When the weekend rolls around, what’s your game plan?
If you’ve planned to celebrate a week of clean eating and working out with a cheat meal, that’s fine. There’s both mental and physical benefits to taking a break from your day-to-day eating plan.
The Trouble with Binge Eating on the Weekend
But for too many people, a cheat meal on the weekend quickly turns into beer and pizza Friday night, followed by missed workouts, off-the-rails eating, and more than just a little dessert by the time you realize it’s Sunday night.
By then you could be a few thousand calories into a surplus and flip-flopped your macros to practically look like your goal is to gain belly fat?
Been there? Done that?
If you’ve found yourself in that situation at the close of a weekend, you’re not alone. Even fitness pros like Ricardo Cruz struggle with dieting, hunger, and self-discipline. And I know I’ve had my own bouts of cheat-meal weekends.
Is Your Appetite Getting in the Way of Achieving Your Goals?
But if you’re serious about building muscle, shredding fat, transforming your physique, and achieving your fitness goals, you already know a pattern of cheat-meal weekends will only get in the way of success.
What are you going to do about it?
If it’s a one-off weekend that went off the rails for whatever reason, get back to training and eating right.
But if you’re in the habit of binge-eating on the weekend, or you simply want to prevent it from happening, you need a game plan to avoid a cheat-meal weekend.
The Science of Cheat-Meal Weekends
Think you can get away with a cheat-meal weekend and try to make up for it later by cutting? That might work in terms of counting calories. But it’s not going to help you in the long run.
At the University of New South Wales, researchers looked at the impact of weekend binge eating in a laboratory environment.[1] They found that eating junk food only on the weekend was just as bad as eating unhealthy foods during the week.
Researchers also found that just a couple days of poor eating, can alter gut health, and hormones linked to hunger and cravings.
But here’s the real kick in the crotch.
Go from clean eating during the week, to shoveling it on the weekend on a regular basis, and you’ll likely end up consuming 30 percent more calories than sticking with your meal plan or only allowing one reasonable cheat meal.
Kind of scary, right? Let’s say you’re trying to hit 2,000 calories a day during a cutting phase. You eat clean all week, and get into the habit of binge-eating on the weekends.
That could put you 600 calories over your limit on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Two weekends of binge-eating like is equivalent to the calories in a pound of fat.
And let’s face it, you can destroy 600 calories in seconds if you’re staring down a slice of cheesecake, tossing back some cold ones, or munching your way through a box of cookies.
5 Strategies to Avoid a Cheat-Meal Weekend
Everybody’s probably had a weekend of eating that didn’t go as planned. It happens. But you can’t let that become the norm if you really want to get results. Here are five ways to avoid another cheat-meal weekend:
1. Plan Ahead
I can’t stress this enough. I ask all my clients to take this seriously, because it works:
- Prep your meals in advance.
- Weigh your food.
- Keep healthy snacks with you in the car, at work, or at home.
- When the weekend rolls around, have a plan for a cheat meal, and stick to your diet the rest of the time.
- Consider cutting back calories a day or two before the weekend arrives to balance out the extra cheat-meal calories you plan to eat. It’s a form of flexible dieting.
Do your best to plan ahead and know what you’re going to eat, even on the weekends. If you take a random-wait-and-see-what-happens approach to dieting, it almost always ends in overeating.
2. Choose, But Choose Wisely
If you have plans to go out to eat with friends, attend a party, or take a road trip, you really don’t have to eat what everybody else is eating. Choose, but choose wisely. At a party or restaurant:
- Start with a leafy-green salad.
- Split an entrée with someone else.
- Drink water instead of alcohol or soda.
- Skip the mud pie dessert for a bowl of fruit, or treat yourself to some Skinny Cow ice cream later.
You can still enjoy dining out without obliterating your diet for a night, or worse an entire weekend.
3. Get Support
If you’ve got a supportive group of friends or family members, ask them to help you stick to your diet when you meet up for the weekend.
For example, you might bring or suggest healthier options for the big dinner. Or you could agree on going to a restaurant with menu options that fit your macros better than another.
I’m not gonna lie. This can be hard. If you’re in a cutting phase, and your friends and family want to party, it can be difficult to be the one to scrutinize their meal plans. But if they really care about you, share your goals with them, ask for their help, and you’ll likely get their support.
4. Focus on Your Goals
If you’ve had a long work-week, and you’re looking forward to the weekend for some needed rest and relaxation, it’s all-too-easy to forget your big-picture goals and disregard your meal plan. Don’t do that.
There’s nothing wrong with a cheat meal here and there. But you can’t lose sight of why you’re eating clean during the week and spending a lot of time on cardio and training in the gym.
- Start the weekend by reviewing your goals to build muscle, shred fat, or transform your body.
- Commit your daily calorie and macro goals to memory.
- Track everything you eat, even on the weekends.
- Visualize what you’ll look like and feel like when you reach your goal.
Starting your weekend off with a simple reflection like this can help keep things in perspective. You can still enjoy a cheat meal, but you’ll be more likely to weigh your options between pizza and beer and healthier alternatives when your goals are top of mind.
5. Give Yourself a Break
If you do end up blowing your diet during a weekend of cheat meals, give yourself a break. It happens. But it shouldn’t be the gateway to letting your diet spiral out of control for days or weeks at a time. Just recognize where you went wrong. Develop a plan to do better with some of the above suggestions. And get back to eating clean.
Need help with training and dieting to achieve your goals? Let me know.
References
- Kaakoush, N., et al. (2016). Alternating or continuous exposure to cafeteria diet leads to similar shifts in gut microbiota compared to chow diet. Molecular Nutrition & Food Research. From: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mnfr.201500815/abstract;jsessionid=E704CAAEDE63FB2EB7A8042ABDC904D1.f04t04