Cheat Eating - Don’t Panic!
Most people get off to a good start when they begin a new diet. They lose weight over the first couple of weeks and feel great. Then a couple of hurdles come up and for whatever reason they eat the naughty stuff and undo all their hard work - at least that is what they think!
In actual fact an occasional binge is not going to hurt you as much as you think. The biggest key to sustained weight loss is sustained motivation. There is nothing that kills motivation faster than a big binge session, but it should not have to.
Let-s look at Susan, who is 27 years old, and weighs 80kgs. With an office job and virtually no exercise, she would burn around 2000 calories a day. She then sticks to a diet of 1200 calories a day.
On this diet, each week she would burn around 5600 calories more than she is eating, meaning she would lose around 0.75kg a week or 3kg a month.
Now on top of Susan-s normal eating, lets say she has a terrible day every Sunday and binges on a packet of chips (245 Cal), Mars bar (275 Cal), McDonalds large Big Mac McValue meal (1160 Cal) and large bowl of ice cream (290 Cal). Remember, this is on top of what she would normally eat on a Sunday anyway, so a big binge.
All this eating on a Sunday (1970 Calories worth) would only change her weekly weight loss from 0.75kg to 0.5kg. So Susan is still losing 0.5kg a week, which is great!
So you can see that she really should not get too down on herself for a bad day, but rather try and put it behind her and get back to her healthy eating the next day.
By allowing yourself one -cheat day- a week you can help stay focused during the week and enjoy the benefits!
It should be stressed that this article is in no way advocating binge eating. There is no doubt that Susan-s binge eating is not the IDEAL situation but it is simply trying to illustrate a point that you should not lose motivation if you occasionally enjoy your other favourites.
If you absolutely have to have a certain food that you know is bad, keep it to one day a week and don-t beat yourself up about it. The most important thing is that you keep your mind focused on your end goal and maintain your motivation through to the end.
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Tags: binge eating, weight loss, weight loss advice, weight loss tips