Why Your Reverse Diet Didn't Work and How Long It Takes

Nikkiey: This is the thing: a reverse diet, or retraining your metabolism, isn't a quick reset. It's not a quote-unquote break from dieting. It is literally a full-on metabolic recovery phase. It is the process of slowly increasing your calories over time.

What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident.

For today's episode, episode number 307, I'm going to talk about a topic that I've talked about before, but I'm hopefully going to say it in a little bit of a different way that will resonate with you guys a little bit more. Or maybe you heard the topic before, it didn't really resonate with you, and this time it will make some light bulbs go off. And that is doing a reverse diet and doing it the right way. Because I've heard women say, the ones that have tried it, "I've tried reverse dieting, but it didn't work."

If that's you, then this episode is for you. And if you are somebody who has never heard about reverse dieting, I have a few other episodes. If you go to themacrohour.com, you can just hit Control-F if you're on a computer, and I'm sure you can do it some way on your iPhone, and just type in reverse dieting or retraining. There's like four or five episodes on this topic that you can listen to, and you can come back to this one. Or if you've never done retraining or reversing, this episode is still going to serve you in one way or another, especially if you've been under-eating and doing cardio. Retraining, or reversing, is bringing you up and eating more calories without you gaining the weight.

So if you said what I just said, that you tried a reverse diet before but it didn't work, then hear me out. Because the truth is, it did work. You just didn't stay in it long enough for your body to actually fully heal. When you hear me say how long you should stay in this, very broadly speaking, depending on how long you have been under-eating and doing tons and tons of cardio, you will be amazed at what that length may seem like.

Some of you guys go two, three, four, six weeks max trying something like this. And if it's not getting the result you thought it would, then it's like, okay, it's not working. It's just like all the diet plans or programs you've tried in the past. I'm not saying that to slight you. I'm saying it to be honest. Because the one mistake I see is when it's not working, quote-unquote, women jump right back into not eating enough, or a deficit.

And that is the exact reason why women stay stuck year after year on this hamster wheel, wondering why they're not getting the results they see so many women getting. And I want to be honest, right? You guys know I'm honest. I come from a tough love approach because I love you guys, I care about you guys, and I want you guys to win. And I feel like what's made me successful over the years of coaching so many women is that I just say it for what it is, direct. I do it because I love you guys.

So this is the thing. Most women don't reverse diet. They dabble in it. Like I was just saying, you spend a few weeks slowly eating more. You heard about the concept. Maybe you listened to the episodes before. Maybe I'm speaking directly to you. You listen to the episodes, you try it out, and then you stop. You maybe try it for a couple weeks, you start feeling better, and then the second the scale moves, this overwhelming fear takes over. And what I mean by moves is it goes up. It's because you've been conditioned your entire life that if you see the scale go up, you panic.

You think weight gain equals failure. You think, "Oh no, I'm gaining weight. I need to stop what I'm doing and go back to eating less." But when you're reverse dieting, when you're quote-unquote reversing, when you're retraining, that's not failure. That is literally your metabolism coming back to life. I need to say that louder. Your metabolism is literally coming back to life when you are giving it what it has been needing for so long. And what I mean by that is food.

I know that eating more sounds scary. You've been so conditioned to think you're just going to gain fat. I want to rewire that. I want to challenge those stories. I want to rewrite the narrative. That's not the case. If you eat the wrong types of foods and too much, then yes. There is a whole method to the madness when it comes to reverse dieting, and I'm going to get to that later in the episode. I've shared it with you guys multiple times, and this is what we do at WarriorBabe. There's actually a whole product that I will make sure is linked. I've talked about it in a couple of the episodes. We call it the Ultimate Guide to Macros, or the Macro Method. I'm going to link it in the podcast description below.

But anyway, the small weight fluctuation you see isn't fat. It's water weight. It's food volume. It's your body trying to metabolize this food. It's glycogen. It's salt. It's sugars. All the things. It's your muscles refilling. It's your digestion functioning again. It's your body literally entering the mode of trusting you again.

But if you interrupt that process, if you mess it up because you think, "Oh, I'm gaining fat," you can literally sabotage everything. You pull the plug way too soon. Then you cut your calories down because that's what you're used to. And then your body goes, "Oh, okay, I guess I'm entering the same arena I've been in for so long. I guess it's not safe to burn fat again. So I'm just going to go into adaptation mode and conserve everything." And you end up right back where you started. You end up tired. You end up bloated. You end up frustrated. And you end up in this cycle of, why can't I get the results?

So I want to clear that up. A reverse diet, or retraining your metabolism, as you may have heard me or the coaches at WarriorBabe say it, isn't a quick reset. It's not a quote-unquote break from dieting. It is literally a full-on metabolic recovery phase. I want you to let that sink in: a full-on metabolic recovery phase. It is the process of slowly increasing your calories over time.

It could be months on end. It could be a full 12 months that you're doing this. I know it doesn't sound sexy to say it, but it is the brutal, honest truth. Broadly speaking, if you do this and do it consistently, you can see results within weeks, to a month, to three months, all the way up to sometimes a year, depending not only on how much your metabolism needs to heal, but on how consistent you are with it. It's slowly increasing the calories to repair your metabolism after long periods of restriction.

And that takes time. Your body doesn't heal in just four weeks. Think about it. How long have you been under-eating? And if you don't know how much you're eating in a day, you are more than likely under-eating. How long have you been doing that? Four months? Four years? Maybe a decade? Your body isn't going to just turn around and heal that in four weeks. It takes months, and sometimes longer, to restore thyroid function, to restore hormonal balance, to restore metabolic flexibility. When you've been in a deficit for years, or decades, eating 1,200 calories, doing cardio daily, overtraining and wondering why you can't lose weight, that's when your metabolism adapts and slows down to conserve, to protect you, to hold on.

So when you start reverse dieting, you're basically telling your body, "Hey, I'm feeding you. I'm giving you what you need and what you want. You're safe now. You can start burning fat again." But your body doesn't instantly trust that message, and I want you to understand that. You literally have to prove it. It's just like being in a relationship. Think about that. You don't trust someone right out of the gate in the first month or two of talking to them. That takes time, right?

You have to prove it. You gain trust through consistency, through nourishment, through love, through time. The same applies to your body. That's why we call it the retraining phase, the healing phase, the reversing phase: reversing out of eating 1,200 calories, retraining your metabolism to trust you again, healing by giving nourishment to your body again. This isn't just about how lean can I look, or how much weight can I lose during it. It's about what you're literally rebuilding underneath, internally. It's things you can't see. Inside, your body is a very complex system, and you're rebuilding that.

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All right, let's get back to the show. This is what's really cool about what we do at WarriorBabe, because we retrain babes. A majority of our babes come in not eating enough, eating under 1,200 calories. They're overdoing it with cardio because they've been conditioned that way. It's been decades and years of messaging, and it's just how women are primed nowadays.

When you come into WarriorBabe, a majority of the coaches do this retraining, reversing process. So many babes come to us exhausted. Their weight hasn't budged in months. They're freezing because their thyroid is off. They're doing tons of cardio. And then we say, "Hey, we're going to reverse diet. We're going to retrain your metabolism," because we understand that eating 1,100, 1,200 calories a day is what's causing you to feel this way.

And a lot of the babes are like, "No, this doesn't logically make sense. You want me to eat more to lose fat? That doesn't make any sense. I'm not wired that way." But what our coaches do so well is this: one of our mottos is "Trust us now, believe us later." Women come in, they trust the process, they build that relationship with their coach. They gain that respect and understand that they're working with a professional, and they start to trust the process. For some of the babes, it happens immediately. For some of them, it takes time. Like the analogy I just did of a relationship, it's the same with a coaching relationship and building trust.

What we do is slowly increase that food. And guess what? Yes, the scale is going to go up, but then it levels out. And then over time, the body starts to change. Externally, you start to see that aesthetic result you want with your body. You look leaner, you look tighter, you're losing weight, you're more alive. I've heard babes say, and I know you've heard it in the success stories we share on these episodes, that they went to eating 500, 700 or 1,000 more calories a day. And they're lifting heavier. Their body composition is changing. Muscle definition is showing. Weight is dropping. Fat is dropping. And guess what? We're not cutting calories. That's what happens when you fully trust the process and commit to a reverse, retraining phase. You stop surviving. You start thriving.

And I get it. I've seen so many women get triggered by that scale. You spend decades being praised for making that number go down. Even in conversations with individuals, like, "I want to get to 200 pounds." I was actually talking to a man about it. He said, "I want to get to 200 pounds." And I said, "What about if you got to 220 and you had muscle?" It doesn't matter, because, again, muscle weighs more than fat. So you could be changing your body composition but still weigh the same on the scale. I just want to reiterate that.

But that's the thing. You spend decades chasing that smaller number, being praised for the number going down, or feeling emotionally elated when it goes down. You associate smaller with better. So when you finally start eating more and the scale moves up a few pounds, this old fear, this old identity, this old narrative, this old story starts to kick in. You think, "I'm losing progress. This isn't working." But the truth is, that small jump is the cost of long-term freedom. You can't heal your metabolism while clinging to your diet identity. This isn't another diet. This is metabolic repair. You can't build strength while you're chasing a smaller number.

Because if you're chasing a smaller number, you're never going to have strength. You're not going to have that muscle if you're chasing a smaller number. As I alluded to in that example, muscle weighs more than fat. Well, a pound of muscle and a pound of fat weigh the same. It's just that muscle is more dense than fat. So you can be smaller and step on the scale and it doesn't change, but your composition can be changing.

So if you want your body to be in that trusting mode of burning fat again, then you need to show it that it's safe to let go of conserving and holding on to energy and being in, quote-unquote, survival mode. And that means you need to stay consistent. You need to stay the course even when those emotions come up around the scale and you start to feel uncomfortable. I'm going to give you some ways you can go into this reverse dieting tactically.

But that means part of what you're measuring isn't just the scale. It's biofeedback. It's energy. It's sleep. It's how you feel. It's mood. It's your digestion. It's not just being identified by the scale. The scale doesn't tell you the whole story. And when those markers start improving, that is a clear indicator that your metabolism is repairing. You can't necessarily put numbers or data to it, but it's how you feel, and that should be the most important thing. If your metabolism is repairing, that's a win. Okay?

I think in an episode before on this topic, I did red flags and green flags. To break it down in simple terms, similarly around that same concept: when you diet for too long, your thyroid hormones, your T3 and T4, drop. Your stress hormone, your cortisol, spikes. Your hunger hormones, ghrelin and leptin, get dysregulated. I've heard so many women say, "I don't know what it feels like to be hungry." They don't know what a hunger cue feels like. That's a first indicator. That's a red flag that your metabolism needs repair. Your metabolism is now slower because of all those things I just said, because your body's trying to conserve energy and hold on to it.

But when you reverse that, some of the green flags you can experience are that you actually raise your thyroid output. You reduce your cortisol and inflammation. You restore leptin sensitivity, which helps your body regulate hunger naturally. Again, you start to feel what a hunger cue feels like. You start to learn and listen to your body. You start to build lean muscle, and when you have more lean muscle in your body, that naturally raises your metabolic rate for the long term. In other words, those green flags are basically you turning your metabolism back on.

But that takes time. Another analogy I could use: think about when you break a bone. If you take the cast off too early because you, quote-unquote, feel fine, and I know some of you have been there and done that, what happens? It'll probably break again. It's the same thing here. If you jump back into not eating enough, or back into a deficit, before your metabolism is fully healed, you restart the cycle of burnout again. You don't heal a broken bone in four weeks, do you? A broken bone will probably heal faster than your metabolism will, but you get the gist, right?

One of the biggest mistakes I see when women do reverse dieting is that they treat it like a temporary pause instead of an actual phase. They'll say, "I'll do this for a few weeks," and then they get their energy back and go into a cut again. And I've heard coaches say this too. Coaches will say, "I've started with a babe, and she keeps asking, when are we going to go into a cut? When are we going to go into a cut? When are we going to go into a cut?" That's not a reverse. That's a diet in disguise.

The reverse phase isn't a means to an end. I want you to think of it as a season of rebuilding. It deserves the same focus, the same patience, the same respect that the cut does. Maybe even more. I think this is one of the most important phases somebody could be in. Because the truth is, your cut will only ever be as successful as your reverse was. Let that sink in. If you rush the healing process, the retraining process, the reverse process, you'll never have the metabolism to sustain results for the long term.

This is literally a game changer for the future of your fat loss journey. You can't skip steps and expect long-term progress, right? You can either spend a few months healing now, or you keep repeating the same lose, gain, repeat cycle over and over and over again.

So, some quick tactical takeaways. As I've probably mentioned in episodes before, I just want to remind you. First, know your starting point. To start reverse dieting the right way, know your starting point. Track your intake for a full week before you even make any changes.

Once you see where you're at, you can gradually start to increase. Add about 100 to 150 calories per week, mostly getting your protein up, and then adding in the carbs and fats. Then use that extra energy to train with purpose: to lift, to get stronger, to push your performance in the gym.

Then monitor your biofeedback. Don't just look at the scale. Track how you're sleeping, your energy, your mood, your digestion, all of those things. That's how you know your metabolism is healing.

Then stay in it long enough. Broadly speaking, if you've been dieting for years, you might need a true 6 to 12 months of repair before you go into another cut or deficit.

The last thing I'll say is you need to mentally detach from the outcome. The reverse isn't about fat loss. It's about setting the foundation for every fat loss phase after this, for long-term success. You're building your metabolic engine so you can finally drive without running out of gas. Think of it like that.

So: one, know your starting point. Two, increase gradually. Three, train with purpose. Four, monitor your biofeedback. Five, stay in it long enough. And six, mentally detach from the outcome.

If you're new to this, or you've been in a reverse before and you're getting impatient, let me remind you of something. If you implement this, you're not going backwards. You are rebuilding forward. Literally. Every single bite of food you take in, you are fueling your body with what it needs right now to restore trust with your metabolism.

The women who get the best results long term aren't the ones who diet the hardest. They're the ones who implement this. They're the ones who have patience. They built their foundation by implementing this very important step. Okay? So don't rush it. Don't fear the number on the scale and think it's going to undo all of your progress. Because once your metabolism is repaired, once your hormones are balanced, once your energy and your strength are back, then you can start to cut, decrease and go back into a deficit. But you're doing it the right way at that point, and at that point, it's actually going to work. Trust me now, believe me later. Okay?

If this episode helped you, and I hope it did, screenshot it, put it on your Instagram story and tag me. Let me know what stood out the most. I would love to chat with you in the DMs and help you on your journey in any way I can. I hope you enjoyed it, and I will see you in the next episode. Peace out.

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