Island Boy J Music.

Hello friends.

Welcome to Activate, a podcast consisting of purposeful conversations aimed at encouraging listeners to embrace both the beauty and chaos of life.

I'm KB and I can't wait to share valuable insights on health, fitness, nutrition, aging, faith, family and everything in between to help you level up and activate your life.

I'm a former network marketing hater turned.

Top leader in my industry.

I'm a certified life and nutrition coach, helping women to break the same chains.

That once kept me stuck.

I'm so happy you're here.

Let's do this.

Hello, friends.

Happy Monday.

How are we?

I hope you're great.

I'm so happy that you're here.

I'm excited to talk to you today.

I am going to talk, talk about, I'm actually going to talk about food and body a little.

We've kind of, we've kind of gotten away from that.

But I'm still a nutrition coach and I still have such a passion for helping people.

And one of the things that I don't know that I've ever really talked about or explained thoroughly is a reverse diet.

And I have had people, several people actually recently ask me about reverse dieting.

I am currently in a reverse diet myself.

And I think it's something that could be really valuable for people to kind of understand because we all know that roller coaster we can get on with dieting, right?

Because we, we do all this hard work to lose weight and then we go straight back to our old habits or we try to stay in this really restrictive calorie deficit and we just can't do it.

So reverse dieting is the anecdote for all of that.

And so I'm going to share some of those things with you today.

If you've been around here long, if you've been listening from the beginning.

When Activate was born, I was really deep in an eating disorder and had no idea.

I just thought, I couldn't figure out how to eat.

Like I didn't understand.

I didn't know how women just ate.

I got on a major binge restrict cycle that I just could not find my way out of without help.

July this year will be five years since I did seek help and get out of.

Thank God, literally just by the grace of God, got out of that and began healing from my eating disorder.

When I tell you that that time in my life, like that eating disorder, that, oh my gosh, the misery of that eating disorder kept me from doing so many things, I was unable to think about anything other than food in my body.

I had no brain space for anything else, let alone all of the enjoyment that I missed out on because I, you know, I.

I wouldn't eat outside of my eating window.

I wouldn't eat outside of my plan.

So any occasion, which is basically all of them, where you're celebrating or spending time with loved ones, revolves around food, right?

It's part of just culture.

And I was stuck.

Like, I would sit miserably across the booth from, you know, my husband and my children while they ate, and I would order like a side of broccoli, or I would order just a water with lemon and pretend that I didn't care, when really I wanted to murder them because somehow they could eat and I couldn't eat.

But yet I'm.

These are like self imposed, ridiculous restrictions that I was putting on myself.

And I also contribute my feelings of not, like, not being successful to wasting all of this time and brain space on being absolutely obsessive about food and my body.

I absolutely had made an idol of my body.

And I was so, so stuck.

And it kept me stuck and in chains for years.

It was years of my life that I wasted being so unhappy, so out of control, and just so confused about how on earth you just eat like a normal person.

Some of you might be, like, really confused right now and be like, what is she talking about?

But some of you are feeling so seen and heard right now.

I know that.

Um, so as a nutrition coach, like, the data shows that at least half of those that are in the health, fitness, nutrition, wellness profession have struggled with, at the very least, body image issues, but also disordered eating habits.

So it's no surprise that I've ended up here.

But you are most powerfully positioned to help the person you used to be.

And so I feel like this is absolutely part of my calling and I love fitness and nutrition.

Like, when I was listening to a podcast the other day and they said, like, to.

To figure out what your passion is, like when everyone else, like, goes to sleep at night or, you know, when you have this time to yourself.

What are you.

What are you watching?

What are you researching?

What are you googling?

What are you.

What are you YouTubing?

And for me, it's Jesus and nutrition.

Okay?

Like, these are the things, like, these are just my passion.

So I want to talk about a reverse diet today.

So people ask me about what it means to reverse diet.

And now the thing about, like, nutrition coaching, you could have five different coaches and they could all give you a different way to get to the same Result, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat, right?

So there's not just one way.

But reverse dieting is definitely a tool, an important tool in the toolbox for getting to a healthy weight and body composition and being able to maintain it.

So I love to use reverse dieting after a dieting or fat loss, calorie deficit phase, whatever you want to call it, most people, this is the problem.

Most people think you either reach your goal weight with a diet, right, and then you just go back to eating like you did before, like, okay, the diet's over, I reached my, I reached my goal way, or I finished the six week challenge or whatever.

And then there's no plan.

You just go straight back to doing what you always did and you get what you always got.

Or they believe that they have to stay in this very strict calorie deficit forever, which no one can ultimately adhere to forever and nor should they, right?

And then they are back.

They're back to either very quickly or slowly gaining back all the weight because they, they go into this diet phase with no plan for how to come out or what to do once they've reached their goal.

So this, this is when we're officially on this roller coaster of dieting and losing the weight and then subsequently gaining it all back and having to start all over again.

If you know, you right, like if you've been on the roller coaster, you've been on the roller coaster.

So did you know the number one predictor of weight gain is going on a diet?

It's because no one knows what to do after you can say, oh, that really worked for me, I gained or I lost 30 pounds.

Well, except for it didn't work because you actually gained 40.

Right?

So you lost 30, you gained 40 or you lost 30, you gained it all back or you lost 30 and you gained 25 of it back.

It didn't actually work for you.

Right.

So this is where a knowledgeable coach can really come in handy.

I know a gal if you need one.

A reverse diet is essentially the diet after the diet, or better said, it's how we fuel after a fat loss phase.

So it's a gradual increase in calories to get to your new maintenance calories.

Because after you've dieted, say I was 150 pounds, I dieted down to 130 pounds.

My maintenance calories to stay, to maintain 130 pounds are going to be different than my maintenance calories that helped me maintain £150.

Right.

So you have to, you need someone who's knowledgeable, or you need to get on the Internet and figure out how to figure out your maintenance calories for your new weight.

Okay?

So your old maintenance will now be a surplus.

So if you just go back to those old maintenance calories, you're actually going to be in a surplus and you're going to be gaining weight.

So here's how you know when is a good time to reverse diet.

So if you've been in a calorie deficit for 16 or more weeks, it's probably time to reverse.

Okay?

There's something called metabolic adaptation, and eventually, and I'm going to talk about this later, but eventually you're just going to plateau.

Your, your body metabolically adapts to the amount of calories that you're eating, and it will just become your new maintenance.

If you have 40, 50, 60, 100 pounds to lose, you can probably diet longer.

If your biofeedback is still good, if you're still feeling good, you're still losing weight, and there's still room for you to drop calories, you can stay in a diet longer when you have more to lose.

Have you been chronically under eating or totally inconsistent?

So this is where a lot of people fall, okay?

So they're like these Monday through Thursday dieters, where you're in an extreme calorie deficit Monday through Thursday, and then the weekend comes and you totally lose control.

Whether it's intentional or not, some people are just like, well, I'm going to enjoy the weekend and I'm going to be really strict during the week.

And some people intend to stay strict, but they just can't.

Their willpower wanes on the weekend.

And it makes sense because our bodies can't handle being in a deep, deep deficit all of the time.

So you make sense if you do that, but if that's what you're doing right, you're dieting so hard during the week and then letting it all unravel over the weekend, making your whole week shake out to either maintenance or even a surplus to where you're gaining weight, it's time to go into a reverse diet, okay, and get back on a normal, consistent eating schedule or calories.

If you're in a very busy or stressful season of life, it's time to reverse to your maintenance calories.

Because you know what else is a stressor on the body in addition to everything else that you're dealing with?

A calorie deficit.

And we know stress can wreak havoc on our bodies.

Also, if your biofeedback is poor.

If you have low energy, mood swings, if you're obsessing over food, if you have low libido, if you're experiencing headaches, bad sleep, poor, poor digestion.

This is all negative biofeedback.

And it's time to reverse.

Even if you have not gotten to your goal weight, it's time to reverse diet.

And what will happen is after you go into reverse and stay there for a while and maintain your weight, this will prime your body for your next dieting phase.

Another time that's good to go into a reverse diet, which I was talking to before, is when you hit a plateau.

So you see no movement on the scale or in your measurements or in the way your clothes fit or in your pictures for two plus weeks.

Okay?

This is not just, oh, I didn't lose weight the last two days, or I had a little fluctuation on the scale.

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying a true plateau, two plus weeks of no movement, not budging.

So this means, this means, this is the metabolic adaptation that I'm talking about.

So this means your, your new maintenance is, is where you're at, right?

Um, so the way to fix this, fix your metabolism, quote, unquote, fix, is to do a reverse diet.

The other time you would want to do a reverse diet is when you've met your goal weight, right?

And so if you've done the hard work, you've been in a deficit, you've spent time in a calorie deficit, you've lost all of the weight that you were looking to lose, you're at your goal weight.

What do I do now?

This is where people really can mess it up.

And what you need to do is go into a reverse diet where you're slowly increasing calories over time to get to your new maintenance.

Okay?

So this might be a hundred calories at a time.

So maintenance is really the best place to be.

We want to live in maintenance, right?

So most people, most people actually need more muscle and less body fat to have the body that they want.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they need to lose weight.

Weight, okay?

At maintenance, you can add muscle mass and lose body fat.

So your weight won't necessarily go down.

It will likely stay the same because you're in maintenance, but your body composition will change, and that's really the goal.

We all think we're chasing after this number, but we're really chasing after this look.

And the look happens from the body recomposition from proper calories, strength Training proper protein like this is where the body recomposition happens.

So that was just a really quick little episode on what it means to do a reverse diet.

I've had several people asking and I thought this could be something really quick that I could share on the podcast.

But I also want to always bring it back to what does God say?

Right?

So we don't want to make an idol of our bodies.

And honestly, we are inundated by beautiful, quote, unquote perfect looking bodies all over social media.

And it's, it's not even real.

Most of those people, whether it's Photoshop or whether it's.

They are showing you at their.

No one is showing your you at their.

No one is showing themselves to you at their worst.

Okay?

No one does that.

They're showing you their best day, okay?

And they're probably not living there because it's absolutely unsustainable and it's unhealthy.

Most women should be really around 20% body fat to be healthy.

The girls that you're seeing on social media with the ripped abs, their body fat is way too low.

Their biofeedback is probably horrible.

They're probably not having a menstrual cycle.

Their hormones are all out of whack.

Like, it's not ideal.

It really isn't.

It isn't where you want to live.

You are absolutely not going to feel good.

You might look good, but you don't feel good.

And I have been there.

And sadly, you'll never probably get more compliments than when you're at your least healthy because somehow people just think skinny is the ideal look and it's not, it is not the healthiest place to be.

So don't be chasing small.

You don't want to be small.

You just want to be strong and you want to be healthy and you want to have strong bones and, and you want to have muscle, right?

So God also wants us to just be a good steward and honor the body he's given us.

He wants you to recognize your body as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

God lives inside your body.

Be kind to your body.

Seek God's grace and guidance.

If you struggle with disordered eating or body image issues, you are, you are not alone.

You are one of many.

So many people struggle with this in this compare and despair world.

This highlight real social media world that we live in.

The Bible emphasizes moderation and self control.

Forgive yourself when you stumble and acknowledge that often our struggles are spiritual and God's grace is required to get through that.

Okay.

It's not.

You don't have to do all this hard work on your own.

Pray through it.

An eating disorder can be an absolute battle.

It can consume your life.

And we can't do kingdom work when we are consumed with food in our bodies.

So I know this was a quick one.

I hope that was helpful.

I would love to talk to any of you about nutrition.

I would be happy to help you find your maintenance calories.

I'd be happy to help you find a proper deficit for you so that you can lose some weight.

I'm happy to talk about my six month program.

It's six months because this process does not happen overnight.

This is a long and gradual process so that it can be sustainable.

And I am so passionate about how helping people, women specifically, live in bodies that they love, that feel good every single day, that look good, that perform well.

That's the goal.

And then we can, we can put all of that to the side where it belongs and we can do the real important things in life.

Raise our children, love our families, love others.

You know, bring people to the kingdom of God.

So I love you.

I hope that you have the best week.

Stay tuned really, really soon for.

I'm going to share the name of the new podcast.

It will stay right here.

You're not going to have to go follow another podcast.

We're going to stay right here because you know what, we've got like 300 episodes and we're, we, we earned those.

So we're going to stay right here on the same feed.

But the name's going to change and I'm so excited to bring you all along.

I hope you have the best day.

Later.

That's a wrap on another episode of Activate.

Stay up to date by following hristenleeballard on Instagram.

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Thanks for being here.

Love y' all.

Later, Sam.