Crash Diet -> Healthy Diet

Slowly increase your caloric intake back up to maintenance (go calculate what your maintenance level is). So long as you don't make this an overnight process, you should be fine.

You just can't let yourself go back to eating like hell, even if life intervenes. That's when the weight starts to pile back on.

I have a huge appetite so I find that once a month fasting works for me. I believe it shrinks my stomach and makes future large meals unpleasant.

There are different formulas to reaching that number, but since this isn't an exact science, a quick and easy way to determine your maintenance level is to multiply your body weight by at least 13.

So let's say you weigh 190, then to maintain that weight, you'd consume about 2,500 calories a day.

Again, this isn't an exact science and YMMV depending on activity levels and other variables. But in my experiences, that's a pretty accurate way to gauge where your maintenance level is and where you'd need to go in order to lose or gain.

try bodyopus for 4-6 weeks as a kick start. you will thank me.

Appears to be a book - Underground Bodyopus: Militant Weight Loss & Recomposition.

I can tell you what I would try to do, no promises, though.

Your current daily is X. Calculate your more plausible daily maintenance, Y. Start eating at the half way mark and increase your daily by 100 cal per week until X = Y or the mirror tells you that you are gaining fat. Increase weight lifting, lower cardio. /shrug

I would up your exercise by a bit (specifically weights) if possible and get back to pre-diet maintenance like previously suggested, but I would do it pretty fast rather than gradual. I don't think you want to lose more weight by continuing a deficit for awhile. I would also make sure to workout early in the day as the increase in food intake will leave you a bit tired from the energy spent getting your metabolism and digestion going again.

I'd think about doing 2-3 weeks of maintenance and then drop your calories again by 100/day until you got to a reasonable level for healthy dieting. But some people react differently.

Gradual or not, it doesn't matter much. The body acclimates itself fairly quickly. I'm not saying go out and eat 6000kcal today and then reduce calories massively again for a few weeks tomorrow (there are a lot of issues with that beyond the obvious ones), but in terms of BMR and hormones and such the body doesn't really work as diurnally as people are wont to believe. Daily journals are a tidy way of tracking calorie and exercise amounts, but the body doesn't see the the same clean slate each morning as minds might.

A lot of cyclical ketogenic diets like Bodyopus or Lyle's UD2.0 use a big carbohydrate 'refeed', but I think it's unnecessary for most people. Die-hard bodybuilder types seem to start enjoying the diet more than the food, which is an oddity I can understand but still spurn, especially given the gustatory garbage that comprises the diets. Besides, if a person doesn't feel that same level of excitement from the diet (something like a metabolic rollercoaster, spine tingling at the ketogenic crest of the hill) the diet becomes incredibly restrictive for no real added benefit. And in many cases, it becomes detrimental to training or general life.

I won't get into all the details, but essentially the body stores energy. Always. This is why meal timing doesn't matter much and why people can skip lunch or go for a walk without requiring an IV drip of glucose to keep themselves alive along the way. Some diets play with the mechanisms of storage (ketogenic diets, for instance, use carbohydrate 'refeeds' because carbohydrates are rarely stored as fat when carbohydrate levels are depleted in the body). But the body doesn't work in the same zero sum model that a lot of these diets invoke; that is, again using the ketogenic example, a person can deplete carbohydrate stores just by lowering carbohydrates or they can rapidly deplete carbohydrates by eliminating them entirely; the effect is roughly the same, but the timing differs.

Extrapolating this beyond ketogenic diets, the general principles can be viewed microcosmically and macrocosmically. Think about an off-season bodybuilder or weightlifter: they gain weight at the beginning of the off-season, knowing later they will lose it as the season begins. Diets can therefore work in very small amounts of time (a wrestler's 24-hour fast to make weight), longer lengths of time (a cyclical ketogenic diet), or extended periods of time (over a year as seasonally required by some athletes). Keep in mind that these are all just examples of diets for the purpose of furthering a general understanding, and they are not in any way the only examples nor are they a sole prescription for their respective diet model.

Putting this all together, what I'm essentially saying is that your body will store energy. It will start putting much of this energy toward normalizing the reduced function, and some of this energy will become stored for a period of time. This doesn't mean a protruding paunch will burgeon overnight. It doesn't mean the scale won't change at all either. It does mean that the relatively-miniscule amount of extra energy your body stores will be put to use in the future no matter how it manifests itself in the present.

The 'exit strategy' you're looking for is, as I've said before, to eat normally. The problem you're having is recognizing that eating normally is the norm.

^being a celiac, i have reduced my refeeds to bi-weekly. haven't found weekly refeeds necessary.