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The Rejuvenating Health Podcast
Join Women's Health Nurse Practitioner, Lindsey VanSchoyck for a weekly dose of Precision Medicine as she addresses the hot-button topics specific to Women's Health, Fitness and Nutrition, interviews expert guests and hosts round table discussions with the team of dedicated functional health care specialists.
The Rejuvenating Health Podcast
E146 | "Over Fueled, Under Nourished": Reverse Dieting, Made Understandable
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What if eating more is the missing step between you and sustainable fat loss? We dive into reverse dieting with a clear, no-drama roadmap for restoring metabolism, calming a stressed nervous system, and rebuilding the muscle that keeps your engine running. If you’ve been living on 1200 to 1500 calories and still feel stuck, this conversation reframes the problem: your body isn’t failing... it’s adapting to protect you.
We break down what reverse dieting is and what it’s not: a structured, gradual increase in calories aimed at hormone health, thyroid conversion, and energy availability, not a free-for-all or a bulk. You’ll hear the science behind metabolic adaptation, why leptin drops and ghrelin rises during chronic restriction, how cortisol drives muscle breakdown, and why menstrual cycles and thyroid markers often go sideways when fuel is too low. We talk practicals too, how to raise calories by roughly 10 percent every 7 to 10 days, why protein and fiber lead the way, and which biofeedback signs prove your plan is working: deeper sleep, fewer cravings, better lifts, and steadier moods.
We also get real about timelines and expectations. The first four weeks can feel messy as glycogen and water rebalance. By weeks five to eight, strength and energy return. Around eight to twelve weeks, many can hold a higher maintenance and consider a brief, smart deficit without relapsing into extremes. Most importantly, we explore the mindset shifts that unlock consistency... moving from punishment to nourishment, control to collaboration, and urgency to patience... so you can build a bigger caloric buffer and stop white-knuckling your health.
Ready to trade short-term restriction for long-term freedom? Press play, then subscribe, share with a friend who’s stuck in diet limbo, and leave a quick review to help more women find a saner path to metabolic health.
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Welcome & Topic Reveal
SPEAKER_00Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed on the Rejuvenating Health podcast are solely those of the speakers and are intended as such. Please consult your trusted healthcare practitioner for medical advice. Let's go, girls. Hey ladies, welcome back to the Rejuvenating Health Podcast. I'm Lindsay, your nurse practitioner, and as always, we're here with Coach Lakin. Hey ladies, welcome back. So today we're gonna talk about an interesting topic. I'm not even sure if everyone has heard of it, to be honest. Um, but we're gonna talk about reverse dieting. And if you have heard of it, it probably seems scary.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it probably has a bad stigma.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I know whenever we bring it up to clients, it brings a lot of resistance and fear and skepticism, and they hear, oh my gosh, I'm gonna gain weight. So we're gonna explain the science behind it. Who should be doing it, why you should be doing it, what you should be doing, and really like validate your fear, right?
SPEAKER_01Because that's important. It's like the fear is legitimate. It's not, it doesn't come from nowhere. We've been conditioned, right? Diet culture, um, influences, whatever were marketed constantly, is taught people that like you have to eat less in order to be able to have control over your body, over you know, what what your choices look like. And reverse chat reverse dieting for a lot of people is a identity challenge, right? Like it's not just about habits. It's like if for the longest time I've told myself that my body looks this way because I only eat blah, blah, blah, or like, you know, the common thing is like, oh, well, I only eat 1200 calories a day, or I only eat 1400 calories a day, and that's how I'm able to, you know, maintain what I want to look like. It's like, okay, well, if that's a story that you've been telling yourself and that's not working anymore, there's a reason for it, and your body is probably asking for help, right? And so the idea is that this episode is not us trying to convince you that you need to eat more necessarily. It's just we want to give you information so you can understand why this is a protocol that sometimes we recommend and what it's good for and when it's needed.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. So if your body is not responding, which pretty much everyone that comes to us, their body is not responding. It's not because you're failing. We've talked about this in episodes before. It's your body kind of protecting yourself, right? So let's talk about what reverse dieting is and and is not, because there's a big difference, right? And what it is, is a strategic, you're not winging it, you're not willy-nilly doing it, a strategic gradual increase in calories. And it's designed to restore your metabolic rate, to get your hormones signaling again, to help with energy availability, to help you be actually able to grow or preserve your muscle and understanding that this is a therapeutic healing phase, it's not a weight loss phase.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? It's not giving up. It's not, well, I'm just gonna intuitively eat for the next 12 weeks and see what happens. It's not, I'm gonna binge and eat pizza every night. It's not a bulk where you're trying to gain muscle. It's not those things.
How Chronic Restriction Breaks Metabolism
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but it can feel like that for a lot of people because most people, especially most women, have never actually experienced consistent fueling for their body, right? They've been chronic dieting and been in the chaos of that for probably their entire adult life for a lot of them, right? Up and down, um, peaks and valleys there. And so reverse dieting, what that does is it allows us to have a sense of predictability around, okay, we're gonna slowly increase this based on how your body's responding, right? That's a really important component. And the idea is that the nervous system has to feel safe before fat loss can occur. And we've talked about that before, but the structure of this creates that sense of safety, right? We're we're inserting a little bit of that certainty. And the consistency is more important than the precision when it comes to reverse dieting. Because, you know, you could get really, really dialed in with the macros and all of that. But if I'm not consistent with it, it's really all for naught.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And you need to understand why this happens, right? Because at some point you get so low in calories that you can't reduce your calories anymore, right? Like if you're a grown woman, you should not be eating under 1200 calories. And the reason why that's for children. It is, it's for toddlers. I don't even know. I think toddlers eat more than that. But the reason why this doesn't work is because that chronic calorie restriction and diet, it breaks your system, right? So you get metabolic adaptation. And I'm sure you've heard of that, but you probably really don't understand it, right? And your body is adaptive to literally everything, it's made to be that way, right? And chronic calorie restriction leads to a lower basal metabolic rate. So your basal metabolic rate is literally just how many calories you burn lying in bed all day, right? Muscle affects it, your hormones affect it, all of those things affect it. When you're chronically dieting, that number goes down. Like my BMR is like 1500. When you're chronically dying, you can get it to like 800. Like it you can get it so low, right? And then it affects your hormones because it downregulates your thyroid hormones, right? How many people do we see come in and their TSH is fine, their T4 is fine, but they are stressed out and chronically underfueled and they have no T3. Their thyroid's like done, shutting off. And their reverse T3 is like through the window because anytime your body's under chronic stress, reverse T3 skyrockets, which which blunts your thyroid hormones even more, right? You get re dirt reduced thermogenesis. So you're not you're not moving as much. Like if you're in a huge calorie restriction, you're not going to be like fidgeting and moving as much. Like your body, you and you probably don't even notice it, but your body is purposefully not moving as much. So what you need to know is that two people eating the same calories can have vastly different outcomes based on their metabolic adaptation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but also that that chronic underfueling over time, like I want to think about this as another environmental factor, essentially, right? That we're it's self-imposed. But it's having a stress impact on the body the same way that like being overtraining over a period of time can have a compound effect, or you know, being exposed to things that are causing your body an intense amount of stress, whether that's chemical or you know, emotional or whatever it is, right? It's it's going to have the same effect. Your body is continuing to fight for that homeostasis and to adapt back to what it needs, where the state that it needs to be. And so it's overcompensating because it's not getting what it needs to be able to get there.
Hormones, Stress, And Energy Availability
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And then it affects those hormones that we've talked about before. The the leptin, right? So leptin is produced by your fat cells, it signals energy sufficiency. And dieting lowers that. So you're going to be hungrier and you're going to have reduced satiety. Your ghrelin, your hunger hormone, it becomes chronically elevated with restriction. So you're chronically hungry. Your cortisol, because your body's under perceived threat, becomes elevated and you're breaking down muscle and increasing fat storage. Your low energy availability, calorie restriction suppresses progesterone and estrogen. It's literally why people lose their periods. Yeah. Right. Your body's like, uh, you can't carry a baby, you can't reproduce, you barely have enough energy to survive.
SPEAKER_01To carry yourself around. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. We're definitely going to shut down this system, right? So it it affects a lot, a lot, a lot of things. And it's the it's the way that women go to. Like you there are so many women out there that eat 800 calories a day, and I'd believe you. I don't I know that you're not eating more than that, and you're like, I'm gaining weight.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because your body's storing everything that it possibly can for dear life.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it really affects your muscle and mitochondria and energy output. Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue, and it's really hard to gain. But once you lose it, wow. Like, how hard is it for you to gain muscle?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, people think it's really easy, right? It's so funny. Like when we do in-body scans and we'll see like a pound of muscle increase over the course of a month or two months, and people are like, oh, that's it. And I'm like, that's amazing. Like it's that's really hard to do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And when we're underfueling, it leads to muscle loss. And your mitochondria require fuel to function properly. So less fuel means less output, like we talked about, like you're not going to be moving as much. You're in like your literally muscle is your metabolism, is is going away, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And because we're not taught this, and because you know, we don't, most people don't have insight into what's going on inside of their bodies, people end up blaming themselves for something that's just a biological survival response, right? Like your body is doing exactly what it's designed to do. It's just that it's not receiving the proper input to be able to give you the output that you're wanting. And here's the other thing, too, is a lot of women will say, Well, I, you know, it used to work and it doesn't anymore. Like I used to be able to do that and it worked fine. Yeah, because over time it they can only do so much, right? So when we start to get into a different season of life where hormones are being impacted and where um things are not at a foundational level operating as needed, all it takes is like it's like the straw that broke the camel's back, right? And if I'm also not fueling property properly, then it's going to just make it cave in. And then we have to rebuild that foundation again and allow the body to heal.
Who Should Reverse Diet
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of what cryotic dieting does. It's not good for you, right? Some you have to get out of it at some point. You cannot be dieting constantly, which is why we don't even like diets. We like lifestyle changes, right? So if you are someone that has been chronically dieting, you need to reverse out of it, right? So who should reverse diet and who who shouldn't, right? So if you are someone that has been a long-term dieter, I mean eating less than 1600 calories for extended periods. I'm not even talking about 1800, I'm not even talking about 800 calories. I'm talking if you're eating less than 1600 calories for forever, you should you should maybe consider reverse dieting, right? If you're someone that's completely plateaued, like you did a calorie cut, you lost weight, you completely plateaued, right? If you are a perimenopause or postmenopause woman, if you have thyroid issues, if you have a history of gaining weight after dieting, you should consider doing this, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's not ideal for someone with an active eating disorder, right? It it's gonna spiral triggering, yeah. It's also not good for someone who doesn't have structure and accountability. It's really hard to do this without a coach because you are gonna wake up with your pants snug one day and you're gonna freak out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Like it's not worth it, it's not working.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And you should not go into this thinking that you're gonna lose weight. You will eventually, but not during this phase.
Mindset Shifts And Support
SPEAKER_01Right. Right. And emotional readiness really matters. I think a lot of women will get into a place where they say, like, okay, nothing's working until I'll try anything, right? But you need to be really realistic with yourself about expectations and around how you're gonna feel when the scale still isn't moving in the direction that you want it to, because we're we're having to take a step back, we're having to reset, we're having to heal, right? Like the body essentially needs a break and it needs to refuel, right? Before you can go into a place where you're asking it for performance again. So if your self-worth is tied very much so to the scale, reverse dieting can feel really threatening to that identity. And so it needs to be something that you can be honest with yourself around. And that is also where a coach comes in and you can really benefit from talking through some of that that's coming up for you, things that are commonly triggering you throughout the process and preparing in advance to say, okay, these are these are some of the things that are going to come up during this period while I'm trying to heal my body. And how am I gonna feel about that? What's gonna come up for me? And then how am I gonna process it? What are the things that I'm gonna choose to focus on instead? Because if you're just focusing on the scale, it is not gonna be a fun time.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I would suggest that you throw it away this time, to be honest. And I think this is something that we should maybe really dig into is getting real with yourself if you're gonna attempt this, because so many women come to us and they're like, I've tried everything, nothing's work. But they expect results in the first four weeks and they get real angry when it doesn't happen. But how do you expect results to happen doing the same thing that you've been doing over and over before? Right? Like you say you come in and you say you want results, but you're not willing to do anything differently, and then you get frustrated because you're not getting results because you're not willing to do anything different. Like the clients that get success and that work trust the process and don't go in and like truly are I'll do anything you say.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And aren't resisting it. Because if you're resisting it and you're constantly going back to restriction, you're never gonna get out of this.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's also like it's a it's a way, it's a waste of resources.
SPEAKER_00Like, why would you not listen?
SPEAKER_01Time and money, you know, when you're if you're gonna go back to doing the thing that you were stubbornly doing before and not getting what you wanted out of it anyway.
Timeline, Expectations, And Metrics
SPEAKER_00And then get ticked at your coach because they're not getting you results when they're doing what they're supposed to be, you know. So if you're gonna do it, let's talk about expectations, timeline, what happens, right? In the first four weeks, again, I don't think that you should be weighing yourself, but the scale's gonna be like all over the place, right? Because you're replenishing your glycogen, you're just rotating water from sodium, and it's gonna be uncomfortable, right? But after you get through those first four weeks, you should start seeing improved energy. You should be sleeping better. Your food noise and food obsession should start to decline a little bit. You should be able to like you know, maybe your pants are snug, but you have so much energy, you're able to hit your workouts. You're not like crashing on the couch at 4 p.m., right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you should be able to lift heavier if you're doing resistance training.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And then after about that eight-week mark, your body's settling down, right? And you're gonna have a higher calorie tolerance, you're gonna have improved metabolic flexibility, and that's when you can start working with your coach and maybe start slowly trying to lose weight. So you're looking at months, not weeks. I would say you're looking at eight to 12 weeks of reverse dieting, getting your metabolism back on track, and then we're not crash dieting. We're maybe doing a four-week of lower calories and then going back up.
SPEAKER_01Right. Right.
SPEAKER_00Right?
SPEAKER_01That's what I think people miss is like they think that they can do this like refeed phase and then just go back to the the restriction that they were doing before. But that that defeats the purpose. Like the goal is the the absolute end goal is can you get to a point where you can consume the most amount of calories that your body will still burn effectively, right? So we're feed we're giving our body the most nutrient-dense amount of food possible for it to still be able to either maintain if we're not trying to lose weight, or lose weight if we want to reduce the new caloric, uh, the nucleoric deficit, right? We're creating ourselves a bigger buffer window so that way when we go into a deficit, we're not in extreme restriction. It's just that, just a deficit from our new baseline, right? It's when we try to create a deficit where we don't have anything to pull from because we're already consuming less than what our BMR is. That's when we're in dangerous territory. So we have to increase that threshold.
SPEAKER_00I mean, uh, a deficit for me would be like 1800 calories because I probably eat 2400 calories a day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I'm super lean.
Building A Higher Baseline
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But you've been able to get your baseline there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because there was a time where you weren't eating that much.
SPEAKER_00No, there was a time when I didn't eat anything.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00But I reverse dieted up a little bit, gained some muscle, and now I'm like, I don't track my food, I don't log my calories. I probably average 2,000 some days, 2,600 other days, right? I listen to my body, but I'm super metabolically flexible, right? And again, it takes months, not weeks. Yeah, it might even take a year.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was gonna say it could take longer than just, you know, months. Like it is a process, and I think that's why it's important to look at some of the mindset set shifts that are necessary throughout this process, right? Like patience is not something that's passive. Um, and so when we look at shifting from that sense of urgency into self-trust, right? Like recognizing that this is something that I'm doing for my body. This is something that I'm doing that's going to help me. I'm going to like, can I focus on how I'm feeling better, right? Like those positive things that are coming through. And then shifting from a perspective of punishment to nourishment, that's a big one because a lot of women discipline their bodies with food. And that's what we want to get away from. Like food should be something that's nourishing for us, not something that we restrict out of punishment or that, you know, when we have to feel guilty around when there's an indulgence. And then also switching from control to collaboration, right? Like if I'm not micromanaging and having this intense control around all of my choices when it comes to food, yes, I still need to have some structure when it comes to the reverse dieting or the refeed, but it should be collaborative and it should be something, again, this is where a coach comes in of like, okay, I can understand where I'm doubting myself in this and where you're providing some of that certainty that I can outsource from you as my coach.
How To Increase Calories The Right Way
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I'm not talking about you going from eating 900 calories to 1600 calories. There's like you're doing like a 10% calorie increase every seven to 10 days and seeing how your body responds. Like, and that's why you need to work with a coach in doing this because it's not jump from 800 to 2000. You're not gonna feel good.
SPEAKER_01No, not only that, but it's also about like the quality of those calories. Uh it's not just pure calories. So when we talk about, you know, increasing our caloric intake, yeah, it'd be really easy for me to add some empty calories and jump up my caloric intake daily, right? But we're talking about getting those calories from protein and fiber mostly.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_00We're not Yeah, I mean reverse dining really exposes your relationship with food and control. Yeah. It'll really, and that's why having a coach is important too, because they can help you work through that relationship with food and control. And just because you might feel a little bit discomfort doesn't mean that your body's in danger, right? And I know that this is hard for me to say, but what's gaining five pounds short term to be able to lose 15 pounds long term when you're beating your head against the wall?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but the problem, the problem with that is that it's, you know, and and we get this, it is very hard to see that future option when it has not been like I don't have any evidence that shows me that this is gonna work, right? So that's where it does take a good amount of that trust and like being able to say, okay, I'm going, I'm willing to be open and trying something that I have not tried before and gain evidence as I go that this can work for me.
SPEAKER_00And this is why GLP ones don't work for you, people that eat 800 calories.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
Why People Fail And How To Succeed
SPEAKER_00Right. Because it's not like you're not it's GLP ones are not gonna work for you people. Like they're not, right? So the reason why like most people fail at this is not because of willpower, right? One, it's a lack of education, you don't understand the process of it, what's going on with your body, why you're doing it, right? You say you want to do it, but then it starts to feel uncomfortable a little bit. And so your initial response is ooh, to pull away and kind of start doubting and losing that trust, right? And we just give up on it too early, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, like anytime there's any kind of fluctuation, people want to be like, oh, but it's not working, and like you know, swerve left or pump the brakes. And it's like that's where another reason why a lot of people fail is because there's a lack of support there, right? You're gonna have a lot of things working against you just like any other time. When you're restricting, you still have people like, oh, what does it matter? Just have this. It doesn't, you know what I mean? Just eat this or just eat with us, whatever it is. Like when you don't have support in the other direction of like, yeah, we are making good choices, this is what this looks like, and I have a container to hold you in, right? Give you the structure that you need, that's where um, yeah, the odds of failing are really high. Not having, not being able to regulate your nervous system throughout those fluctuations, and when you have expectations that are not realistic, right? And then being fixated on lagging metrics, aka the scale, not the ones that you have direct control over.
Final Takeaways & Call To Action
SPEAKER_00So I mean, taking away this is not easy. No, but I guarantee almost every one of you listening probably needs to do it, right? If you're eating less than 1500 calories a day, your chronic dieting would have worked by now. And it's it's not, right? And so it's really asking yourself, okay, do I what do I really want and what am I really okay with? And if you're not okay to reverse diet, it's okay because it's scary and it it's hard, but you have to get your every single person we work with is like in adrenal fatigue. They have low thyroid conversion and it's all from like undernourishment and being in this stressed out world, and a lot of them need to reverse diet out of it, and it's it's not easy. We're not saying that at all, right? But if you can do it and if you can learn to restore trust and learn to let your body get back to stabilization, the rewards long term, you're never gonna have to diet again. You're just gonna be able to live a healthy lifestyle and live your life. Like, I don't diet. I like I just live. And if you can do this for a while, get your metabolism up, do strategic deficits, get out of them, then you'll eventually be at a place where you can just live a healthy lifestyle.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And we're we're to be clear in wrapping up, I just want to make sure that we mention, you know, yes, this is a problem that we see very commonly, but we're all like it's not like everyone is under-eating, right? There are a lot of people that overconsume a lot of calories, but I think what's most important, running it back to like what is what do those calories look like? And almost everyone is under-eating nutrient-dense calories, they're undernourished. Exactly. Exactly. And so that's where this strategy can benefit you. Yeah, benefit you either way, even if let's say you're not doing um, you know, chronically under-eating, but almost everybody that's dieting, when they're not dieting, they're overeating empty calories.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So it's like you have to heal your metabolism, and that that's possible with the right support in place and being really intentional about it.
SPEAKER_00And patience. Like it you have to be patient and you have to have the right support, right? So if this resonated with you, like it, share it, whatever. Work with us. We're really good at doing this with people. Work with any other coach. Don't try to do this by yourself. That's my that's my call for you. Like, please don't try to do this by yourself. You're gonna get very frustrated with the process, and it's probably not gonna work out very well for you. And I don't want you to end up 10 pounds heavier that you can't get the weight off, right?
SPEAKER_01Right, and then also you just then you just have the then you'll say, like, oh, well, it didn't work.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So give us a five-star review, really appreciate it, and we'll see you next week, ladies.
SPEAKER_01See you, ladies.
unknownBye.