You Finished your Diet. Now What?

October 9, 2026

Once you've got to your goal, there will likely be several psychological and physical challenges on the way that you have successfully navigated. Now there's one final psychological hurdle; to maintain your great result. If you have dieted for a show or photoshoot, you will know and understand the difficulty of returning to “normal” eating patterns once you have achieved your goal. One minute you’re feeling great, the next you’re pinching yourself worrying that you’ve gained an extra couple of pounds!

This is no different for you once you achieve your transformation. There are two key elements to consider here:

You will not gain excess levels of body fat unless you eat beyond your maintenance calories. However, there are reasons why this will be harder in some instances, such as finding time to exercise, meals out, continuing poor relationships with food, etc.
What are realistic expectations for levels of body fat post-diet and what are the implications of this?

Returning To “Normal” Eating

You’ve gotten lean after many weeks or months of hard work and you may even have completed a photoshoot. Given that they’ve likely deprived yourselves of many of pleasurable food choices, it’s only natural that you will want to return to some degree of normality, whether that is eating out more regularly, enjoying a few drinks on the weekend or going on holiday. However, both the client and me as their trainer are mindful of avoiding undoing their hard work. A few things to make yourself aware of:

You won’t be able to return to the way you ate previously and your former lifestyle choices. The healthy habits that got you to your goal are going to be those that maintain their progress. Luckily, you will likely have set up a range of healthy habits and strategies that should make this less appealing.
You may not be able to stay mega lean all year round (sub 8-10% body fat for men and sub 18-20% for women). For the majority of people, this would not be advisable from a hormonal and general health standpoint. For women, this can lead to serious conditions such as amenorrhea, hair loss, low mood and low thyroid function. In men, this can result in lowered testosterone levels (clearly unfavourable for muscle growth), low mood and even hair loss.
It may involve eating at a level that reduces the individual’s scope for ingesting essential nutrients.
It’s a lot less enjoyable to spend your life being anxious and worried about food, which has the potential for encouraging orthorexic-like food behaviours, i.e. obsessing over the calories and macronutrient content of foods, refusing to eat out in particular restaurants, shunning social events. While these may sometimes be necessary while dieting hard for a goal, long term they can cause serious psychological and physiological harm.
The core purpose of what we do is to enable our clients to lead healthy, happier lives. We need to give them the tools post-diet to do so.

What Are Essential Versus Realistic Levels Of Fat?

Being shredded is not conducive to gaining muscle mass or peak performance. Once you have achieved your weight loss goal, it is important to agree on future goals that you would like to achieve. More often than not, these will involve physical or performance goals. In either case, being shredded is not conducive to gaining muscle mass or peak performance. Explaining/understanding this is important to psychologically ease yourself out of the dieting period. If you are concerned you are likely to go completely crazy with your new-found freedom, this can also be a tool to explain the concept of eating for general health and performance rather than pure enjoyment.

Are “Reverse-Diets” Necessary?

A reverse diet refers to slowly increasing calories after a period of extended dieting to return to maintenance calories and minimise fat gain. Hypothetically, being leaner at this stage will allow yourself to make good gains in the gym and start any future diets or transformations with more muscle mass, less body fat and eating as many calories as possible.

However, the downside of this approach is that you may spend far longer in an energy deficit than is necessary. This can increase negative metabolic adaptions as well as continued negative effects such as low testosterone, decreased thyroid output, increased irritability, tiredness, increased likelihood of disordered eating, reduced gym performance and more. It makes little sense to keep someone in an energy deficit any longer necessary if the aim is improved body composition and other health markers. It has also been found that in up to 90% of cases, reverse dieting is not successful.

The concept of the “recovery diet” was developed in the context of recovering from contest prep and has a few key features we can apply post-transformation. Before the end of your transformation, discuss your ideal lifestyle you would like while maintaining your new physique.

If you are now at a healthy weight and body fat percentage, the aim is to bring you up to maintenance calories, which can be achieved as follows:

Step 1.

Take person x measurements and use calculator to calculate their maintenance calories (and a meal plan if person x wants this).
Set calories at 20% lower than their estimated total daily energy expenditure to help offset against adaptation where energy expenditure can drop. Apply for two weeks, review progress and then increase from there based on the rate of change.

Step 2.

Track calories and protein intake to hit specific goals.

Keep calories in a slight deficit during the week but don’t track at weekends.
This second option may not be helpful for those with a history of binging or disordered eating patterns.

Give your client a week of ad libitum eating before returning to a more structured plan.

Typical macronutrient splits might look like:

Protein set at 1-1.3 g per Ib of lean body mass.
A fat goal of at least 25% of total calories.
Carbohydrates should make up the remaining calorie total.

As above, you can manipulate the calories within the week to fit your lifestyle while adhering to calories/ macros. This can be adjusted every two weeks as necessary.

Tracking

As you progress after the transformation, you may feel that you do not want to meticulously track calories and macros every day and long-term this is probably advisable to avoid disordered eating behaviour. However, you have hopefully developed good habits along the way that support this. While you may initially be asked to follow a plan or calorie and macronutrient targets, over time you may want to start focusing more on internal cues, such as satiety and hunger, which will improve with practice. If you feel you have lost focus, you can reintroduce tracking periodically to help yourself regain control.

Intuitive Eating

If you have has successfully developed good eating habits, you should end up eating relatively within the ranges that you have set. However, this will depend largely on:

Did you previously have very bad habits or slipped up a lot on your diet? You may require more support.
You are scared of overeating and subsequently under-eat on calories, particularly carbohydrates. This is often common with female clients. It is therefore important to understand that it is not healthy to permanently remain in a period of energy deficit and the importance of these additional calories for growth and performance.

In both of these cases, intuitive eating may not be for you.

However, if you know that you are confident in consuming sufficient protein and calories without binging and your weight is staying within your target limits, this is a desirable outcome from a psychological perspective. The goal is to track as few variables as possible while still ensuring you still achieve your performance and body composition goals.

Key Points

It is important to understand at the end of your diet that:

The aim of the recovery diet is to maintain a sustainable weight.
If you eat the same amount of calories as you burn, you will not gain excess levels of body fat.
You need to consume more calories than they were during their diet in order to gain lean tissue. Being lean puts them in a great position to do this.
However, they do not need to be in an excessive surplus to gain tissue either.

This is important for setting up for long term success, which can be supported by future “mini cuts” for important occasions like holidays, weddings, etc.

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