7 Ways To Stop Eating Like A Horse At The Weekend

Weekends to fat loss are what group messages are to WhatsApp, autocorrect is to the iPhone, and people eating loudly are to life.

Bloody irritating.

A whole five days of perfect eating, exercising, and hitting your fat loss goals can be wiped out with a spontaneous, catastrophic three-day splurge of food, drink, and more food.

Weekends just never seem to go well do they?

Sunday evening hits and not only do you feel twice the size you did on Friday, but the guilt and shame clouds you in a blanket of overarching contriteness.

‘Back to it Monday’ you sigh, as you hop onto the scales and cover your eyes as the number seems to have bumped back up to what it was last Monday morning.

So why is the weekend such a pain?

Why can you never stick to the bulletproof habits you’ve been diligently practicing throughout the week when Friday evening hits?

Is there any way around these three seemingly elusive days?

Let’s take a further look at the dreaded weekend and how to combat its mysterious calorie-inviting nature…

Why The Weekend Can Ruin A Whole Five Days Progress

Is over-indulging on the weekend that bad?

The short answer is yes. Yes, it is.

Let’s say, your calorie average from Monday to Thursday comes out at around 1600 calories. Awesome, you’re in a calorie deficit and on the way to shedding some serious body fat.

Friday hits, however.

A few drinks Friday evening, a late brunch Saturday morning, a few mindless and calorific snacks throughout the day, before a big dinner and night out Saturday evening.

A quick late-night snack when you get in, and Sunday is a complete write off as you try to recover from the mother of all hangovers.

An average of 3500 calories each day later and you’ve just bumped your average calorie intake up to around 2400 calories for the week.

Shit. You’re no longer in a deficit.

That is why the weekends are so important when it comes to fat loss.

That is why ignoring your regular behaviours and treating Friday night to Sunday evening as their own separate entity is a recipe for disaster.

That is why procuring a set of rules for your weekends are the key to fat loss success.

Your body doesn’t know the difference between a Monday, Thursday, or Saturday night out with the girls. All it really cares about is its energy requirements.

So how can we combat the prominent weekend problem blurring our fat loss progress?

1. Stick To Your Usual Routine

The usual weekday routine goes down the shitter when Friday evening hits doesn’t it?

We wake up later, we don’t have the comfort of our usual workday breakfast and lunch, we haven’t got any meals prepared, we’re at home where snacks and treats are more readily available, and we have to navigate the harsh terrain of frequent meals out with friends and family.

While this list is in no particular order, probably the best bit of advice in sticking to your fat loss goals at the weekend, is to adhere to your familiar weekday routine.

This involves having the same breakfast at the same time, the same lunch at the same time, and, if you’re not going out, the same dinner at the same time.

If you have meals prepared throughout the week, make sure you have meals prepared for the weekend.

If you avoid the 3pm chocolate-binge at the office, you have to avoid the 3pm chocolate-binge at home.

If you track your food throughout the week, track your food at the weekend.

Treating Friday to Sunday as you would Monday to Thursday is no mean feat, but is the simplest solution to combating the enticing elements of the weekend.

Stop thinking of the weekend as something ‘special’. Routines help you during the week, so there should be no exception when you’re at home for most of the day during the weekend.

2. Bump Up The Week, Bring Down The Weekend

Saving calories for the weekend can work.

For most people, however, the ‘restriction/over-eating’ cycle is akin to asking your partner if you can have your latest argument via email; a recipe for disaster.

Being ‘good’ during the week, only to let your foot off the gas at the weekend, as we’ve seen, can lead to a flurry of gorging on calorific, unwarranted foods.

As Josh Hillis say: ‘A ‘cheat day’ is simply a free-for-all consolation prize for white-knuckling your rigid diet rules all week’.

Most people’s weeks look this like:

They should, however, look like this:

By breaking free from the rust-covered shackles of the week, and simply circumventing the restrictive nature of Monday to Thursday, you won’t be as inclined to ‘make up for it’ during the weekend.

This isn’t, of course, a free pass to eat whatever you want from Monday to Thursday. But by avoiding restricting harder and harder each weekday, and making it up for it at the weekend, you’ll be less likely to be stuck in the vicious cycle of under and over-eating throughout the seven days of your week.

Simply ‘bump up’ your calories during the week, and ‘bring down’ the calories you have during the weekend.

Offsetting the two parts of the week against each other will enable you to stay more consistent throughout the week and not feel the need to ‘cheat’ on the weekend.

3. Use Implementation Intentions

It’s always someone’s bloody birthday. Or retirement, wedding, christening, promotion, baby shower, bar mitzvah, screw-it-I’m-upset-let’s-buy-fifty-cookies-for-the-office-day, for that matter.

Life seems to be one never ending series of celebrations. And they always seem to fall on the weekend.

‘Today is a special day after all’ you say to yourself, as you scoff down another helping of – free – banoffee pie.

But you see the ‘today is a special day’ approach to selecting your indulgent moments provides you with far too much ambiguity.

Given the frequent nature of these occasions it also often leads to unnecessary and all too familiar blowouts; even if you convince yourself it’s ‘just this once’.

It’s about avoiding automatically associating celebrations or these ‘special days’ with indulgence.

The solution, therefore, is to use something called ‘implementation intentions’.

Implementation intentions allow you to specify a behaviour you intend to take when a specific situation arises. For example, telling yourself:

– ‘If I’m at someone’s birthday and there is cake on offer, I’ll eat half and put the rest away. I won’t have and don’t need anything else’.

– ‘If I’m at a wedding, I’ll only allow myself one glass of wine’.

– ‘If someone brings biscuits round when they visit me on the weekend I won’t have any; I don’t really like biscuits and don’t actually need them’.

Implementation intentions allow you to plan ahead of time with a specific action you’re going to take in order to achieve your goals.

The ‘if-then’ strategy provides you with a clear plan for overcoming obstacles which means you’ll be less likely to be swept away by the temptations of life.

The environment becomes a cue for your behaviour; not your motivation there and then.

4. Follow IIFYM

While there’s no definitive ‘way of eating’ when it comes to fat loss, following the principle of ‘If It Fits Your Macros’ can work wonders if executed correctly at the weekends.

IIFYM – fitting foods that you want to eat into your calorie and macronutrient targets – will permit you a certain degree of flexibility throughout those three treacherous days.

If you’re going out for dinner, or want to have a chocolate bar, and you can still fit those foods into your calorie and macro budget, then not only will this enable you to enjoy what you’re eating, but also ensure you’re still in the coveted calorie deficit required for fat loss.

The main trick is to plan ahead.

If you know you’re going out for a meal then there’s no point in getting to the end of the meal, entering what you just had, and thinking, ‘damn, I totally went over on my calories’.

Pre-enter what you’re going to have and try to fit all your foods into your food diary like a jigsaw puzzle.

If, for example, you’re going out for pizza, which takes up 40% of your calorie budget, you’re going to have to probably reduce the amount you eat for the rest of the day.

This means you can still have the pizza and keep progressing.

While IIFYM isn’t the holy grail of fat loss, utilising this smart way of tracking your food can be hugely beneficial when trying to traverse the rocky roads of the weekend.

5. Prepare Your Meals Ahead Of Time

While preparing meals and placing them in ceiling high towers of tupperware seems like a tradition only elite level bodybuilders indulge in, the concept of preparing food ahead of time is a habit everyone should master.

The more easily accessible and convenient your food is, the easier it is to stick to your fat loss diet.

If it gets to lunchtime on Saturday and the only thing you can be bothered to do is traipse down to the local Subway to pick up a Chicken & Bacon Ranch Melt in a 9-Grain Honey Oat sandwich, chances are you’re probably going to tip your calories over for the weekend.

If, however, you’ve already got a pre-prepared lunch waiting in the fridge for you, the less thinking, and making, you’ll have to do in order to eat well.

While you certainly don’t have to fill your kitchen with mounds of tupperware boxes, getting into the habit of cooking and preparing your meals for the weekend will ensure you won’t end up eating foods that’ll hinder you chances of progressing.

6. Stop Aiming For The Perfect Weekend

You want to do well. So when you ‘don’t do well’, you end up not doing it at all.

When you somehow end up with a chocolate bar in your mouth, even when you swore you wouldn’t, you instantly think you’ve failed and carry on to consume nine more chocolate bars.

Unfortunately, no one is going to experience the perfect weekend. Even the people who manage to post those remarkable transformation photos on Instagram.

The ones that are most successful, and can combat their weekend demons, are the ones that have practiced becoming comfortable with their imperfections.

So, when that chocolate bar does somehow make its way into your mouth, the answer isn’t to then gorge on another nine, because ‘what the hell, you’ve ruined everything’.

The answer is to shrug your shoulders, feel satisfied that you enjoyed the chocolate bar, accept that it happened, and move on.

As soon as you take ‘being perfect’ off your mind, things change. You feel empowered because there are now other options.

In order to get your head round attempting to have the perfect weekend, the answer is to practice being conscientious.

If you are conscientious, when you mess up it has no effect on you continuing what you said you were going to do.

If you diligently work on your nutritional habits for six days of the week, experience some form of mistake on Saturday night, but then diligently work on your nutritional habits on Sunday, you are being conscientious.

The only game you are playing is to keep your word for the following day.

That is the definition of people who accept they’re not going to have the perfect weekend, yet still make progress.

7. Stick To A Meal Plan

‘But meal plans are so restrictive!’ I hear you cry. And yes, most of the time, they are.

Telling yourself to ‘just drink a little less’ or ‘don’t have all the chips for dinner’ just isn’t going to cut it at the weekends I’m afraid. ‘I’ll have just have one beer tonight’ quickly becomes six beers, a kebab, and a toilet bowl full of sick.

Providing yourself with a bit more structure throughout the weekend, whether that be what to eat, or when to eat, will ensure you have something to ‘stick to’.

You don’t have to adhere to a specific meal plan every weekend, but if you tell yourself you’re going to only have X, Y, and Z, throughout this particular weekend, more likely than not you’ll stick to it.

If you’re invited out for lunch but know you’ve got to have your cod with cucumber, avocado and mango salsa salad, as per your meal plan, you’re more likely to avoid choosing the calorific option at lunch, and instead stick to your pre-designed meal plan.

Having a plan in place sometimes isn’t the end of the world.

If anything, it can work wonders for your adherence when the usual routine is out the window.

This Article Was Too Long And I Didn’t Read It – Can You Summarise It Please

The weekends suck.

The lure of tasty snacks, calorific meals out, and glasses of wine at random times throughout the day, can tip you over your calorie budget for the week before you know it.

ignoring your regular behaviours and treating Friday night to Sunday evening as their own separate entity is a recipe for disaster.

Your body doesn’t know the difference between a Monday, Thursday, or Saturday night out with the girls. All it really cares about is its energy requirements.

The solution is:

Stick To Your Usual Routine – Treating Friday to Sunday as you would Monday to Thursday is no mean feat, but is the simplest solution to combating the enticing elements of the weekend.

Stop thinking of the weekend as something ‘special’. Routines help you during the week, so there should be no exception when you’re at home for most of the day during the weekend.

Bump Up The Week, Bring Down The Weekend – Simply ‘bump up’ your calories during the week, and ‘bring down’ the calories you have during the weekend.

Offsetting the two parts of the week against each other will enable you to stay more consistent throughout the week and not feel the need to ‘cheat’ on the weekend.

Use Implementation Intentions – Implementation intentions allow you to specify a behaviour you intend to take when a specific situation arises.

The ‘if-then’ strategy provides you with a clear plan for overcoming obstacles which means you’ll be less likely to be swept away by the temptations of life.

Follow IIFYM – Fitting foods that you want to eat into your calorie and macronutrient targets will permit you a certain degree of flexibility throughout those three treacherous days.

If you’re going out for dinner, or want to have a piece of chocolate, and you can still fit those foods into your calorie and macro budget, then not only will this enable you to enjoy what you’re eating, but also ensure you’re still in the coveted calorie deficit required for fat loss.

Prepare Your Meals Ahead Of Time – The more easily accessible and convenient your food is, the easier it is to stick to your fat loss diet.

Stop Aiming For The Perfect Weekend – The ones that are most successful, and can combat their weekend demons, are the ones that have practiced becoming comfortable with their imperfections.