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Let's talk about the missing half of every diet that you've tried so far. It's the keeping it off heart. What's up? My name is Johan. As always, welcome back to Talking Nutrition. If you're new here, if this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a returning listener, so to have you back. Cool. I was chatting with an old client of mine who lost, I think it was about 20 kilos after uh giving birth, and she's still killing it. And what I want to see my clients is hey, like once we're done coaching, I want to see like how do they continue going through these different phases? How do they continue the resourcefulness, the troubleshooting, the figuring shit out along the way and overcoming obstacles? Because even if you've gone through my whole restore method, like there's still gonna be times in life where you're gonna have to like rely on the things you've learned, and life is gonna throw you curveballs, too. Like, let's be honest. But I think I haven't coached with her since probably about a year ago. Okay, this was my client Victoria. She's uh still on my Instagram, by the way, so you can go to my pinned post. She's still one of the pinned posts. Amazing transformation, and again, just a different person. Such a cool thing, okay. But I wanted to share with you what I actually told her or promised her because I told her, hey, you know what? Let me just do a podcast about this. Because she asked me, hey, I've just wrapped up another fat loss phase, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on a few things on how to do the reverse diet. Because I mean she's done it uh multiple times, but she just wanted to have that conf confirmation of like, am I still doing the right thing? Okay, and that's why I promised her, hey, you know, let me just record a podcast on this, okay? Because I think it's a very valuable lesson. And if there's any if there's a specific phase in my restore method, which was previously the OCS process, similar kind of thing, but now we're getting more detail. But we have a specific phase for this, okay? Because at the end of the day, losing weight is cool, losing body fat. But like, how are you gonna keep it off? Like, I'm not gonna go on a rent, I'll promise, but the standard here in Norway for coaching is like a 12-week fat loss plan with a workup plan and and you know, recipes and maybe like a meal plan or something. But what about after? Like, I'm currently like actively coaching my clients through vacation, and they're still killing it. They're just gonna message literally right now of a client. She said, Hey, I haven't tracked my food for a full month, I haven't weighed myself. We've just had her focus on the basics, and my clients still check in over vacations. She came back the exact same weight, and she's like, That is huge for me. Now it's not even about that weight, right? But it's hey, we've taken her to maintenance, she was there before vacation. We decided to focus on the basics, to not track her food. I actually don't want my clients to track on vacation. We just focused on a couple things, and she just came back, she maintained perfectly. So she had an amazing vacation, didn't track a single, you know, or didn't weigh a single food, didn't weigh yourself. Now she's back home, same spot, no damage done, right? No, no, you know, compensating either, which is something I don't allow my clients to do anyway. Um, but she's just in a good spot. But anyway, going back to what I was saying, you can't just have a weight loss plan. Like, if that's the whole program, you're being set up for failure while you're doing the right thing by trying again and trying to lose the weight again. Look, if if no one shows you the keeping and off part, you are gonna rebound because living on these diets, you you might even think now, like, hey, eating more is gonna make me fat. Like, no, it doesn't. It doesn't understand what a calorie deficit is, okay? But I'm gonna walk you through this before I just completely go off of because what I do try to do because you know me by now as well, if you've been listening for a while, I like to go on little side quests. So I do like to go about my speaking points that I gave myself here to kind of like guide you through this, okay? So again, the keeping it off part, super, super key. And it's a key moment in the restore method, okay? It fits in the transform phase, so the tea of restore. This is the second half of that phase, right? Because I don't care how much weight you lose, I want to see you keep it off, right? So that's a key thing here, okay? I'm gonna explain the method briefly. We're gonna focus on the reverse dieting part of the second half of our tea and the restore method, okay? Like I said last time, I'm gonna walk you through all of these phases and and seasons, you know, one by one. I want to start with this one specifically because I promised my client or past client Victoria to kind of dive into reverse dieting for her, just a kind of like a little recap, okay? Because I still have my educational course for my clients, the Odyssey, and this is actually something I teach them as well. And going through that reverse diet is gonna look different for people, okay? But what is a reverse diet? Because there's now even coaches who will call themselves reverse dieting coaches. I am a reverse dieting coach, right? And I don't I don't love that either. And it's it's just like saying, hey, I am a fuck, what's a good example here, you know, like a holistic or like or or like a flexible dieting coach, or you know what I mean? Yeah, okay, cool. Well, let's stop giving things the name, okay? Let's just call it what it is. Reverse dieting is no magic. Plain and simple. All a reverse dieting is is look, you have your maintenance calories, right? And that is where your weight's gonna be stable, you're not gaining, losing, etc. You have your maintenance calories, and to create a calorie deficit, we remove calories, right? Because a calorie deficit literally means sometimes I feel like people don't understand the translation here, like you know, language barriers aside, even English-speaking people look, a calorie deficit, which is required for fat loss, literally means there's a shortage of calories coming in. This now means that the body's gonna burn body fat to account for the the calories you're still burning, but you're not eating enough for. That's how we lose body fat, okay? Assuming you're metabolically healthy. So we achieve that calorie deficit by lowering your food intake. We keep steps nice and stable. And no, we're not gonna do cardio to burn fat. But you have maintenance, and let's say we, and if you're watching this, you can see me kind of like paint this out here, but you have maintenance up here, okay? Let's call it a 2500 calories, just for easy numbers. We're probably gonna start your fat loss phase at just about let's call it 2000, okay? Because now we know we're below that maintenance range, which is about a two-300 calorie range. So I want to make sure that hey, like you're actually there, and we're gonna push you towards 0.5 up to 1% of weight loss per week. So you can lose body fat effectively while maintaining muscle. Okay, we keep protein nice and high as well, we keep the basics up, but so let's say your maintenance is 2500 calories, we're going or starting your fat loss phase at 2000. Now, maybe over time, maybe four weeks in, maybe six or eight weeks, we're gonna lower by another hundred calories, and we're gonna do that maybe a few times. So let's now imagine we end up at 1700 or 1600 calories, okay? Or 15, it really just depends, okay? Depends on your maintenance calories, but just for easy numbers. What do we do after fat loss? The reverse diet. All this is is hey, you ended your fat loss phase here. This is your expected maintenance calorie range. We're gonna step by step bring your calories up instead of going one big jump, we're gonna like transition. Okay, there's a few benefits to this. Uh, mentally is a big one, okay. I always gotta tell my clients, look, you're not done yet, okay? But we're deliberately going slow here, okay. And slow is relatively speaking. So the e more part on purpose, okay. Your instinct might go, oh, I'm gonna gain body fat. No, you're not. Look, if you're literally, let's call it a I don't know, if you're in a 700-calorie deficit or 800, adding four or five hundred calories is not gonna make you gain body fat, you're below maintenance still. So the way we do it is step by step, the biggest step first, and then we take it slow from there, okay? Depending on what weight's doing, I'm still gonna push calories for people, but it just depends. Everyone's different there, okay. And the main reason people will use reverse diets is uh metabolic adaptation. Now, do I think that people, depending on their history, but people with me, okay? I'm gonna speak for my clients because my clients are going to do maintenance before fat loss. Do I think that people who've dieted for three months with me are so metabolically adapted that we need to really be careful? No, I don't think so. Right? Depending on history, okay. I only know so much when people come in. But we have the the first part of the whole restore method, making sure that we fuel nourish and you know, work on the functional stuff and the foundations, the habits, but a couple of months in, it's probably not gonna be that bad. Like mostly neat, okay. So non-exercise activity goes down. Um, body temperature, you know, is a nice one to look at as well. I mean, by eating less, your thermic effect goes down, of course, of course. Exercise, which is only 5% of how many calories you burn daily, is gonna go down slightly because we have less energy coming in, so maybe less able to push. Uh, but it can also be in terms of hormonal down regulations. Now, is this the thing to worry about?

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No.

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But when people think about or hear about the metabolism slowing down, it's not just slow. Look, that's a normal process, and we can bring it back up too, okay? So if you want to be successful in the the long term, you're gonna have to go through these periods, and I like to reverse diet as a transition, okay? And I can tell you this too, because like I said, my clients eat more first before anything. I'm just gonna take a little sip of my drink over here. Guys, sorry, I've been talking a lot today. So now all joking aside, monotons coming in, also the active ones, okay, eat very little. And then oftentimes it's eating very little, and then we have these benches in the evening or in the weekends. But I see a lot of people, like from a day-to-day, like a normal weekday, eat on the lower end rather than too much. But too much is usually more like a moment or evening in a week, okay? Or multiple evenings. So what I do in the beginning is hey, I see your food diary come back, and I'm seeing a 15, a 1200 calorie, and an 18. And hey, we're just gonna bring you up a little bit. We're gonna standardize your intake, we're gonna bring you up, and we're gonna bring you up more. And the amount of times I've seen people lose body fat or lose weight and body fat those first few weeks, I can't I can't tell, like it's most people actually, you know what I mean. But you need to do it smart here, step by step. Now, mind you, as much as most of my clients still lose body fat and weight in their reverse diet, it's never the goal, okay? So immediately take this out of your hand. A reverse diet should never be the tool for fat loss. The reverse diet is the transition out of fat loss and with all these reverse dieting coaches to make you lose weight by eating more. That's it's misleading, okay? It's misleading. Anyway, no rants today. I'm gonna stick to my my little outline here, okay? No side quests. How do we do this? Okay, it's earned, not rushed. By the time a client goes through the reverse dieting process, they've done the foundation work, right? Remember the the whole restore method that we talked about last time. Reveal, establish, solve that comes first before transform. Okay, so we've really gone deep into their symptoms, their labs, their lifestyle habits. We've fueled, we've nourished, we've worked through any of the hormonal or gut stuff. Okay, we got them to a good spot with good biofeedback, right? Sleep, stress, hunger, digestion, etc. Recovery. We've already done that. All right, so keep that in mind. These people, once they go through that reverse diet, they've already acquired so much knowledge and they've learned so many new skills and experience. This needs to be said, okay. So throughout my restore method, they they go through those initial phases to set them up for success, so that I also know for sure that hey, once I pull them into fat loss and we do the reverse diet, I know they're gonna respond really well, they're gonna be able to stick with it, okay? Of course, there's still troubleshooting along the way. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring carbs up for the most part, and we're gonna say, okay, you and your fat loss phase here. This is your expected maintenance, which by the way, you can go to my website. I'll link this in the show notes for my free TDE calculator. You're gonna be able to for free. And again, that's not even a download thing, like you can just go there, put in your data, you can figure out your maintenance categories. I'm even considering creating like a like a reverse dining add-on to that. And if you would like me to do so, please message me on Instagram before I spend a lot of time creating a whole you know calculator that no one's gonna use. If you think that with my TDEE calculator that shows you your maintenance, fat loss, and category surplus goals for muscle gain and fat loss, etc., if you think a reverse dieting add-on here would be helpful, let me know via the DMs, okay? But what we're gonna do is the following here's your end fat loss phase calories. This is expected maintenance. What's our halfway point? Going back to our example, I'm just gonna pull my calculator for this. I feel like I shouldn't need this, but I'm gonna use it anyway. Let's imagine we are let's say you end your fat loss phase at 1600 calories, and your maintenance calories is about 2500. Now, what's our halfway point there? That's just about 2050 calories. So, what I'm then gonna do is I'm gonna see 2050 and I'm gonna call it 2100. So I would bring you up by 500 calories instantly, okay. There's also a post that I put up not too long ago. And now, while we're at it, you know what? Let me actually pull this up because I want you to read this as well. I actually took a client through this. Um give me a second because I want you to read through this. I need you to go to my Instagram and scroll back, and then you're gonna see a post. One second, sorry. There we go. Okay. On June 30th, the post shows I added 535 calories to my client's day in one go. She just lost 6.8 kilos in four months, and she was terrified. Check out that post, I'll link it in the show notes as well. I think that's a huge one for you to read, okay? Because this is actually showing you an example of a client going through their reverse diet and keeping it off perfectly. Okay? Perfectly. Her measurements even dropped throughout the reverse diet, okay? So don't worry about the reverse diet. Follow my steps, and you're gonna be fine. But uh, two links I'll put in the show notes, the TDE calculator, and then also this post. I want you to read through this, okay? Give it a like as well so I know that you've seen it. But we're gonna go halfway, we're gonna be aggressive in the beginning. Let's call it 500 calories, and then we're gonna stay there for at least one week, sometimes two, kind of depending. Uh, I like one, okay. And then I'm gonna look at your weight, and this is where reverse dining is a little bit more intuitive. In that I've done this so many times now with with hundreds of people, like I don't go and calculate stuff, and I'm just looking at hey, okay, so this is our weight. What about measurements? You know what? I'm gonna add another hundred categories. I've changed in this though over time. Um, I used to be a lot slower, and I'm still gonna do that with certain clients, it just really depends. Because once we've done that first jump, which is always gonna be the same, I'm gonna go halfway-ish, maybe on the higher end, and we're gonna monitor. And I bring the client in on this too. I'm gonna ask them to say, hey, two things we can do. We can get you up to maintenance as soon as possible, which I do like, or if you feel like, hey, you know what? It's we're in a pretty good place, but I'd like to squeeze out some extra fat loss. Let's go diet and slow. And I also agree as their coach that they can get away with it, assuming they've not dieted for too long. Okay. Now, if a client's dieted for 16 weeks, like we're not gonna do that, okay? We're gonna bump them up, but then we're gonna maybe add 10 carbs, and then the next week 10 carbs, and then the next week five fats, or maybe five fats and ten carbs, okay. This is what I need you to understand. Like, is there's not a set way to do this, and for me, it's super intuitive. And I also think that having not gone through this without a coach or with a coach might make it a little difficult. So I'm still gonna give you the steps, but understand, okay. I can teach you the steps, but there's a lot of self-doubt in these phases, there's a lot of scary moments. You're gonna see more weight fluctuations. Remember, too, that your muscle glycogen begins to replenish. Okay, this is carbohydrates stored in the muscle. This has weight. Every gram of carb stored in the muscle pulls in three grams of water, okay? So you see, you're gonna doubt yourself even more here, and you're gonna see those weight fluctuations. You might even freak out a little, okay? So that's where the coaching comes in, that's where the mindset stuff comes in. Because the mindset coaching that we do, okay, that runs alongside of all these caloric increases and whatever, okay? Because I literally tell each client this, okay, who's never reverse dieted. I will tell them this, and I will say, hey, look. I've just explained this whole process to you, but I'm gonna be honest with you. There's nothing that I can tell you now that will make you fully believe that what I'm saying is true. There's nothing I can say that's gonna give you that full confidence. I'm gonna need you to embrace the process, trust me as your coach, and remember too, you're literally paying me to get a result and keep it, okay? So I know what I'm doing. But trust the process in about two or three weeks. Once we have the real world data, you're gonna see it on paper, and then you will get it. And this is how it goes, then. First, increase 500 calories, more fluctuations, pretty often, right? So people start to worry, and right, it's still a little scary, but we weigh them uh they weigh themselves every single day, they track their food, which by the way, 500 calories doesn't mean you're gonna add 500 calories in shitty fucking processed foods. You're sticking with whole foods, and 90% of your calories are gonna come from whole foods still, okay? Very strict with this in fat laws and reverse diet, your food quality needs to be in point. This is not like a you know, like a flexible dieting fest, like no, whole foods. Also here, okay now week one, 500 extra calories, no weight gain. Or maybe a little bit. Week two, hey, you know what? Looks pretty good. Let's add another 10, 15, 20 carbs. Cool. Another week. Weight stable. They start to see it. Another week. Uh you know, weight's pretty stable. Maybe it's even a little bit down, right? And this is where like some people will go down, up, or just stay stable. Like, what it's gonna be for you, I can't tell you because I'm not there with you, and it's literally different for everyone, okay? And it massively depends on what you are doing with your food quality and how accurate you are actually tracking. Because don't get in this mindset of like, oh, you know, we're done with fat loss. We're gonna be nice and flexible here. Like, no, you're you're gonna stay on point, okay? That's how you master this. You just stay like as dedicated to your reverse diet as you were to your fat loss phase. But now you just don't get that gratification of the skill going down, and that's just not a lesson to learn, okay. Look, I'm not saying this is easy, all right? But you have to push through this, okay? You have to push through the self down and show yourself because it's only gonna click and you're only gonna believe once you've gone through this whole process. And then week three, hey, weight's still stable. Hey, they do their measurements. Again, and my client actually sees their waist measurement has dropped, which objectively means they have lost body fat while weight stayed the same, and their calories are now up by five, six, seven, eight hundred calories. Now they start to get it. And now that weight comes off at our shoulders, and they say, you know what? This is kind of crazy. I've never experienced this. I've always thought that eating more is gonna make me fat. But I'm eating a lot more now, and I'm the exact same weight, plus my measurement was down, you see. So a reverse, a successful reverse, of course, goes into our next phases, right? Where we own and where now we're gonna put him at maintenance and keep him there. I'm gonna now like teach you some other things, right? A dedicated phase where, hey, you know what? I'm gonna have you not track for a little bit. We're gonna do other things. We're gonna actually maybe catch up on labs, maybe check again, see how we're doing there. Hey, there was some some markers were off with your blood sugars, your lipids. Let's actually see where we're at right now, okay? Um, and then we can take it from there, and then we go into more like the muscle gain phases, etc. Or long term, if people have more weight to lose, then we're gonna do multiple rounds of fat loss. But we're always gonna do a reverse diet here, unless we do something that I call the flush, which we will do another episode on potentially, but that's more reserved for my clients, okay? Where we actually bring up calories hard, we actually go low protein, okay, but it's a whole different strategy, um, which we we might actually discuss on a podcast at some point. But it is that simple, okay. You jump halfway, take it step by step from there. And even once we get to maintenance, I'm gonna I'm gonna still push because the majority of my clients end up above their expected maintenance, calculated maintenance, while still maintaining. And that's what I like. I like a high food intake, a high output, the body's functioning, we have a lot of micronutrients coming in, and of course, there is a limit, right? But I like to bring it nice and high, and then they're like, yo, I can't believe like I just lost 10, 20, you know, 10, 20 kilos, and I'm eating more than I did, you know, the last few years, consistently at least, and I'm maintaining here. This is incredible, and now people have the flexibility too, because you know how I said with the food quality, look, once you're at maintenance, I'm fine with 8020. Okay, it's just never the priority to focus on the pizza, the burgers, that you know, this is how we do that, all right. So, again, like Veronica, actually, the the the client I or past client that recorded this for, for her too, like 20 kilos down over time. We coached for a long time, of course, but we did the first fat loss phase, okay? Reverse diet, maintain second fat loss phase. She included weddings, birthdays, vacations, all that good stuff, and she's still killing it right now on her own. She just needed that confirmation. But I'm following her on Instagram still, and I know she's killing it with trading, with food, and all that, with the meal prep. She still does it, and that's the success. It's you keeping up the things that I teach you as your coach. Okay. Another client of mine, Marlene, actually posted about her uh a couple days ago. She coached with me for eight months, and only three of those were spent in a fat loss phase, right? She lost like 12.3 kilos or so, 12 and a half kilos or so. And the majority of her time was also spent on like these kind of things, like bringing food up, kind of showing you that you can do this. And it's just so cool to see, right? Because even like the example I used with another client, seeing people like going through those different phases, and then what I said earlier, like I want to make sure that hey, we bring you two maintenance before vacation, right? So I want you, or actually, I might have said this in my source just now, but if a client has vacation in like let's say mid-July, now we're gonna do fat loss probably before summer. I want to do the reverse dieting leading leading up to summer, and I'm gonna have you at maintenance already used to your maintenance categories one or two weeks at least, right? Before your vacation. So now you're fueled up, your your hunger is more stable again, and you're more in tune with what your body needs. And this is how that periodization uh aligns with also your real life plans. Makes sense because I want to have like even thinking if you're looking at fat loss now for the rest of the year, first of all, it's not gonna be hey, all of you know, July, August through December is fat loss, like no, maybe three months, okay. But if you do this, okay, if we look at our timeline, you plan for a three-month cut, uh reverse diet, do it for four weeks, plan for four weeks, um, and then maybe be a maintenance, you know, latest, probably like first week of December or so, kind of depends. That's a really good way to do this because now you can say, hey, I've had I have enough time to come back from a vacation into my routines, dial in, go into Fet Laws when I'm ready and when my body's ready. I'm gonna do that for three months, I'm gonna reverse diet for a month, and then from about December, we're gonna just build or just maintain, kind of depending on your goals, you see. So the reverse dieting process is such a key thing, and I really love the experience for my clients because it's every single time, like it's the game changer. Okay. Now, you're still gonna have to like follow the plan and follow my advice and and share things with me because the the clients who kill it in my program they get uncomfortable, they share the things, they they are willing to be confronted, you know what I mean. But if we work through that and we take them through those different phases, the winning part is like it's is when the eating more part comes in, you know what I mean? So, like I said, I will um link the posts about adding 550 calories to a client after her three, four-month uh fat loss phase where she lost a ton of weight, and how scared she was about that, right? I'll link that in our show notes. I will link the TDEE calculator as well. And last but not least, if you do feel like it would be helpful to have some type of reverse dieting add-on to my calorie calculator, we can probably build it out. I just want to make sure that you actually will use it. So just shoot me a message if you would like that, okay? That way I know you've listened to this, that way I know hey, it's actually worth building it before I make something that no one's gonna use. Okay, so all that being said, have an amazing rest of your week. I will talk to you very soon. Thank you for listening once again.