 Question is from Corn Van Groening. You guys always talk about reverse dieting. What exactly is it and what would be the best approach? So reverse dieting became popular. Going in the other direction. Yeah, when you have these like bikini competitors and physique competitors and bodybuilding competitors who would go on these 12 or 16 week diet protocols to get super, super shredded for a competition. And then what ended up happening is they would get really shredded, they'd restrict their calories, do lots of cardio, whatever. Get really, really shredded. Then they would do their competition. Then the competition was over and then they'd just go nuts. They would just go nuts and eat a bunch of food and okay, I'm done with my competition. And some of these people would gain 30, 40, 50 pounds in a very, very short period of time which is terribly unhealthy for the body and actually results in the creation of new fat cells. Actually makes it harder for you to get lean again later on. So then people started to learn about reverse dieting. And reverse dieting basically says this, if you have 12 weeks leading into a competition, you should have maybe six to 10 weeks leading out of it as well. And the reverse diet is literally kind of the opposite of what the diet was. You're slowly upping your calories in a structured way to prevent that crazy rebound and fat gain that people get post-show. Now the way I look at it is the way I would look at somebody who uses anabolic steroids. Like someone's gonna go, I'm gonna do an eight week cycle of anabolic steroids but they don't have any post-cycle therapy planned. They're setting themselves up for failure. So like a good, you know, you talk to these pro bodybuilders, they'll say a good steroid cycle is dictated by the post-cycle therapy. Well a good diet in my opinion is dictated by the reverse diet. How good can you come out of it, speed up the metabolism and minimize some of the problems that happen without reverse dieting. Well, I love this conversation because this is actually how I found Lane Norton. And when I was first getting into like the whole bodybuilding world in that community, I was like searching for, you know, bodybuilders that were presenting really good information around this. I knew this because I know how the body works. I know how the metabolism works or I understand it to somewhat that, you know, if we restrict calories, restrict calories, restrict calories to get lean, what ends up happening is the body adapts to that. And this becomes your new caloric maintenance. I think a lot of people don't understand that our metabolism is this free flowing thing. It is not a set number. You weren't born with a certain metabolism that burns X amount of calories. It's ever changing. Every time you add a couple pounds of muscle to your body, it changes. Every time you start exercising a certain way, it changes. If you become more sedentary, it changes. You restrict calories dramatically for weeks on weeks on weeks, it changes. It changes. It's adapting. It's adapting and it's getting used to whatever that you're doing to it. So if you have somebody who's on a diet who is week over week over week has been increasing cardio and restricting calories and restricting calories, that person who started that diet, they might have had a caloric maintenance at say, let's say 2,500 calories when they started this whole process. That's where their bodies stayed the same. That's what calorie maintenance means. And then over that time, they've restricted calories and maybe even added movement. And by the time they get to their ultimate goal, they look the way they want to or they lose their 20 pounds, their new calorie maintenance is no longer 2,500. It might be something like 1,400. And so what ends up happening a lot of time is people go, oh, awesome. I look amazing. This is what was my goal. Now I'm back to how I was eating before. And what ends up happening is now they're in a worse position than they were back when they had built their metabolism, their calorie maintenance, excuse me, was at 2,500. Because now their calorie maintenance is at 1,400. And then they think they can go back to how they were eating that 2,500 to 3,000 calorie diet sometimes. And what ends up happening is just a ton of weight gets, body fat gets put on them because they have a new calorie maintenance. And what you want to do, like Sal was saying, is the same way you restricted every week over week to get down to that place, you want to slowly introduce calories back into the diet and ideally change your stimulus. So this is where I love to switch up the programming for my clients. So if I have a client, we reach our goal. When she first hired me, her calorie maintenance was somewhere between 25, 2,600 calories. I've slowly reduced her and we were following a certain program and she hits our goal. Awesome. Well, my job isn't done now because I don't want her only eating 1,400 calories for the rest of her life. So now I'm going to start coming the other way and I'm going to start adding calories to her diet. And when I do that, I'm also going to change the stimulus inside the gym. So switch up her programming. Maybe she's following like maps and a ball, that's what got us down that size. Now I'm going to go to maps performance or I'm going to go to something like map strong, something completely different, a new stimulus. So what I'm hoping by doing that, while I'm increasing calories back into her diet, I'm hoping any extra calories that her body is getting, that they're getting partitioned over to build muscle and to support this new adaptation, this new focus, this new modality that we're doing. So that's what reverse dieting is. And a lot of people didn't talk about this. I didn't learn about this until over a decade into personal training, how important this was. And the way we were taught back in the days was just cut calories or get them to lose weight. And then you're done. And then you're done. There was no talk about what do you do to these people after they reach their goal. And there still isn't a lot of people talking about this. I mean, Lane was one of the first people that I came across. He's got a great book on this too. I think it's one of the better pieces of content that you can invest in for somebody who is wanting to diet, get down into great shape, and then what does it look like to come out of it? Because if you care about staying fit for the rest of your life, that part of it is as important, if not more important than the journey there.