Beaufort Fitness: How To Come Back From A Diet

All right. It’s time to answer some questions. And today’s Q and A, I’m going to go over how to come back from a diet. You’ve been dieting for a while and you want to go back to eating more of a normal lifestyle. How do you do that without putting out a bunch of weight? All right. So first off, before I get into anything, anything I say today is going to be more general principles because nutrition is very nuanced. So it’s going to be individualized to you, but you can use these as general principles and apply them to yourself.

So the first thing you want to do after you’re done getting to the near end of your diet is you’re gonna want to check your calories. You’re going to want to know what your caloric intake is. You could do that through logging and get out my fitness pal, after you have a good sense of that, put in your idea where you want to go, plan out…Okay, well, when I eat a normal day, this is what I want it to look like. Plan out where you want to go. From there, you’re going to take and I’ll give you a very general example. Let’s say you’re a female who wants to eat 1700 calories a day. And you’re currently dieted way down, way down to 1100 that is low for females. Let’s say you’re, you’re dieted on there from how you’re going to do that is you’re gonna want to scale up very slowly week by week. You’re not just going to want to start eating 1700 calories consistently because you’re going to, you’re going to then put on body fat. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to go up to about 1300 calories, 200 or so, and you’re going to really lead with protein, upping those calories. You kind of want to know what your macronutrient profile is, and if you have a coach that’s coaching you on that, they’ll know. 

Generally you’re going to start by upping your protein. Once you get your protein to a good relative spot, recommendations are about 0.8 grams per body weight. You’re going to then increase the other energies, the fats and the carbohydrates as well to get you to where you want to go. So to kind of recap what I just said, you’re going to want to increase about 200 calories a week over time, and then to until you’re where you want to be. And then you’re going to want to lead with the protein after you get to a certain protein, because that’s going to preserve your muscle mass. Then you can start adding in the carbohydrates and the fats, whichever ones really, you prefer, you feel like your body works best then. So that is the best approach on how to come back from a successful diet. 

If you don’t want to do all those calculations, hire a coach to do one, but if you don’t want to hire a coach to do one another thing you could do is, just eat like meat to start out, just have one extra serving of protein whatever that is. If you don’t eat meat, then you know, you can have… be a vegan option of protein. And then just add a palm full of that kind of back into your routine, wait a week, and then add another palm full. And then you’re going to add in the carbohydrates by measuring out a fist or your fats by measuring out a thumb. That’s another general way you could do it, but that’s not going to be as specific or precise. When it comes to nutrition, you do want to have a good amount of precision with it. And then I want you to get up to where you’re used to eating. You don’t need to continue to calculate all the time although I do recommend it is very beneficial to do that.

That is all for today. I threw a lot of information and if you have any more specific questions on that, feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me a message that is all for today. Everybody, stay strong.

-EarthFIT Coach Sam