The Myth of Reverse Dieting (Do THIS Instead) | Ep 389

Join the 10-Week Recovery Diet Workshop tomorrow (Tuesday, October 21) at noon Eastern. Get the complete evidence-based protocol for metabolic recovery without reverse dieting. Just $27 includes the full workshop, replay, 20-page protocol workbook, and bonuses.

Register at: http://live.witsandweights.com

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Reverse dieting promises to "fix" your suppressed (or "broken") metabolism through gradual calorie increases, but does it actually work?

Is it the most efficient way to "recover" after a fat loss phase or years of dieting?

Discover what the research actually shows about metabolic recovery, why reverse dieting creates convincing illusions of progress while delaying actual results, and what you should do instead if you're stuck at low calories heading into the new year.

Episode Resources:

• Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS
• Join the 10-Week Recovery Diet Workshop (Tuesday, October 21 at noon ET) - $27 includes workshop, replay, 20-page guide, and bonuses:
  http://live.witsandweights.com

Timestamps:

0:00 - Reverse dieting hype vs. evidence
5:00 - Myth 1: Precision reveals "true" metabolism
10:05 - Myth 2: Maintenance is a fixed number
14:50 - Myth 3: Eating more without gaining fat
19:48 - Myth 4: Gradual increases drive recovery
24:25 - What actually drives recovery
26:50 - The 6 steps of a proper recovery diet

Chapters

• 0:00 Reverse Dieting Hype vs. Evidence
• 1:56 Client Wins and Real-World Outcomes
• 3:09 The Core Claim and Why It’s Backward
• 5:00 Myth 1: Precision Reveals “True” Metabolism
• 10:05 Myth 2: Maintenance Is One Number
• 14:50 Myth 3: Eating More Without Gaining
• 19:48 Myth 4: Gradual Increases Drive Recovery
• 24:25 What Actually Drives Recovery
• 26:50 The Recovery Diet: Six Steps
• 29:20 Recap & Takeaways

Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:00

By now you've probably heard of reverse dieting, and that it is the solution to your suppressed metabolism. Add 50 to 100 calories every week, watch your metabolic rate magically climb, and avoid fat regain in the process. Except the research shows that reverse dieting, the way it's commonly practiced and promoted, is mostly built on myths. The benefits people experience have almost nothing to do with gradually adding calories, and everything to do is simply getting out of a deficit. Today I'm breaking down what the evidence actually shows about metabolic recovery, why reverse dieting perpetuates myths that keep people stuck, and what you should do instead if you're stuck at low calories heading into the new year. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're going to talk about one of the most overhyped strategies in the fitness industry, reverse dieting. I've spent years working with clients who have tried reverse dieting, and I've watched this approach evolve from a post-contest recovery strategy for bodybuilders into a supposed metabolic fix for anyone who's ever dieted. And the problem is that most of what you've been told or see on social media about reverse dieting is not supported by evidence. The actual research, and there's a lot of it now, it's actually quite interesting, tells a very different story than Instagram testimonials and coaching programs selling you on this approach. So today we're going to look at what the evidence shows, why reverse dieting does perpetuate these myths that seem true, but they're not, and what you should do instead. Because this is more about recovery dieting and doing it the right way, not doing reverse dieting the way it's usually perpetuated. Before we get into it, I want to share what is possible when you actually get this right. I want to share some quotes from members of Physique University who've been working on their nutrition and training foundations over the past few weeks and months. Joseph says, quote, I'm working on my lifting form. Thanks for form checks with inputs from both Coach Carol and Coach Phillip. I have expert inputs allowing me to improve my workouts. Huge plus. Also, looks like my body fat's trending downward and muscle mass is on the incline. So everything's headed in the positive direction. Joe said, quote, I can now wear a pair of jeans that were consigned to the same pile as underwired bras and high-heeled shoes, labeled not possible anymore. They fit perfectly now and don't hurt anymore. And Christine told me, quote, I had to bring my daughter to get a new state ID this morning. She was asking about the real ID, so I got my license out. It I saw that after 39 years, I finally weigh less than my license shows by 30 pounds. And these are just a variety of different outcomes that people are getting depending on their goal. And it's what happens when you understand what drives recovery and stop relying on some of these myths. Joseph is seeing body composition improvements while getting stronger. Joe is experiencing real-world benefits that she cares about. And Christina's getting results she hasn't seen in 39 years. So if you want these kinds of results for yourself, I am teaching the complete system tomorrow at noon Eastern in the 10-week recovery diet workshop. Registration is open right up until then. So you can go to the link in the show notes or live.witsandweights.com. So let's talk about why reverse dieting isn't what most people think it is. I want to start with the conclusion and then work backward through the evidence. Reverse dieting, if you look at social media and how it's practiced, promoted, and spoken about, it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how metabolic recovery works. The idea is that by very slowly and precisely adding calories, usually it's something like 50 to 100 a week, sometimes I'll see 200 calories, and tracking everything, you can somehow coax your metabolic rate upward. You could jumpstart your metabolism without regaining fat. And then you can supposedly lose fat from a higher metabolism. At least those are different elements of this claim. The research shows this is backward. The benefits that people experience from reverse dieting have nothing to do with the gradual calorie increases. It comes from getting rid of the energy deficit. That's a different thing. Those are two different things. Okay. Getting out of a deficit causes your rate to partially recover back to its current baseline or set point, whatever word you want to use. And that happens whether you jump straight to maintenance or you drag it out and inch your way there over, say, 12 weeks. So what reverse dieting actually does then is delay recovery while perpetuating myths that make it seem like the gradual increases are doing something special and that they're necessary. And then understanding these is important because, you know, lots of smart, well-intentioned coaches believe and say these things, and sometimes in a negative sense in that they are used preying on your fear to get you to join a program. So today we're going to break down four myths that keep people stuck in reverse dieting. And we're going to talk about what actually drives recovery. And then finally, what should you do specifically? So myth number one is that extreme tracking precision is going to reveal your true metabolism. Now you might be shocked to hear me say that because I talk about macrofactor all the time and how tracking your weight and your food is going to help you understand your true estimated expenditure. So if you are, for example, adding 10 grams of carbs this week and you don't account for that, then the entire approach is meaningless somehow, that you have to track to the gram every day, or you can't tell if your planned increases are having any effect. But what's happening when you are tracking, however precise you are, is that you're revealing how much you're actually eating. You're not actually revealing your improved metabolism. And again, you're like, wait a minute, Philip, it doesn't quite jive with what you've said in the past about eating, tracking your food, tracking your weight, and revealing your metabolism. Stick with me because there's some nuances here. So I'll see this a lot with clients, right? Someone comes to me, you know, thinking their metabolism is just so much lower with age, it's broken, whatever words we want to use. And they're like, hey, I'm only eating 1400 calories at the moment. I can't lose weight anymore. So I'm not going to go ahead and immediately change their diet. What I want to start with is tightening up their tracking and awareness. I want them to weigh using a food scale. I want them to use the barcode. I want them to use AI-based vision estimates, whatever makes sense. It doesn't have to be perfect. But I do want them to log everything for the day and do it every day so that we get the most and the most precise data in a relatively short time. Okay. And suddenly they discover, oh, I'm eating 1800 calories. So that's one scenario. And I'll say it's not the most common scenario today because a lot of people that come to me have heard the podcast. They know to do this. They're not gaslit about how many calories they're eating, is the word I'm going to use. Okay. But a lot of people aren't tracking or not doing it consistently, or they're skipping weekends, or they're using an inferior tool like MyFitnessPal, where they're just tracking, but they don't know how much to target. So then they feel guilty when they don't hit their goals and then they don't track on those days or those meals, right? And the list goes on and on and on. And we we know that even registered dietitians, right? People who have lots of nutrition training are routinely underestimating their calorie intake unless they actually track it. Many of us just are terrible at this. You know, 40 to 50% is common for non-nutrition people or people who haven't gone through this before. So even if you're trying to do it intuitively, you could be off by 20%. And then it kind of compounds over time as your diet changes, your life changes, maybe the adherence is a little bit spotty, those errors get even larger if you're not, you know, kind of on top of it. So what makes reverse dieting seem to work is that you are now more precise with your tracking and it improves your habits. Because the loose tracking that you did before, where you were quote unquote eating 2000 calories, but maybe you were eating 2,400 on average because you didn't count the weekends, you didn't count the snacks, you didn't count the bites, didn't count the eating off of your kid's plates, right? Those sorts of things, as well-intentioned as you were, that's gone. And now you're like, oh, okay, I'm actually averaging a few hundred more calories than I thought. And then your brain goes into the solution mode of, oh, well, now I maybe need to meal plan a little bit differently to bring that number closer where my maintenance is. So it's not that, hey, I used to maintain on 2000, now I'm maintaining on 2600, my metabolism is fixed. It's not what we're doing here. That's that's one of the myths. You are always eating whatever the value is and maintaining at that weight. You just didn't know because your tracking wasn't as accurate. So for many of you, you've already gone past this point and you are tracking, but I do want to address the listener who is still not quite tracking consistently because there is extreme value in that. Tracking creates a real measurable difference in the numbers you see because you see the truth. You see the real logged calories. It doesn't have to be perfect. By that I mean you should log everything, but the accuracy, there's gonna be a little bit of error, but the error tends to work itself out. It tends to be a little high and a little low. For example, if you're using AI-based food logging, I think that's good enough. I think it's going to be a little bit high sometimes, a little bit low sometimes, especially if you give it context, it's gonna be a little bit more accurate. And all of this can be extremely empowering in and of itself without doing anything else. Of course, it then throws water in your face because you're like, oh, I'm actually eating a little bit more. So I my behaviors do have to change a little bit, right? So if you need that level of precision to make reverse dieting quote unquote work, that kind of tells you something. Okay. I think real changes to your metabolism can happen regardless of whether you're tracking precisely, right? They're they're two different concepts. But the the tracking is going to create the awareness that's gonna improve the habits that are gonna help you with your metabolic change. Okay, I hope that all made sense for the first one because some of these myths are a little bit are a little bit nuanced. All right. Myth number two is that your metabolism only works at a specific calorie level. And what I mean by this is the idea that your true maintenance is, you know, this one number and it's not very different and it doesn't differ very much. In other words, it's fixed or close to it. So let's say your maintenance is 2200 right now, then your brain immediately goes to, okay, if I eat 2100, obviously I'm gonna lose weight. And if I eat 2300, I'm obviously gonna gain weight. But the reality is far from that. Let me walk it through. Okay, so let's say your true expenditure, we call it your total daily energy expenditure, the amount of calories you burn in a day. Let's say it is 2200 calories per day right now. If you eat exactly 2200 calories a day, your weight will probably stay fairly stable. Now, if you eat 2100 calories a day instead, you're in a 100 calorie deficit. Over three months, we would see a, you know, a couple pounds of fat loss, let's say. But because daily weight fluctuates by, say, one to three pounds for most people, having nothing to do with fat, but because of water, you may not even be able to notice that. Even if you're using a tool like Macrofactor, you know, which is as precise as it gets in terms of your weight trend, it's gonna be hard to see that. Now, what if you're eating 2,300 calories? So that's a hundred calorie surplus. Again, opposite. You're gonna gain a couple pounds over several months, barely noticeable, especially within the noise of day-to-day fluctuations. So for practical purposes, your maintenance is actually a range of something like 400 calories. I mean, you know, because 400, we're talking about practicality here. So anywhere from let's say 2,000 to 2,400 calories a day is gonna feel like maintenance to you. And because the scale isn't obviously going up or down, your clothes fit the same, you would say that you're maintaining. But here's how it creates another reverse dieting myth. Let's say someone finishes a diet at 1800 calories and they're on the low end of their maintenance range, maybe even a small deficit because but but because they're losing weight so slowly, they perceive themselves as maintaining, right? And then they start reverse dieting. Over, say, 10 weeks, they work up to 2200 calories. So they went from 1800 to 200. And remember that 400 calorie range. Well, now they're kind of on the high end of their maintenance range that they ended the diet with. Maybe they're in a small surplus, but again, the weight change is barely perceptible. And then you think their mind goes to, hey, I just added 400 calories over those 10 weeks and my weight stayed the same. Awesome, reverse dieting works. But their actual expenditure might have been 2,000 calories the entire time. They went from slightly below to slightly above it, and they stayed within that invisible range of quote unquote maintenance the entire time. They didn't reverse metabolic adaptation, none of this reverse dieting magic occurred. They just moved from one end of maintenance to another. Maintenance is a range. And it fluctuates even so, even beyond that. You know, I could think of a client who, for example, reverse dieted from 1700 to 2100 calories over 12 weeks with a previous coach and had told me this story how she had done these reverse diets and she's like, Yeah, I added 400 calories, I didn't seem to gain weight. But when you averaged it out based on the intake, her TDEEE was really around 1950 the entire time. When you look at the expenditure graph, we had to reverse engineer it with her data because she wasn't using macrofactor at the time, and then we kind of reverse engineered it. So that's like she started slightly below it and did slightly above it, and it looked like metabolic recovery. And I think this is a power myth, powerful myth to sit on here because it creates the it creates the experience that reverse dieting promises, which is eating more without gaining weight, but nothing's changed. It's purely a, I'll call it an accounting error. It has to do with math and averages and dynamic dynamic, your system being dynamic and the signal versus noise and all that fun stuff, the kind of the engineering stuff that you really have to be aware of. And you can get fooled by if somebody is a really slick marketer and kind of flips the numbers the right way. And so this is why tracking and monitoring your expenditure matter a lot. Because when you understand your actual energy expenditure via logging food, logging weight, not just this perception or this like nebulous range, it helps you target in on those smart decisions. How do I want to adjust my calorie, calories, but not let it drag out a long time and not actually have a result? So I'm teaching this tomorrow at Noon Eastern in the 10-week recovery diet workshop. This is not reverse dieting with all the myths and all the false promises, but it's actually called recovery dieting, where it's based on your metabolic response and your personal lifestyle and the need to adjust as you hit various plateaus and situations. So I'm going to walk through how to assess your foundation. You know, how are you even in the place where you can properly track, measure, and execute a recovery diet and know that you're doing it? How to use that data, like your expenditure, to make those informed adjustments, how to monitor biofeedback, which honestly is one of the best indicators of recovery. And then what to do when your data shows that you're ready for certain changes along the way. So you don't go too slowly. I'd rather you get there fast and efficiently if you can't. So that's tomorrow. It's $27, includes a 20-page protocol workbook and all the bonuses, all the guides, the workshop itself. Live.witsandweights.com or click the link in the show notes. Go to live.witsandweights.com, click the link in the show notes. I'm going to continue on now with myth number three that you are eating more without gaining because your metabolism's going up. Now, again, you might think, well, yeah, isn't that what happens when you recover? You eat more, your metabolism follows, and therefore you don't gain weight. And mathematically, it's very convincing. It explains why a lot of people are certain that reverse dieting worked for them. And again, you're thinking, Philip, this sounds a lot like what you talk about, but there's differences. I really want to explain. I hope I'm doing a good job on this podcast because it's hard to do this. The myth is hey, I'm now eating 2,800 calories and maintaining the same weight I used to maintain at 2,000 calories. Therefore, my metabolism increased by 800 calories. The problem is that calorie intake is instantaneous, but body weight change is cumulative. When you ignore that cumulative math, you create a myth of metabolic improvement. And honestly, as much as I love macrofactor and I use it myself, this is where I have to constantly question what it's telling me in terms of the expenditure and either offset it one way or the other because people, I think, maybe trust it too much to be like, this is what's going on today, even though it's a lagging indicator, all right, and doesn't overrespond, it's very conservative. So what's actually happening looks like this. Let's say you finish your diet, you go on a fat loss phase, you lose some fat, you finish your diet, or maybe you're plateauing, whatever. Let's say your expenditure at the end of the diet is 2,400 calories, but you're not quite sure that's what it is. You've been eating something below that, right? Like let's say 1800, what did we say? 1800 calories? I don't think I gave you a number, but let's say 1800 calories. And so you're like, I'm gonna do a reverse diet, I'm gonna jump up to 1900, and I'm gonna go up 50 calories a week for the next X number of weeks until I recover my metabolism. So in the first, let's say, eight weeks, if you're going up 50 calories a week, you're basically still in a deficit because you didn't really trust how high you should go and you didn't want to lose fat, right? And then at some point you hit your maintenance, but you're still going and you start to overshoot, and eventually you get into a surplus and you start to gain a little bit of weight, but all of this is imperceptible. It's all imperceptible. And then by let's say three or four months later, you've been trying to do this, it may not take that long, maybe a shorter time frame. You're actually eating a higher level than your true maintenance that's even fully recovered. And your cumulative energy balance over that entire time is approximately zero. You haven't gained weight, but you think you've boosted your metabolism by that amount of calories, let's say 800 calories. Except in reality, you took a long time to get to your true maintenance, and then you took a long time slightly going past it. And again, going back to myth number one, you're effectively in that range the entire time. And yet you've probably ended up on the top end, and now you may be in a surplus and start to gain weight, but it's gonna happen slowly over time. So it's this lack of data and lack of confidence where you think, oh, the reverse diet worked and I'm maintaining my weight, and you're not really, you're actually starting to slowly gain weight at that point, maybe a lot of weight, and it just slowly catches up. And so I think this part ex this myth explains the most common reverse dieting testimonial, quote unquote, you know, I'm I'm eating so much more than I used to, and I haven't gained weight. Okay. Because it's true, at least on the surface, but they haven't been eating that much more for very long, and the cumulative energy balance really hasn't had time to catch up. And because they're not tracking their data accurately, they don't know it. And so this is where, hey, I gained eight pounds or 10 pounds months later, and I'm not, and I don't know why. So this is kind of disconnecting calorie intake, which is what you eat today, from body composition, which is what you've eaten over many months. And the illusion of reverse dieting manipulates the timing to create this myth of eating more without gaining, but the cumulative math is gonna catch up eventually. And that brings me to myth number four that gradual calorie increases drive the metabolic recovery. And this is the most important myth to understand because it gets at the core misunderstanding of what actually drives metabolic recovery. The reverse dieting myth says that gradually increasing your calories causes your metabolic rate, your metabolism to increase. Add 50 calories this week, your metabolism speeds up a bit, add another 50 next week, it speeds up more, keep going. And then you rebuild your metabolic capacity through this careful manipulation of calories. And again, the research shows us and experience shows us this is backward. What actually happens is eliminating the energy deficit, the calorie deficit, causes a metabolic, your metabolic rate to increase. That's different than increasing calories causing it to increase. You have to eliminate the deficit. When you transition from a negative energy balance to a neutral energy balance, maintenance, metabolic adaptation partially reverses because you're no longer in an energy depleted or resource-depleted state. And guess how fast this happens? Within days, it has nothing to do with whether you jumped straight to maintenance or inched your way there over 12 weeks. Once you get to maintenance, right, and that's the important part, you're gonna start recovering very quickly, which is why we want to do it quickly. Okay. Metabolic adaptation is driven by two things: the loss of fat mass and body weight and the presence of an energy deficit, right? Those are two different things. You're getting lighter on the scale and you're in a deficit. When you get rid of the deficit, that portion of adaptation driven by the deficit reverses very quickly. The portion driven by your loss in body mass is going to persist until you regain it because you're just a lighter person. Of course, that was your goal, right? To be a lighter person. So you take that along for the ride. So reverse dieting gets the causality backward, the cause and effect. You're not able to add more calories because you're carefully manipulating your metabolism upward. You're able to add more calories because eliminating the deficit increased your metabolic rate. And now your old maintenance is actually a slight deficit, right? The maintenance you ended your diet with, technically, right, is now a slight deficit because you've recovered to your true, full recovered maintenance as quickly as you could. I think it's almost like a parallel to progressive overload and training, right? You don't get stronger because you added five pounds to the bar. You're able to add five pounds to the bar because you got stronger from the previous training. I know it sounds like a paradox, but the weight increase is the effect of you adapting and getting stronger, which is why we're not really overloading, we're actually loading right to the edge and then causing that adaptation. The same thing happens with reverse dieting. The calorie increases are the effect of metabolic recovery from eliminating the deficit. So you're kind of like allowed now to increase your calories because you're slowly getting out of that deficit, and the recovery happens because of that. The gradual increase in those calories are you just getting up to that point, albeit slower than I would like you to, which is kind of the whole point of this whole discussion. And this matters because if reverse dieting is the effect instead of the cause, then the approach is redundant. What do I mean? Well, you're engaging in weeks or months of this guesswork, and maybe you are tracking, but it's still this very mentally fatiguing calorie manipulation to accomplish something that happens when you automatically automatically when you just go to maintenance. You just jump up to maintenance now, like within a day. So the research actually confirms this. When people transition out of an energy deficit right to their true maintenance, their metabolic rate goes up within days, not weeks, not months, days. And it increases the same amount whether you jump to maintenance now or your reverse diet, you're way there weeks later. But we want it now, don't we? We want to recover. Your body's gonna feel much better for it. What does not increase quickly is the part of your metabolism driven by your body weight because you're lighter and you can't change that. It's a biological reality. That's the other confusion because you're not gonna recover, you may not recover fully to the metabolism you had before. Now, the difference being you're probably also building muscle over time. So that's gonna slowly inch up your metabolism as well, just a little bit. But in the short term, you're not gonna have any of that going on. You're just gonna be a little bit lower because your body weight, but you should recover because you're not in the diet. And I actually see this in the data when when I work with clients or in physique university and we're using macrofactor and we're doing this the right way. We'll sometimes see the expenditure bottom out, and then within a few days or at most a couple weeks, it really starts to climb and get back to its normal level. It's always gonna have ups or downs, though. You gotta understand that it's very dynamic, but it's going to recover. So putting this all together, and then I'm gonna talk about what to do instead in a moment. The evidence tells us that metabolic adaptation, it's not permanent damage. It's just temporary, a temporary change in metabolism that reverses when you eliminate the deficit. And then if you gain your weight back, it'll go all the way back to what it was before. Or if you gain muscle, it's gonna go up, right? That's adaptation. The adaptation adds friction to the whole process and it adds confusion. And that's why I do these episodes. But we're talking about a modest impact, not a huge impact. Effectively, effectively, when metabolism drops during dieting, it's gonna add several weeks to the whole process. Or it's gonna cause you to have to eat a little bit less. That's basically what it comes down to. And you can choose do I want to go faster and have it be a little bit harder with more hunger, or do I want to go slower and face the reality of it? The portion driven by the deficit will reverse within days of returning to maintenance. That's, you know, primarily hormonal, right? Your thyroid, we know it drops by like 6% on average in a 500-calorie deficit, but then it goes right back up when you get out of the deficit within days. We know this from bodybuilders as well. You know, the research on physique athletes, those who tried to kind of restrict their weight regain because they were worried about getting too much fat back, they actually had this persistent long-term suppression of their metabolism. While people who said, you know, I'm gonna come right back to my set point right now, recovered faster. And then ironically or coincidentally, your metabolism then pops back up where it needs to be. So, what should you do instead? So instead of reverse dieting, you want to do what's called a recovery diet. It's not about gradually adding calories and hoping, guessing, taking time, being stuck in that maintenance window and not actually recovering. It's understanding what drives recovery and then optimizing for those factors. And I'm gonna give you six quick ones here. And again, we're gonna cover these in detail in tomorrow's workshop. First is to assess your foundations. These are things like sleep, stress, training, activity, nutrition quality. All of that is going to help you regain your or not regain, it's going to help you come back to your uh recovered state without gaining fat, right? Because that's what we're trying to do. Number two is transitioning to maintenance as quickly as you can instead of inching your way there over many weeks or potentially months. And you can do that with a lot of confidence without worrying about fat regain when you follow the kind of approach that we take. Number three is to be tracking your dynamic maintenance. Again, we use MacroFactor, use my code Wits and Weights, all in Word. It is the only food logger that can do that right now. The only other way to do it is with a spreadsheet. Although I'm gonna drop a hint right now, there's an app that I'm developing that will also do that for you in the background. But anyway, your metabolic rate is gonna climb slightly after you eliminate the deficit. And you want to get first to where it is right now as quickly as you can, and then you start to jump up to where it's going to be in the short term. So that's not reverse dieting, that is a quick jump and then some subsequent jumps as you know how your metabolism is changing. Number four is to accept the reality of biology that, you know, if if you're extremely lean to get fully, fully, fully recovered, you're probably gonna gain a little bit of fat back, or you're just gonna have to stay, you know, to stay lean, you're gonna have to just be eating a little bit less, not a lot less, like a diet, but it's not gonna be as much as you were when you were heavier, right? You can't override that with any system or magic reverse dieting protocol. Number five is tracking things that really matter during this whole process, like your strength, your energy, your sleep, the performance in the gym, all of that is telling you that recovery is happening. So even if you didn't have all this data about calories, you could tell quite straightforwardly, I don't know if that's an adverb, based on your biofeedback that you're recovering. And then number six is using your recovered capacity now in an intelligent way. What I mean by that is let's say you come to our workshop tomorrow and then follow the 10-week protocol. Now, it doesn't take 10 weeks to recover. A lot of that time has to do with building the foundational habits, okay, and assessing these things and doing it the right way. It's actually gonna happen fairly quickly, but you're gonna finish your recovery, you're gonna enter the new year at a well-known maintenance with good biofeedback, then you're ready to go hard at a proper fat loss phase. Not because you boosted your metabolism, but because you're not fighting this deficit-driven, this lack of foundation-driven suppression in your metabolism. That is recovery dieting, okay? And that is what I'm teaching tomorrow with all the implementation details, with the workbook, with the plan and everything. In tomorrow's workshop, just go to livewitsandweights.com. Again, just go to live.witsandweights.com or use the link in the show notes. It's $27, includes a complete 20-page protocol workbook. It includes the foundation assessment, it includes the dynamic maintenance approach we talked about today, how to actually execute it. It includes how to bio how to monitor your biofeedback, and I even have a troubleshooting guide in there for all of the things that will come up in the data, in your plan, and in your life, especially since it's during the holidays. So again, go to live.wits and weights.com or click the link in the show notes if you want to stop wasting time on all these diets and the reverse dieting. And you want to understand this is how I recover, and then I can go after good fat loss in the future. Until next time. Keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember your metabolism isn't broken, it's just adapted. And understanding the difference is what actually drives recovery. My name is Philip Pape, and you're listening to the Wits and Weights podcast. Talk to you next time.