You start off Monday morning and work hard all week on watching what you eat, measure out your serving sizes, count your calories, and do your exercise.
You then get on the scale the following Monday and the scale hasn't moved. You get frustrated and think "Why am I not losing weight? I was good 90% of the time last week but had a little fun on the weekend. I should have seen some change on the scale."
Your problem might have been that "fun" you had on the weekend.
You can put yourself in a calorie deficit all week long but on the weekend you head out for dinner a couple of times, have a few drinks and snack on some "fun" food that you wouldn't normal eat Monday through Thursday.
Maybe you head to a Mexican restaurant, order your food, and then snack on the chips and salsa while you wait. Your meal comes, but you could have very easily chowed down 500 calories from those chips.
Then Sunday comes around and you have a big family dinner that includes snacks beforehand, followed by a nice main meal, some dessert after and some wine or other alcoholic beverages in between.
But in your mind, you're thinking "I was eating as planned during the week so all of this won't cause a problem." But the scale doesn't lie come Monday morning.
There's a recent article about how weekend calories can wreck your diet that talks about a study that pretty much confirms the scenarios above.
A couple of professors reviewed data from 600 men and women that tracked exactly what they ate over a period of two weeks (they were reviewing data collected from a marketing research survey).
What they found was,
...that people tended to eat more on weekends than they did during the week — particularly at breakfast, when they likely had more time to eat than on weekdays
Dietitian and exercise physiologist Kim Gorman, MS, RD, Weight Management Program director at the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado at Denver says it perfectly about the effects of these weekend calories:
"Many dieters feels as though they're dieting all the time but not losing weight, when, in fact, they're creating a calorie deficit Monday through Friday but filling it — and more — during the weekend,"
The weekends tend to not have the structure of routine that we have during the weekdays. I don't think that's a bad thing. We need frequent breaks from the normal day in and day out activities that we do. But that doesn't mean we should go off our regular healthy eating habits 100% of the time during the weekend.
The article gives some tips on ways to avoid weekend calories that cause a "two step forward, two step back" to your weight loss goals.
1. Wake up the same time on the weekends that you do on the weekdays. This one can be rather difficult to do, especially if you're up at 5:00 like I am every weekday morning. But if you can do it, go right ahead.
2. Eat Breakfast. But make sure it's not a bigger breakfast than what you're use to having during the week.
3. Weigh in Friday morning and then again Monday morning. This is a great tip and can really be an eye opener as to how much the weekend calories are causing you to be at a standstill. I've done this a number of times after a "bad" weekend and it definitely raises an eyebrow.
4. Keep a log. I find it difficult for people to keep a log as most people tend to fall off with tracking things pretty quickly and they tend to under report how much they actually eat.
5. Watch your alcohol intake. Alcohol can be a big factor on adding to the weekend calorie total due to how alcohol can shut down the natural fat burning mechanisms that we have.
6. Workout on the weekend. If you don't normally include a workout for yourself on the weekend, add a quick one in. Go on a longer walk with the dog than you normally do as well.
The simplest advice that I can give on this is to continue with your healthy choices of meats, fruits, veggies, and some nuts and oils during the weekend like you normally do, but just take one (and only one) meal on the weekend and use it as a cheat meal. Eat what you want but only for that one meal.
Taking and "cheating" for one meal during the weekend is going to go a lot longer in seeing fat loss results and avoiding the extra weekend calories than using all 9-12 meals during the weekend as a cheat meal.
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