Ep 163 - Is Reverse Dieting a Good Dieting Alternative?

<p>Welcome to How to Love Your Body - this week’s podcast episode is a review of Reverse Dieting. One of our community members sent us a post confused about whether it was a good non diet option so we wanted to review it to let you know what we think.</p> <p>Disclaimer: This episode will discuss dieting behaviors, some calorie numbers and for the love of god, do not google reverse dieting if you are trying to avoid diet culture and before and afters.</p> <p>The reason we are explaining it here is because it is one of those diets that don’t look like diets, it’s something that people trying to UnDiet may look at and be convinced that it’s a safe diet alternative… Here's what we found.</p> <p>Let’s start by explaining what reserve dieting is:</p> <p>Reverse dieting is often described as the diet after the diet, it is slowly increasing calories after a period of restriction.</p> <p>Here’s where the first diet culture red flags come in - the intention of this is often weight loss or prevention of weight gain.</p> <p>And honestly when we were first sent this I had a twinge of, oh this doesn’t look too bad, maybe that could work for some people, encouraging people to eat enough is never a bad thing...</p> <p>Here are 3 red flags of reverse dieting:</p> <ul><li>You still have to count calories for the rest of your life. It is assumed that each day your body needs to same amount of fuel. It treats your body like a machine, and we are not machines.</li> </ul> <ul><li>It has the same freedom language as macro counting (and the dreaded Noom) - eat whatever you want, there are no good or bad foods! AND you can only eat x calories a day. Well that is not freedom, that cannot be intuitive, it’s still a calculation where, yes you can eat a burger and fries but then you can’t eat much else for the rest of the day… </li> </ul> <ul><li>The intention is weight loss, there is a weight loss focus, no one reverse diets and accepts that maybe they were repressing their weight too much and their body WANTS to be at