Transitioning From A Dieting Phase

This is a question we always get around the summertime, as people have been dieting for the last while and are interested in transitioning from a dieting phase into a maintenance phase (or potentially a gaining phase).

The questions generally go something like this:

“I have been dieting for X weeks and I have lost Y kg. I understand the process of dieting now, and although I did run into a little few hiccups along the way, I think I have a good grasp of the diet as a whole and the whole calorie balance thing. Now that I have lost the weight that I wanted to lose, I am a little bit lost as to what to do next. I would hate to waste all my hard work by getting this next step wrong. You hear so many horror stories of people binging after a diet, and that is not what I want.

So what do I do to transition from a dieting phase?

.. or something along those lines. The basic premise being, they lost weight and want to know what to do next.

Well, let’s answer that!

Now before we get into the meat and potatoes of the article, we have to get a few things out of the way first. This article assumes you already know how to set up your calories and macronutrients, and as you have been dieting and have been successful at dieting, it assumes you already have fairly good food practices in place (like eating your veg and spacing out your protein). So this won’t be a discussion of how to set up your diet, as we have discussed that many, many times before on multiple platforms.

What this article will deal with is how you transition out of a successful weightless phase correctly.

 

Goal Setting

The first step of getting this tricky period right, is to actually have a clear goal. This is one of the major reasons people fail, they just don’t set themselves up correctly from the start. I don’t just mean your immediate goal, or end goal, I mean your medium to long-term goal. Do you plan on staying this lean and maintaining the current physique you have? Do you want to start a gaining phase? Do you want to change your training focus from more aesthetic goals to more performance-based goals?

What exactly do you want to achieve?

That is the first thing you have to decide, because, without a concrete goal, you are just plodding along mindlessly.

Of course goal setting goes beyond the scope of this article, but needless to say, you should have a clear goal in mind of what you want to do over the next few weeks and months.

The vast majority of you are likely to have the following goals:

• maintain the level of body fat you have gotten to and continue to enjoy training but have a little more freedom in your diet.
• transition to a gaining phase, while hopefully staying lean.

… so we will mainly discuss it from those perspectives.

 

Staying Lean

Before we get into the actual plan of action, which is what you guys want and this article is about, I want to touch on the whole staying lean thing. You see, I don’t know how lean you have gotten, and you may even be reading this looking for a plan of action to transition out of a diet that led you to be competition lean. So it has to be said that the level of leanness you got to does dictate the plan, along with the methods you employed to get you there.

If you are coming out of a pretty big deficit, have noticed some hormonal disturbances, and/or have noticed pretty obvious adaptations to dieting (like NEAT down regulations or feeling cold all the time), then it may be in your best interest to actually gain some fat. That doesn’t mean you have to go hog wild with things and pack on 10% body fat in a week. But a slow accumulation of fat will likely help you towards your goals, rather than staying exceptionally lean. Yes, yes, I know you love your newly acquired vascularity and the way your muscles pop in the mirror, but for the majority of people, staying competition lean is a pretty bad strategy for long-term progress, both in terms of health and the body in general.

The other thing that needs to be said about staying lean is that the scales doesn’t reflect your body fat (well some newer ones do give you a body fat reading). So at this transition, being emotionally attached to a certain number on the scales will mess your head up big time. If you are changing variables (like increasing calories) you are likely to see the scales go up. A combination of water and glycogen is all that it is, and you may even look better for it (fuller muscles). So don’t put all your stock in being a certain weight as a measure of your success.

So yeah, if you are extremely lean (arbitrarily below 8%) then you may need to gain some body fat first (which you can go about slowly), and then you can more successfully start a low body fat maintenance phase or a gaining phase. And whether you are coming out of a diet that got you extremely lean or one that got you quite lean, the scales will be quite a variable thing that can easily throw you off if you have an emotional attachment to it.

Ok, so with that out of the way, let’s get into the plan of action.

 

The Plan

As I said, I am assuming you have been dieting for a while, and have the majority of your diet squared away and have good diet practices in place. You are looking to create a plan of action to either maintain the body fat levels you have gotten to or you are looking to transition into a gaining phase. The good thing is, either way, they start the same.

The first thing you need to do is establish your new maintenance calories. I say new maintenance because you have likely lost a bit of weight and have some adaptations to dieting, so your previous maintenance calories are likely not your current maintenance calories. Your current maintenance calories are likely much lower than where they were when you were bigger, so you need to find your new maintenance. This is somewhat tricky and you will need to engage in a bit of trial and error. You can use a calculator to find it, but realistically the best and most practical way to find it is to look at your rate of fat loss, your current calories and then reverse engineer it. A kilogram of fat loss is roughly 7,000-7,700ish calories, so if you have been losing a kilo per week, then you have been in a roughly 1,000-1,100 daily deficit. Losing a half kilo per week? Then it’s roughly a 500-550 daily deficit. So from that, you can estimate where your maintenance likely lies.

However, this isn’t foolproof and you will have to do some tinkering. You will likely see your weight go up slightly due to glycogen and water, as discussed above, but once that stabilises, you will have a better idea of if you are truly around your maintenance. However, you will also likely increase your NEAT too once you increase calories, which can lead to a situation where you increase calories and continue to lose weight (which could also indicate you just haven’t increased calories to maintenance, and you are still in a deficit).

Now whether you are thinking of staying at maintenance or are eager to get a gaining phase underway, I would spend at least 2-4 weeks at maintenance. This will give you time to really get used to the calories, see how your body responds, and iron out any little calorie discrepancies.

If you wish to maintain from here, then you can just stay at the calories you are on now after increasing them.

If you wish to start gaining, then I would still stay at maintenance for 2-4 weeks and really get a good handle on how much calories you need to maintain your current weight. Then to transition into actually gaining, you simply need to increase your calories by about 300 or so and the body should start growing. Remember, slow and steady wins the race with changing the body, and just because you want to grow, doesn’t mean your body does.

 

Cardio

This is the only other little hiccup you may encounter. What about cardio? Well if you have been using cardio to create or increase your deficit, you should still have an idea of how much the cardio is contributing versus the diet. So you have two options:

• Drop out the cardio and increase the calories only slightly to get you to maintenance (or none at all if your cardio has created your entire deficit).
• Keep the cardio in (or reduce it somewhat) and then add more calories to bring you to maintenance.

Neither is inherently better than the other. And while we are generally a fan of keeping cardiovascular work in a training plan, if you have been through a very long diet and are feeling quite fatigued, then dropping the cardio out (or at the very least severely reducing it) may be the better option. So a little bit of common sense is needed here, and depending on your goals and what you have been doing, you should be able to decide whether reducing, dropping out or keeping in your cardio is what needs to be done.

 

Transitioning From A Dieting Phase Summary

While transitioning from a dieting phase is a bit of a scary time, as you don’t want to ruin all your hard work, it is quite a simple process. At least from a calorie perspective. You simply need to bring your calories up to your new maintenance, and then adjust based on how your body responds. Very simple. However, that doesn’t mean it will be easy in practice. You will likely find yourself fighting the same cravings than you were when dieting, as your metabolism “ramps up” and some of those adaptations to dieting start to dissipate. So it does take a lot of hard work on your front, but no more than it took to get to this place. The diet is a lifelong endeavour, and it should be an ever-evolving system that allows you to satisfy your needs for a lifetime. Hopefully, this article has given you somewhat of an idea as to what you need to do to really dial your diet in during this transition out of a diet. If you want a more comprehensive understanding of the diet, we recommend reading our article on how to set up a diet. If you need more specific help with your diet, then getting coaching may be a better option for you. If instead, you want to learn how to coach other people to better nutrition, then we recommend looking into our Nutrition Coaching Certificate.