauce and those extra bites, right? Because there's, there's, there are stakes now, uh, there's stuff on the line. So usually what's happening is we start finding some of those missing calories that weren't getting tracked. And it's either that or it's, yeah, on my good days, I eat 1400 calories, but let's not talk about the weekends. And then Wednesday night is trivia night. I go out and have some pizza and beer. All of a sudden that stuff starts to get kind of worked into the calculations. And we see that 1400 calories was actually in some cases averaging out to 2300 calories a day. And now we're down from 2300 calories a day to 2000 or 1950. So usually that's what's happening in that scenario. Yeah, I completely agree. One thing that I've noticed

is people kind of identify as like a person who eats this many calories because that was their intention. There are fatigue-related components to dieting where you might lose some steam and get a little loose with the tracking, but you've identified and formed some crystallized idea that, yo, 1,400, that's my number i'm a 1400 calorie eater and um when you say okay well i would like you to eat more than that even if they were eating more than that and they didn't know it the initial bump in compliance out of sometimes fear like whoa whoa an extra 300 calories like i better i don't want to go a calorie over because i'm afraid i'm gonna get fat that's a great point yeah you know like hey if i i better i better tighten this shit up coach because i've heard as a metabolically adapted human being i am extremely extremely vulnerable

to excessive body fat gain so i am going to track meticulously because i am skeptical about this big of an increase and what that could do for me. And so I think what you find is you go from like a compliance of maybe 70, 75% to like 95, 98%. And all of a sudden, you know, your calorie variance is wildly swinging downward. And, and, and people are shocked that I'm losing weight on a concrete 1700 versus a guesstimated well-intentioned 1400 that loosely is is quite a bit more so here's another scenario and this is this is one that again somebody who's well-intentioned perhaps doing their best with a client um might grapple with this This is something that I've struggled with specific to female clients, which is a female client who has chronically dieted and has begun

to show signs of maladaptation from being restricted for too long. The common ones might be losing some hair, feeling cold, lethargy, and then of course, amenorrhea or any level of menstrual dysfunction. But this client is adamant that I'm very much afraid of losing body fat. And so I think a lot of, or gaining body fat, I'm afraid of gaining body fat. And so in that situation, knowing what we know about the metabolism's ability to adjust and the likelihood of fat gain after a diet, would we be better off if we're taking a health-centric approach to go slow or to go fast in getting this person to a point where they start to see these signs of maladaptation go away?

Because I used to go slow, thinking that the best thing I could do is make the client happy. But now I go a little faster, knowing that these signs of maladaptation shouldn't stick around too long. But what do you think about that? too long. But what do you think about that? Well, what we have here is a pretty tricky tug of war between physiology and psychology. If we treated humans as if psychology doesn't exist, which is a bad plan for a coach, then we would say, yeah, let's get to positive energy balance and let's get this sorted out. And what you find in, especially when you look at studies trying to reverse amenorrhea or oligomenorrhea, where there's, you know, not a complete cessation of the menstrual cycle, but a disruption,

a dysregulation of it. Recovery is hard to come by and it's hard to predict. You know, you'll see studies where they say, yeah, our intervention worked and the menstrual cycle was restored within somewhere between eight and 70 weeks. And you're like, that's a complete, it's a world of difference between the first person and the last person, right? So physiologically, what we want to do there is get back into positive energy balance. But one thing I will say is that doesn't necessarily require a tremendous amount of fat gain depending on where they're at. So a very common misconception is that, you know, the leaner folks experience more of these

adaptations. That's not necessarily true when it comes to some of the stuff related to, you know, thyroid hormone, uh, menstrual cycle disruptions. So there have been studies in, uh, you know, thyroid hormone, uh, menstrual cycle disruptions. So there have been studies in, uh, you know, athletic teams doing some kind of sport where, where leanness is the norm for performance reasons. So we might be talking about gymnastics, cross country, distance running, stuff like that. And there, there have been studies saying, well, who's experiencing what we call relative energy deficiency in sport, which is this whole kind of cluster, the syndrome of, uh, of maladaptations, as you said, and it's not always the leanest athletes. It's usually the athletes with the lowest relative energy availability. And that's a big deal because usually what's happening in

those cases is the athletes with the higher body fat are constantly being told you will perform better at a lower body fat. So they're trying to cope with their training volume while being in a sizable energy deficit because they're trying to get as lean as the leaner folks, but the leaner folks on the team, they're very lean, but they're in neutral or even slightly positive energy balance. So they're, they're recovering from their training very effectively. There's not this big relative energy gap. And so for some, in some instances, you might be able to have an athlete like who's just starting to experience some of those things. And all you have to do is jump to maintenance calories if they're in a deficit and very promptly you might see a reversal of some of those things. So I, I, in those situations, I think it's important to

kind of separate body fat from relative energy deficiency. The two things are often broadly speaking correlated, but, but sometimes we, we find these weird or not weird, but these little scenarios where they become inversely correlated because the people with higher body fat have the most compelling reason to be in a deficit and to have a lack of energy availability. So in cases like that, though, getting back to, you know, how to do it, I think it's important to know the psychology of the individual and to understand if, if, if we go as quickly as physiology would dictate, is this going to backfire?

Because you can't help a client who fired you eight weeks ago, right? And so I think it involves an honest conversation about, okay, here's the problem. Here's what it takes to fix it. If you're absolutely shredded, it might involve gaining body fat. It probably will involve gaining body fat if you're really, really lean. But if you're not super shredded, then, really lean. But if you're not super shredded, then in many cases, all it's going to take is just not being in a deficit for a while. We don't need some magic reverse dieting strategy to do it. And the studies that have tried to do

that, it hasn't gone well. There's one case report that didn't use the term reverse dieting, but essentially did reverse dieting. And in that case report, I think it took over 70 weeks for the menstrual cycle to be restored. And it involved, it was a physique athlete who got lean for a competition and didn't restore their menstrual cycle until they had a higher body fat percentage than where they started. And that was with this prolonged, slow process. So I think with that type of client, you want to just have a real honest conversation and say, so what we need to do is make sure we're at a body fat level that is compatible with reversing those symptoms. But the next thing is getting out of a deficit as promptly as we can and getting to neutral or even maybe slightly positive energy balance, depending on the scenario. Uh, but any kind of delay, um, is physiologically holding you back. The only reason to really justify it would be if, if after having that conversation,

it's very clear that the athlete is uncomfortable or the client is uncomfortable with taking that leap of faith. And you say, okay, that's no problem. Let's take some baby steps. But as a coach in the back of your mind, you have to understand those baby steps need to be baby leaps, you know, not tiptoeing there. You know, we want to make sure we're really intentionally getting to a spot that's going to be conducive to recovery. Yeah. You, you actually hit on something that I had never really put together, which was the notion that it's not so much body fatness that is going to dictate somebody's let's call it vulnerability to reds or amenorrhea specifically with women, but it's the severity of

the deficit. And I have somebody in my circle that is a, I don't want to say a yo-yo diet or a well-intentioned, uh, they're, they're very quick to ratchet up the intensity when the motivation is there. And this is often looks like I will from three days of working out to seven. And I go from not watching my diet to being meticulous. And this individual, I've known to do this on two separate occasions. And the amenorrhea or the dysregulation of the menstrual cycle happens before noticeable body fat reduction even happens because that person is particularly adaptive in that capacity. And even though when I look at them, I'm like, well, you're lean, you have a great figure, you're fit, you're athletic, but you're not lean enough that

if I saw you walking around, I would expect you to be dealing with amenorrhea. But it's the severity of the deficit and the ratcheting up of the movement that can cause these more severe adaptations. So that might be a good thing to think about for anybody listening, whether you're working with clients or you're just attempting to change your physique, that you might increase your vulnerability to change your physique that you might increase your vulnerability to maladaptations if you try to shorten the time horizon for change. And what Dr. Trexler talked a lot about earlier is extending the time horizon on a lot of this can simplify this. Simply just trying to bolster your resiliency around the fact that dieting is

allowed to be challenging, changing your composition is allowed to be challenging, and you can always take a little longer, and that you're probably not as damaged or negatively adapted as you might be led to believe if you can just practice a little more patience. But on the other side of that coin, if you really try to shorten the time horizon, if you try to go fast, you might open up or make yourself more susceptible to some of these negative adaptations. And even a well-intentioned reintroduction of calories slowly, it might not be worth it. You might be better off trying to go back to a caloric intake that's considered to be closer to maintenance for your body weight, body size, than slowly adding them back in. To your point, 70 weeks is a very, very long time to wait to regain what is considered to

be essential function. And if you're somebody who's not psychologically tied to that idea, you might want to go a little bit faster on adding calories back in and maybe a little bit slower on pulling them out. Is that kind of a fair way to put it for most folks? Yeah. Yeah. And I do want to acknowledge, so we have these dual systems that are feeding into the hypothalamus and the hypothalamus is the brain center that's controlling energy intake, energy expenditure. And the kind of dual systems represent short-term and long-term energy stores. So I can tell you, you know, if there's a female athlete walking around at 11% body fat, yeah. If I were placing bets, I'd say menstrual cycle disruption, disruption, regardless of acute energy status, very likely when you're that shredded. Right.

Yeah. Um, so at a certain point, you know, when you're a guy, when I, you know, a guy, you know, natural bodybuilder, four and a half you know, a guy, you know, natural bodybuilder, four and a half, five and a half percent body fat, let me guess your libido is down, right? Because of course it is. Um, so, you know, there are certain areas where body fat just to kind of takes over, but yeah, once you start getting out of those very critically low ranges of body fat, that's where the short-term energy system has a lot more impact on the severity and the presence of those red S symptoms. So yeah, I think you described it quite well. So last scenario before I cut you loose is the individual who is interested in building

metabolic capacity and hopefully with that a good amount of muscle. But they're very, very considerate about gaining too much body fat. They don't want to gain too much body fat. They want to elevate what they believe to be their metabolic rate. And they want to do what is essentially a lean gain, meaning they would like to gain muscle with as minimal body fat as possible. And I think that this is oftentimes seen as the same strategy as a reverse diet. It's just occurring north of that maintenance threshold, meaning instead of it happening below your total daily energy expenditure, it's just happening above it. expenditure. It's just happening above it. What can people expect to be a reasonable rate of tissue gain? Meaning like, okay, I'm looking for a number, a figure. We talked a lot about how

valuable having a number is. What is a reasonable rate of tissue gain, muscle gain that somebody who doesn't have x-ray vision can look for to make sure that they're gaining tissue without gaining too much body fat? So that's a good question. I do like the fact that you mentioned that it's kind of hard to tell sometimes between people's reverse dieting recommendations and their bulking recommendations. I mean, I saw a system the other day that was talking about, and their bulking recommendations. I mean, I saw a system the other day that was talking about, yeah, this is our very fancy, sophisticated,

very cool reverse dieting strategy. And what it did was it put you at maintenance and then it said, would you rather have 10% more than maintenance or 20% more than maintenance? I was like, dude, that's a bulk. I've never told somebody to start bulking at more than 20% over their maintenance calories, right?

So it's like, you can call that reverse dieting if you want that's bulking, you know, like, like good luck. Um, so it's, it's kind of tricky, um, uh, to, to answer your question directly, uh, you know, an amount of tissue gain that would be advisable. I mean, ultimately, uh, it's going to depend on a person's capacity for muscle building, right? So like, usually what I call an aggressive bulk is gaining more than 0.25% of body weight per week. Okay.

And that's per week, not per month. Normally, a moderate bulk is something I would call 0.1 to 0.25% of body weight gain per week. Now, what's tricky about doing it as a percentage of body weight is you think, well, it's nice because it generally scales kind of well, but it also breaks down a little bit because a lot of times the people who are smallest at baseline have the lowest body weight are beginners who have more capacity to do more of an aggressive bulk. So you always have to put a caveat on that. And honestly, I know this sounds like a, like a, um, uh, a bit of a cop-out, but sometimes it's easiest to just look at someone and say, can I imagine you being 25 pounds heavier at the end of the year and us saying, yeah,

that went well, you know, like, like sometimes it's easiest to think in the longer term and then work back for your, your rate of weight gain from there and say, okay, well then what would our weekly and monthly average look like? I mean, I know that's overly simplistic, but sometimes I look at someone, I'm like, dude, if you gain more than 10 pounds this year, like you're already so big. I mean, that's going to be insane. There's, there's no way that's feasible without a considerable amount of fat gain. Right. And then there's other people who are like, you know, they're like, it's a male five 11, you know, 140 pounds, never touched a weight. And they're like, Hey,

do you think I can gain 30 pounds this year? Hell yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know? And so, so it does get a little tricky, but for, for most people who are kind of beyond that, like super beginner level stage of lifting and they're, they're in that more incremental gradual process of their lifting career, you know, I I'd stick with those percentage ranges that I gave you. But, you know, one thing I do want to mention, since we've talked a little bit about case studies and kind of like, you know, different scenarios, there is a scenario that I think is worth mentioning. Yeah, please. And they are, as far as they can tell, maintaining at, let's say, 2,200 calories, right? Or no, let's say 2,000 calories, rounder number.

And so they start this reverse dieting at 2,000 calories, and they work up, they work up, they work up, they get to 2,400 calories, and they say, wow, this is incredible. up, they get to 2,400 calories and they say, wow, this is incredible. You know, I I've, I've gotten here and, uh, haven't gained any, uh, a considerable amount of weight or, or fat in the process. Um, I think there are two important things to keep in mind. Um, you know, first of all, what we identify as our maintenance calorie, uh, level can be very hard to pinpoint with a high level of precision. So, you know, there are some people, so I mentioned like, you know, 9,400 calories for a kilogram of fat. And I talked about how, you know, that has important implications for, you know, the rate at which we gain fat during overfeeding. It also has huge implications for, you know, the rate at which we gain fat during overfeeding. It also has huge

implications for our ability to pinpoint our maintenance calories. So like if you're 100 or 200 calories below your actual maintenance, you might look at your body weight. And of course, it's going to be jumping up and down from day to day. And you might say, I'm at maintenance because I'm not gaining or losing weight. And in reality, you are losing weight very, very, very slowly. And it's not very clear to the naked eye. But if you were tracking really meticulously in a software and you were filtering out all the noise from the day-to-day fluctuations, you'd see, oh, I'm actually in 100, 200 calorie per day deficit.

And then we'll see that same individual work their way up to you know 2400 calories and they'll say i've worked up 400 calories of metabolic capacity without gaining weight and in reality their true maintenance has always been 2200 but they were in a 200 calorie per day deficit they worked up to a 200 calorie per day surplus and both of those deficits and surpluses were just a little bit too gradual for them to really perceive them as being in an active state of weight change. And again, it's a compelling illusion because, I mean, when you just look at the raw data with your bare eyes, you would say that's 400 calories of just pure metabolic capacity. But what it probably is, is 200 calories of measurement

error in both directions. Another thing I should acknowledge is there is an acute change in energy expenditure when you go from a sizable deficit to maintenance, to true maintenance. And that's not anything that has to do with reverse dieting. It doesn't matter if you get there tomorrow or if you get there gradually over the next six weeks. Being in negative energy balance does have some very acute, almost instantaneous adjustments that happen to metabolic rate. So there are some people who say, well, no, I know that my energy expenditure went up 100 calories over this six- week reverse dieting strategy. And one of the really difficult illusions to try to like, um, offset with, with some,

some more kind of nuanced, uh, explanations is like, I know that it went up a hundred calories, but if you had just gone straight to where you got with your reverse dieting, that would have happened in like three days instead of happening in like six weeks. So there are, that's one of the most challenging things with reverse dieting is there are real physiological changes that happen when we go from a sizable deficit to true energy balance. And so when people do reverse dieting, they experience those things and they say, no, things have changed. But the reality is, based on the research, we can do that stuff in a week the concept of parsimony. And that basically describes a scenario where if we've got two different explanations that do an equally good job explaining these observations, we probably want to go with the simpler explanation that's less convoluted and more supported by the hard evidence we already have.

And so for these illusions, what I'm usually getting at is like, so there's two options here. One option is stuff that we have absolutely observed in research many, many times. The other option is that you have tapped into a physiological effect that has never been observed, despite the fact that we study weight loss and weight regain all the time. So if it was going to be observed, we probably should have observed it by now. We have, you know, reverse dieting approaches that have been done in studies that have failed

to reproduce what you're seeming to observe here. All the evidence points against this being something that's occurring. So when we have these two different explanations, we should probably lean toward the simpler one, not the, holy crap, reverse dieting works, even though the closest attempts in the literature have always failed. And yeah, there's just really not a lot of evidence to support the kind of claimed effects that are going on there. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a perfect place to circle the wagons. And you mentioned something earlier, which is the psychology of psychological side of coaching and working with individuals and

working with yourself. And I think for most people who are inclined to consider a reverse diet, it's because they're looking to back out of some of the negative adaptations that occur from restricting your energy intake. And I would just encourage anybody who's listened this far, if you are looking to back out of that place, this might be one where you can do it a little more quickly. You needn't be as concerned with body fat regain as you might think because much of the reverse dieting sensationalism is overblown and not supported in the research. And if you are in a place where you're not doing well mentally, emotionally, or physically because of the energy deficit, I don't think you need to be as afraid

about reintroducing calories. I think that you might feel slightly more empowered to get closer to maintenance more quickly and hopefully get away from some of the negative impacts of caloric restriction and then have a clear head to revisit how you might want to approach this in the future. If you want to go slow, there's certainly nothing wrong with it. But to Dr. Trexler's point, just having now almost, would you say 2014 is the first time you use the term in the literature, having almost nine years of seeing this term thrown around, seeing it used anecdotally, seeing well-intentioned or maybe not so well-intentioned coaches use it with clients. There's just not enough weight to justify using these strategies in most instances, unless it's psychologically favorable for you. And to go back to maintenance or to go back to a caloric intake that's a little bit more closely, it's more tightly bound to where you do better. There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't make you weaker. It doesn't make you, uh, you know, you're not losing your membership card to the bodybuilding club or the body composition club. For some people, it is a good option to just

go back. And if you see it on social media and somebody is doing it, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's, it's right for you. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned in my article, there are two situations where I think reverse dieting makes sense. And that would be number one, you're interested in it and you're excited about it. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong. Hopefully you're going to be in fitness in some way for the rest of your life. So spending eight weeks learning something new and trying something new, there's nothing wrong with that. So I'm not, I'm not out here. I don't sleep better knowing that there are fewer people doing reverse dieting, but, but I do want to empower people to understand that, um, a lot of the, uh, a lot of the claims about it are very, very overhyped. They're not supported by evidence

and they kind of make a lot of people feel cornered into, well, your only way out, this is your last resort is you have to use reverse dieting. And if you mess it up and do it poorly, it's not going to work. And that's simply not true. Like, I mean, everything that one would gain from reverse dieting, they get from simply getting back to maintenance calorie intake. And, you know, some people will say, well, this, I want to maintain my fat loss in the very long term. I don't know what my maintenance calories are.

So I want to go very slowly. So I don't overestimate. That's a perfectly justifiable reason to do something that looks like reverse dieting. But, but the benefit there is not supercharging your metabolic rate. It's not going to lead you to a, you know, I mean, they, they try to do that in the Minnesota starvation experiment and say, well, maybe people maintain a lower body weight in the longterm. If they do slower weight regain, it doesn't, it doesn't work that way. It just simply fails in that capacity. But if you want to do it because you're interested, if you want to do it because

you're not sure what your maintenance level is, so you want to take some baby steps to get there, there's nothing wrong with that. But my general bias as a fitness professional is I want people to feel empowered to have more options rather than feeling restricted to a small number of options that have to be implemented perfectly. And in this case, whether you choose to do reverse dieting or not, you're probably going to end up in the same place anyway. So by all means, give it a shot if you're interested, but otherwise just hopping straight to maintenance should be fine. And I will say one criticism I've gotten is people have said, well, no, no, no. My situation is different because I tell people to go to maintenance and then reverse from there.

And that is not a substantive critique to any claim I make in my article. Is that just bulking? It's just bulking. Yeah, that is 100% bulking. In which case I'd say, great, I hope you have a great bulk um but yeah and that that could be the that could be the shirt i'm not fat i'm just reverse dieting uh perpetually sure yeah i mean but yeah so it is funny though you'll see people who on one hand they'll start at a deficit and reverse diet from there and it's basically just tiptoeing back to maintenance and delaying recovery that's all that's all there is to it.

And then other people say, no, I jumped to maintenance and then I increased calories and I say, great, that's another way to bulk. And well, it's not another way to bulk. It's a new term for the exact same way to bulk. So yeah, there's just no wiggle room in there where you would ever say that reverse dieting is necessary or required or even advantageous aside from those very few scenarios that we described. Well, Dr. Trexler, that's a point I was hoping to get to in some way. You can guide the conversation as an interviewer. And I think you and I both feel the same way about this. But

to your point, it's nice to allow people to feel empowered to try something if they'd like to try it. But I think you guys have all of the resources that you need to handle reintroducing calories, to handle removing some calories, working up or down on the kind of body composition spectrum as you either reduce energy expenditure, add it back in without the fear of feeling like you're going to fuck it up or feeling like you have to land this plane on a really small runway. There are multiple different ways to do this. And oftentimes, the more complicated way is to try to do it the way that you've seen reverse dieting popularized of late. So, Dr. Trex, where can they find you and your work?

I'd love them to keep up with you as, as they expand their kind of fitness toolbox, add some more arrows to the quiver. Yeah. Uh, easiest place to find me personally. Uh, I'm on Instagram a little bit, not a ton. Um, but my handle is at Trexler fitness. Um, and then keeping up with all this stuff, we stuff we do, the mass research review, macro factor, the diet app, most of that stuff, if you just follow Stronger by Science at the website, get on the email list, follow the Stronger by Science Instagram account, that'll help you kind of stay up to date with what we're doing. Yeah, the mailing list is great. I have to compliment you on that too. I find all the time that I'm sitting down to

record a podcast and I'll get something from the mailing list and I'll be like, oh shoot, wow, that's worthy of talking about today. It's very, very... If you're a fitness enthusiast, to get an occasional email from Eric or Greg over at Stronger by Science that really kind of succinctly packages some really valuable information and research. You can read it in like five to 10 minutes. It's a great way to stay up to date at no cost to you. And if you like that, you got to do mass. I've been doing mass for years and it's probably the easiest way if you're a fitness professional or enthusiast to stay up to date on the research. If you're not super data literate like myself,

it's just you guys are doing the Lord's work, my friend, I have to say. So thank you for making it easy for those of us like myself. And I hope to have you on again soon. Absolutely. Happy to come back anytime.