Picture the scene. You’ve spent all week working hard to stick to your food plan and creating a calorie deficit with the hope of seeing the scales shift downwards at the end of the week.
Then, the weekend arrives, and you take something of a more ‘flexible approach’.
Have you ever thought about how (annoyingly) easy it is to cancel out your hard-gained calorie deficit over the weekend – and perhaps even end up in a calorie surplus?
Are you in a cycle of losing and regaining the same pound or two for months at a time?
The weekend makes up 29% of your week. 48% if you include Friday too. When you look at the numbers like this, straight away it becomes easy to see how not following your plan for 29%, or more, of your week is not going to help the scales move down.
Let’s break it down further.
Whether you’re eating a specific amount of calories and grams of protein / fat and carbs each day, or if you’re taking the more simple (and for most people, likely just as effective – at least at first) approach of making better choices for most meals, then you should be achieving at most a 500 calorie deficit each day.
If you achieve that seven days a week, you have a 3500 calorie deficit each week. Which will result in weight loss.
If you achieve that five days a week, and eat without a deficit at the weekend, then you have a 2500 calorie deficit each week. Which will also result in weight loss.
But, if at the weekend you eat more than your body needs to stand still and you neither gain nor lose weight, then you’re literally eating (or drinking) away the calorie deficit you’ve created.
The calories add up annoyingly quickly. You could happily eat away a 2500 calorie deficit with a takeaway and a bottle of wine.
So, choose when you’re going to eat or drink into your calorie deficit carefully, and in full knowledge.
But also remember that no food is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Nothing should be banned or off limits. We value different foods for different reasons at different times.
Just know that going all-out at the weekend to ‘reward’ yourself for sticking to your plan all week might not be helping you get closer to your goal.