We already know all about temporary weight loss. 

We know it all too well. 

So today’s anecdote is about permanent weight loss. 

Because it is actually possible to lose weight and keep it off.

I’m going to walk you through the math of this fat loss puzzle using one of the most basic weight loss approaches: intentional caloric restriction. (Not my fave approach, but pretty much everyone "gets it.")

Let’s say you start your diet at 2000 calories of food per day; a comfortable amount of food that feels normal and nourishing. 

You want to see progress quickly, but you’re also trying to be realistic about how much deprivation you can handle. You decide to drop calories at 200 calorie increments. 

So, to kick things off, you nudge your calories down to 1800 per day. 

You hang there for three weeks and lose two pounds per week, until it stalls out in week four. These weight stalls are what happens when your metabolism down-regulates to your new, lower calorie intake. It’s a normal part of calorie restriction that needs to be factored in. 

You’ve lost 6lbs so far, and now need to gently nudge your calories a bit lower to get things moving again.

For the next three weeks you go down to 1600 calories. 

You lose 6lbs, and then weight loss stalls again due to metabolic down-regulation in week four. 

You drop to 1400 calories for the next three weeks.

You lose another 6lbs and stall out in the fourth week.

You go down to 1200 calories for the next three weeks.

You lose another 7lbs, and then stop.

At this point you’ve lost 25lbs in the span of 16 weeks. 

You’re not done though.

You’re not even halfway done. 

Now comes the hard part: MAINTENANCE. 

You now have two choices to maintain this fat loss: 

Keep living at 1200 calories a day. This is where most dieters fail, because 1200 calories a day is miserably low. You get hungry. Your willpower vanishes… You start snacking, nibbling, and treating yourself. You let up on the calorie counting because, honestly, it’s the worst… You gain the weight back. 

Your other, better option to keep that 25lbs off of you forever, is to sllllllowly ratchet your calories back up to where you started: Back to 2000 calories per day. 

Reverse dieting helps you to bring your daily calorie intake back up incredibly gradually.  to a liveable level, without “surprising” your metabolism and gaining all the weight back. 

Your plan of attack is to increase your calories by 200 per week, and give your body two weeks at each new calorie level to “normalize” your metabolic rate. 

200 calories per week works out to about 30 calories per day.

So, for two weeks you go from 1200 calories to 1230 per day.

The next two weeks: 1260 calories per day.

The next two weeks: 1290.

2 weeks at 1320

2 weeks at 1350

2 weeks at 1380

1410

1440

1470

1500

1530

1560

1590

1620

1650

1680

1710

1740

1770

1800

1830

1860

1890

1920

1950

1970

52 weeks later, you’re back up to 2000 calories per day.

You can eat food again like a normal, non-dieting person and, ostensibly, stop tracking.

When we add the 52 week reverse diet to the original 16 weeks it took to lose the 25lbs in the first place, this puts your 25lb weight loss via deliberate calorie restriction at a 68 week effort. One point two five years. 

Let’s round down to 1 year, though, just to make this seem more hopeful. 

And this assumes that you were perfect. 

A perfect dieter on the way down with no slip ups. 

A perfect reverse dieter on the way up with no slip ups. 

25lbs of permanent fat loss in one year of constant calorie tracking. 

To be honest, just about any weight loss program could work if you gave it a solid year. 

The problem is, nobody wants to wait a whole year to lose 25lbs. 

“It’s not fast enough.”

Well… there is no faster way. Fast = temporary. What good is fast fat loss if it’s not even real? 

The only hack for permanent, real fat loss — no matter how you do it — is patience. 

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