Leah:
Welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I am Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aiden Muir. In today’s episode, we will be covering how to avoid the post-diet rebound. This is super relevant from both an anecdotal perspective, but also statistically. At a population level, a large percentage of people who lose weight end up regaining it either quickly post-dieting phase or after some time.
And as dietitians that work pretty heavily in the body composition and weight loss space, we’re going to talk through our tips and tricks for maintaining weight loss in the shorter and long-term timeframes, but also in different contexts as well. And what, if you’ve had a negative experience with this, what you can go and do about like rectifying it to improve future outcomes.
Aidan:
The first thing we’ll do is I think you need to identify where the issue is. And this will sound really simple when I say it, but like, there’s a bit of a framework for how we assess it. So like the first thing is looking at the timeline and what happened in each phase. So I’m gonna lay out three scenarios and then we’re gonna talk through each of them. And it will seem simple, but then at the end we will give like tips for like, how do you actually solve this?
So scenario one, you lose weight, maintain that loss for more than a few months, and then you start regaining. I know that that wouldn’t always be called a rebound. So it’s not totally relevant for this podcast, but I just want to talk about it. So that’s scenario one. You lose weight, maintain it, then start regaining after a long period of time. Scenario two, you lose weight, you feel good on the way down, it’s fine. And then not long after finishing the diet, you regain weight. And then scenario three, similar to that, you lose weight, don’t feel fine on the way down, and then not long after exiting the deficit, you’re regaining. So both those last two, definitely rebounding. The difference is just how did you feel on the way down.
Leah:
I’m going to spend a little bit of time just touching on that scenario one. So if you fit scenario one and it’s not really technically a rebound, but you have regained it months later and it’s starting to kind of trend up in that direction, the issue isn’t what you did on the way down likely. It’s more or less what you actually did in potentially that transition phase a little bit, but more so what happens after you’ve done the deficit, you’ve transitioned and then how things have changed in that longer term.
The game plan here is pretty simple. Do the thing that worked for you the first time because it’s not realistic to blame what you did on the way down because it isn’t that kind of rebound directly after.
Aidan:
Like you clearly maintained for a bit after. It like that clearly can’t be the issue. Like you maintained for a decent period of time.
Leah:
You were able to have some success at weight maintenance for a while. So it makes more sense to address what happened when things started to change. And then more looking at that kind of longer term maintenance. So this is simple because we just, want to avoid that shiny object syndrome because it’s not realistically helpful for that, that long-term maintenance. There are going to have to be aspects of what you did potentially on the way down, or at least in that initial maintenance phase that needs to be sustainable long-term for continued weight maintenance.
So some common examples of things that need to be maintained or should be maintained in order to achieve that is things like your regular structured exercise, maybe hitting a step count, focusing on certain parts of your nutrition like dietary quality, portion control, meal planning and prepping strategies, minimising alcohol intake and takeout. The things that you did to achieve the weight loss, but particularly in that transition phase where you actually maintained it, what were you doing there that made you successful? And how can we then take that and do all of that long-term for long-term success?
So it’s not that the deficit itself doesn’t need to be sustainable forever. We don’t want to be in a deficit forever and trying to lose weight forever. But there are likely broader lifestyle changes that need to stick.
Aidan:
That shiny object syndrome thing is something I actually do talk about with all of my clients who succeed with weight loss where we’re looking at how do we maintain this? And the reason I talk about it is because if you don’t actually just think about it in advance, it is so common to see people who’ve done some of this work maintained for a bit, regained and then they’ve done a different approach. And it’s like, knew something. It’s true. let’s go back to it. like, I can’t relate to that with food.
Food comes easily to me, but like we’ve rehab stuff. I’ve done that. Whereas like I’ve had an injury, I’ve rehabbed it. Things have gone well for 10 weeks and then I’ve like flared it up and I’ve just done a different rehab approach. It’s like, I could have just done that same first 10 weeks and then change what I did there. Yes. And that’s the logic with that kind of scenario one. Just being like, change what you did there, not the way down or whatever.
Okay, now let’s talk about the more meaningful ones for this podcast where scenario two, scenario three. scenario two, if you lost weight and felt fine on the way down, there’s a chance that what you did on the way down was an issue. I don’t know, there’s a chance it may or may not have been an issue. But there is a very high chance that how you transitioned out of the deficit is an issue. We’ll come back to that. We’ll cover both of these in the same kind of timeframe.
Scenario three. You lost weight and you don’t feel fine on the way down. Maybe you’re super hungry, fatigued, restricted, whatever. There’s a pretty high chance that what you did on the way down was an issue. And there’s also a chance that the transition out was an issue. So it’s harder to tell because the approach in the deficit might set you off for failure. Using a very specific example here, bodybuilding competition prep. If anyone gets stage lean, they will almost always struggle when coming out of a deficit. That’s an extreme example, but like I do see that with clients.
I’ve had some clients who have like shared experiences where like they barely ate for a period of time and then they like had uncontrollable urges to like to eat. And it’s like we could do all the planning for the transition we want, it’s still going to be tough. So what you did on the way down could be an issue in that scenario.
Leah:
Yeah, so going into that a little bit more, what can you do on the way down to improve success in that transition period and in the long term maintenance of that weight loss? I think there are a few things that you could easily pinpoint here.
The first one is not being too restrictive. So if you avoid all of your favourite foods, you take out all the joy around eating, then it’s highly likely that you will probably feel this like really large desire to eat things that are super calorically dense and there is more fun foods and potentially overdo it in the transition period because mentally it’s just really tough. The other ones are don’t go too low calorie. So the harsher the deficit, likely the harder it is to going to be, I mean, to maintain it for one, for a period of time, but also to transition out can be difficult psychologically. The other things are don’t do it for too long. So super extended periods of time and also not getting too lean. So all of these things can make a weight rebound a lot more likely.
So it makes sense to somewhat focus on these on the way down to make sure you kind of avoid these common pitfalls. Like I have previously spoken about, you would also want to prioritise developing sustainable habits throughout the process that you can do long-term to support weight maintenance over a larger period of time. But once you put all these things together, it really starts falling into place.
Aidan:
And now talk about how you transition out of a deficit. This is clearly one of the most important things. The first thing, is actually having a plan. Plan how and when you’ll exit a deficit. Sometimes this seems simple, but if you have a friend who’s starting a fat loss phase, you just ask them like, when you end it, like often, often they won’t have a plan. Like the, the kind of analogy or story I tell with a lot of clients is I share this study about how they got this group of people and they put them on 800 calorie diet. And then eight to 12 weeks later, they took away a shake and they added a meal that was like that portion plate model.
Then two weeks after that, they took away a shake, added a meal. Same thing for the third one. And then they transitioned to healthy eating. And in that study, they got surprisingly good results. I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody, but they got surprisingly good results. And I say to a lot of people, like, if you had a friend who said they’ll do an OptiFast, what do reckon their plan is? Like, none of them would have a structured plan like that to then get back to, it would just be so rare.
And I do think that’s like one of the things, like just plan that out, whether it’s you planning or you work with a dietitian or whatever, like plan out how and when you’ll exit a deficit and even have some contingencies in there being like, my plan is to do this for 12 weeks or whatever, or hit X weight or whatever. But the contingency is like, if I get super hungry six weeks in, what I’ll do is X, Y, like think about those things too.
Cool. So once you know like why or when you’ll exit a deficit, plan what it will look like. For example, how many calories will you add or what habits would you adjust to indirectly do that without you actually tracking? For example, if you went into a 500 to 1000 calorie deficit, maybe that’s what you add back at the end. And I know these things do adjust over time, so you could be a bit more conservative, you could add back slightly less.
But one of the really cool things here is you don’t have to get this precise. You, because you can’t 100 % know for sure how many calories you’d need to exactly add to get to maintenance calories, there’s a bit of margin for error. And because there is margin for error, what you need to do is you need to adjust stuff over time. So you’ve got what I will call the logical adjustment process, which is like, if you undershot or overshot the appropriate amount of calories, adjust things over time. Like don’t change too much too quickly, but you can kind of just measure it. Like you exit a deficit, you go to what you think is maintenance calories, your body weight should go up a little bit, like initially just a tiny bit with like, glycogen, food weight, water weight, all of those kind of things.
But then it should kind of stabilise with normal weight fluctuations. And say you do something and you do it for like four weeks and your body weight is still trending up over time. That’s too many calories, you would want to scale it back. So you did that for a bit and your body weight is trending down. It’s too few calories, you need to add more. So I would just adjust over time. If you reduce your food flexibility significantly, like we don’t recommend doing that in many cases, but say you did do it significantly.
Slowly increase it. Don’t do this all at once. It can be so tempting to have more food flexibility than the normal when you end a fat loss phase, but you do wanna just slowly increase it over time. You wanna maintain a lot of the same habits that you did on the way down if you can just on higher calories. Once again, that’s not a very common theme that people do, but that can be a small portion as to why it is so hard to maintain weight loss after losing weight.
And this is another tangent that I made in my notes, but I think it’s important. It’s not even really important to just this phase, but I think it’s a dangerous game to have a large percentage of your Instagram and TikTok content being food related that you’re consuming regularly. I do think you should have enough exposure to like get healthy recipes and stuff like that. But if you open your app and like all you’re seeing is just like food, food, food, like nice tasting food. It probably makes you think about food more and it makes it harder to not over consume.
And then the final point of this is that the first month is super important. We know that statistically it is quite hard to maintain weight loss, but if you get through the first month, the odds of success get quite high. If you get through six months, the odds get incredibly high. Therefore with all of this, that first month is arguably more important than the fat loss phase. Very few people would treat it that way. And I don’t expect people listening to this to actually go and treat it that way. But I’m like, if you can take it like a little bit more seriously, that’s all I’m asking of this, because it will dramatically improve your odds of success.
Leah:
Yeah, absolutely. Like the longer you maintain, typically the easier it becomes to maintain for an even longer period of time. And identifying whether the issue was what you did on the way down or during the transition period is important. Sometimes people did everything right on the way down and that doesn’t need to change at all. And then, well, they really need to change is their transition period or their longer term approach. So step one is going to be always identifying where things have actually gone wrong for you. And step two is adjusting your approach accordingly.
Aidan:
This has been episode 191 of the ideal nutrition podcast. As always, if you have not already, if you could please leave a rating or review on either Apple or Spotify. If you happen to have both and you haven’t done on the other one, we’d massively appreciate if you double up. I’d like that. But apart from that, thank you so much for listening.