WHAT IS
Flexible Nutrition
& Reverse Dieting?
All of the food we consume contains calories and within calories there are macronutrients or fats, carbs, and proteins. Flexible nutrition or flexible dieting as it is more commonly known takes calorie counting to the next level.
Tracking Macronutrients
By counting calories and tracking your fitness you essentially determine your weight loss; calories or energy into your body versus calories or energy expended from your body. When you learn to track and manipulate the macronutrients, you change your body composition. Fats, Carbs, and Protein all play different roles within your body. No one person is the same because genetically, we were all created differently; it’s that simple. The roles of macronutrients can overlap, but for the most part, you need a certain amount of all of them. When they are not utilized in the proper proportions according to your specific bodily needs, you increase your risk for diseases and turning excess calories and macronutrients not used properly into stored fat. There are calculations that tell you how much you should be eating based on your height, weight, age, and daily energy expenditure, but what those calculations don’t take into account is what your current nutrition intake is daily. This is where I come in and help you figure out based on what your current intake is and current goals are how you get from point A to point B; what your current macronutrient intake is and how to manipulate the proportions of each macronutrient to achieve your goals and reach your ideal body composition and sustainable lifestyle. What I offer is not a quick fix, it’s not a fad diet, it’s not going to get you your desired summer beach body in 30 days or less so if that is what you are interested in I encourage you to re-evaluate your goals for a healthier, long term approach. I offer accountability and the education you would not receive from a blanket “meal plan” that is bland and restricts specific food for periods of time then eventually leads to binging habits when you are allowed to “indulge” or “cheat” on your plan. Flexible nutrition allows you to continue eating the foods you enjoy, while changing the portions of specific types of foods to assist you in achieving that body composition change you desire.
This day in age is extremely focused on diets and weight loss and I’m here to tell you that we don’t have a diet or weight loss problem in the United States; we have a failure to maintain weight loss and a failure to focus on what should happen after your diet is complete. All too often I find after an initial assessment period of my lifestyle clients, that they do not eat enough. This is when I introduce to them the concept of reverse dieting. Reverse dieting is what you should do at the end of a diet. This allows you to slowly add calories back into your diet in order to restore your metabolism and minimize fat gain while maintaining lean muscle mass. For many I work with, I have found because they have had their body in starvation mode for so long, they actually lose weight when they start eating more food! I’ll caveat this and say those people are hyper responders, but I see it time and time again. Your body has held onto fat for dear life because you aren’t feeding it and giving your body the nourishment and energy it needs! Whether you are coming out of a diet and you don’t want to immediately go back to the calories you were eating before the diet and regain all of the weight you lost and potentially more or you want to diet but know you just aren’t eating enough food to begin with, a reverse diet will set up your body with a healthier metabolism to more optimally diet and have success in your weight loss or fat loss journey. It is definitely scary for many of us to hear we need to eat more food in order to lose weight, but that is the reality of the long-term success and part of my platform is to show you success stories of those who have done a reverse dieting successfully so that you can see it’s possible for you to be successful with too. Reverse dieting and flexible nutrition is not easy when you begin, but it becomes a habit when you implement it into your daily life. Ask yourself, is it going to be harder to start making a change in your daily life to support your long-term health, or is it going to be harder to sit back and do nothing, therefore see no change? You now know who to contact when you decide it’s time to make your change!