Reverse Diet

Well, I’m officially starting a reverse diet. It’s all the rage with the body-builders and fitness gurus online, and I’ve finally decided to take part. I’ve alluded to the idea before, but it’s basically a method of slowly increasing your calories over a period of weeks or months so that your body adapts to a new level of caloric maintenance. So by increasing how much you eat slowly enough, you don’t gain weight and you get to eat more. The reason I’ve decided to do this is that I seem to be at the end of the road with my current diet of 1,800 calories. My weight barely changed over the 5-week period before my last weigh-in, and my clothes are still not getting any looser.

Apparently this is what happens to everybody when you’ve been on a diet for long enough: your metabolism slows down. Your body adjusts to taking in fewer calories and you stop losing weight. So in order to get things going again, you need to teach your body to burn more calories. (This means I won’t see any weight loss any time soon, but that seems to be the case anyway.) Theoretically, if I can get my maintenance calories high enough, I can eventually start dieting again and lose more weight. At that point I’ll try a more strategic approach to dieting- taking “diet breaks” every few weeks- so that my metabolism doesn’t slow down again.

But the first step is to add 50 calories to my daily intake every week or two. It’s such a small amount that it’s hard to even measure accurately, but since I have my handy little food scale with me here in the land of grams and milliliters, I should be able to do it.

Complicating all of this is the fact that I’ve changed my weight-lifting workouts a bit. Instead of having “back and biceps day” and “chest and triceps day,” I’m just doing a full body workout 3 times a week. I do 5 machines: Lat pulldowns, chest press, leg press, triceps, and biceps. Since I have rest days in between weight-lifting workouts anyway, it makes sense to take advantage and potentially get stronger by doing a little more. On alternate days, I’m still doing my 20 minutes of uphill walking and slow jogging on the treadmill. In addition to the new workouts though, I’m walking more here in Germany than at home. The gym here is a ten-minute walk away, so there’s an extra 20 minutes of walking 6 days a week, in addition to walking down to the shops here and there.

All of this change in exercise seems to be making me very hungry. I’ve been trying to distract myself with coffee and getting out of the apartment, but I really don’t think I should feel this hungry all the time. Especially since there have been two incidents with some minor bingeing lately, I think that increasing my calories in a controlled manner seems like a good approach all around.

The really weird thing I wanted to mention was that while I was jet-lagging and traveling, I kind of lost my appetite because I was so tired all the time. I couldn’t even get in my full 1,800 calories on several days. That was happening when I first got sick with my recent cold, too. So maybe my body is extra hungry now to try and make up for those times I was eating less. I don’t know.

I just know I need more food. Hopefully if I’m proactive about doing this properly, I won’t end up bingeing and gaining a bunch of weight back. That would be disastrous after all this hard work (I’ve been on a diet for over a year now and have lost 48 pounds) and especially bad for my mental health. As much as I try not to base my self-worth on my size, being heavier in general has led me to some really negative thinking and even suicidal thoughts.

And that is what’s utmost in my mind as I make these food-related decisions. When I was losing weight consistently, I imagined having the luxury of going out to eat once in a while and just estimating my calories. But at this phase of the game, I’m really frustrated with not losing weight and that frustration could blow this whole thing up. And so I always have to eat at home, weighing and measuring every little bite, now getting even more precise so I can inch my calories up over time. It’s really hard. If there were another way to do it that worked for me and my particular situation, I might have a choice. But at this point, I don’t think I do.

And I’m used to having a lot of limitations in my life. I’m used to having to go to the gym, eat the right food, take all my pills, take my Latuda with 350 calories right at bedtime so as to avoid akathisia, never drink alcohol or eat takeout, and get out of the house enough but not push myself too hard. It’s exhausting. But it’s working. So I do it.