Nutrition calculator
Reverse diet calculator
The cut is over. This builds the climb back to maintenance a week at a time: how many calories to eat each week, what the macros look like as they rise, and how many weeks until you are eating normally again. Edit the four numbers and the table rewrites itself. Free, instant, no sign-up.
Maintenance is what you burn on an average day — your TDEE. After a long deficit it is usually lower than a calculator says, so treat the estimate as a starting point and correct it once you have three weeks of weigh-ins at a steady intake.
Your ramp, week by week
Macros here hold protein flat at 2.2 g per kg of bodyweight for the whole ramp, give fat 30% of each week's calories (never below 0.5 g/kg), and hand carbohydrate whatever is left — which is why carbs are the number that visibly grows down the table. Grams are rounded to whole numbers, so a row can land a couple of kcal off its own calorie target. The weekly increment is a judgement call rather than a clinically established dose: no trial has established an optimal pace for adding calories back.
The table says what to eat each week — the coach helps you build the meals and decide when to hold a week instead of stepping up.
What is a reverse diet?
A reverse diet is the planned climb back out of a calorie deficit: rather than finishing a cut and returning to normal eating overnight, you add a small fixed number of calories each week until you are at maintenance again. The practice came out of physique competition, where the weeks after a show are notorious for undoing months of work, and it has since spread to anyone who has spent a long time eating less than they burn. The claim usually attached to it — that a slow ramp repairs a metabolism the diet suppressed — is far shakier than the practice itself, which is mostly a structured way to get appetite, training and bodyweight back to normal without a fortnight of eating everything in the house.
How this calculator works
It takes the gap between what you eat now and your estimated maintenance, divides it by your weekly increment, and prints a row for each week until the gap closes. The last week is clamped to maintenance rather than allowed to overshoot, so a 700 kcal gap at 75 kcal a week finishes on week ten at exactly maintenance instead of week ten at 2,450. Each row is then split into macros: protein flat at 2.2 g/kg — the top of the 1.6-2.2 g/kg band Morton and colleagues identified in 2018 as the point where more protein stops helping — fat at 30% of that week's energy with a 0.5 g/kg floor, and carbohydrate taking the remainder.
Does reverse dieting actually prevent fat regain?
Honestly: nobody has shown that it does. The published evidence is a handful of small case series in physique athletes and no trial comparing a gradual ramp against simply eating at maintenance from the day the diet ends. The metabolic adaptation a reverse diet is supposed to reverse is real but modest — a few hundred kcal below what bodyweight alone predicts, most of it explained by moving less and weighing less — and it appears to recover as you eat more and regain weight, ramp or no ramp. What a ramp does buy you is control: one variable moves at a time, you get a weekly readout of what that change did, and there is a plan on the page instead of an open fridge. That is a real benefit, and it is not the same claim as a repaired metabolism.
Choosing your weekly increment
Fast ramps of 150 kcal a week or more get you back to eating normally in under a month, at the cost of not knowing which of those calories your body actually needed — expect some of the gain to be fat, and expect it to be hard to tell how much. Slow ramps of 25 to 50 kcal a week take months, and over a horizon that long your maintenance estimate drifts and the ±100 kcal of normal tracking error swamps the signal you are trying to read. Most coaches work somewhere between 50 and 100 kcal a week, which is roughly 2-4% of maintenance. Weigh daily and compare weekly averages rather than single mornings: if the average is climbing by more than about 0.25% of bodyweight a week, hold the current intake for a week rather than adding another step.