Reverse Dieting From 1,500 Calories

Fifteen hundred calories is a familiar number at the tail end of a cut — enough food to feel manageable, low enough to keep the scale moving for most people. Whether it counts as a deficit for you, though, depends entirely on your maintenance burn, and that varies with size, sex, age and how active your week is. A smaller or sedentary body might sit close to maintenance at 1,500, while a larger or busier one could be several hundred calories short of it. Reverse dieting is simply the deliberate climb from that intake back up to the level you burn, done gradually so the transition is smooth rather than a jolt. The tool above works out the maintenance figure you are aiming at and, if 1,500 is below it, the exact steps to get there — no guessing at whether the gap is 500 calories or 1,300.

Consider a 30-year-old man weighing 80 kg at 180 cm, moderately active. His resting burn works out to about 1,780 calories, and multiplied by his activity that gives a maintenance near 2,759 a day. From 1,500 that leaves a gap of 1,259 calories. Adding 100 a week, the climb takes roughly thirteen weeks — 1,600, then 1,700, and onward — with protein held around 128 grams a day to protect the muscle he built or kept through the cut. Your figures will land elsewhere, because maintenance shifts with your own weight, height, age and activity, which is why the calculator asks for them rather than assuming the example fits. To sanity-check the maintenance number you are ramping toward, run it through the TDEE Calculator, then return here to schedule the increases.

Swap the example for yourself. Enter your weight, height, age, sex and activity above and the tool replaces the worked maintenance with your own, then lays out the weekly climb from 1,500 up to it. Change the pace and the week count updates on the spot. Once you have settled on a daily calorie target, the Macro Calculator divides it into protein, carbohydrate and fat, and for the complete plan with a rebound-risk read and a week-by-week table, the Reverse Dieting Calculator is the parent tool behind this page.

Early Scale Movement Is Mostly Water

As you start eating more, expect a small rise on the scale in the first week or two. Coming off a diet your glycogen stores and the water held with them are depleted, and the first added carbohydrates refill them fast — a pound or two of scale weight that is not body fat. Read the ramp on its two-week trend rather than a single morning, and the early bump gives way to a clear picture of how your body is handling the extra food.