08: How to stay on track over the weekends
Most people find that sticking to your fitness plan is fairly easy during the week however, weekends everything tends to fall apart. Generally, the structure of a workday lends itself well to the structure of a balanced eating and exercise routine. If you find most of your hard work being undone on your days off, then you are not alone and help is at hand. With a little planning you can have both a relaxing and productive weekend. Here are the main pit-falls you need to account for
- Sleeping In. While it is great to catch up on sleep, the general pattern is you sleep in, miss a meal or two, then try to fit your regular calories in to a smaller time window than usual. This is easy to fix. Set your usual alarm at your usual waking time, have a protein shake beside your bed pre-made, drink it then go back to sleep for some extra slumber. Simply take out 1 snack during the day and your macros and metabolism will be fine.
- Tasty Food. Sometimes 1 cheat meal at the end of a particularly stressful week doesn’t seem to be enough. Instead of turning a cheat meal into a cheat weekend, how about planning some nutritious and satisfying meals into your weekend eating plan. Good choices include
- Home-made burgers
- Home-made Pizza
- Protein Banana bread
- Steak with mushroom sauce plus oven baked sweet potato fries.
Calorie controlled portions of this type of food should be in your nutrition plan anyway
- Exercise. Skipping exercise for some people is common on weekends, particularly when you have a slow start to the day with sleeping in. One good way to get around this is to tee up a gym session or bush walk with a friend. By committing to catching up with a buddy you not only get your metabolism fired up but you also get some of your socialising needs in too.
- Honesty. At some point you have to be honest with yourself and ask the question “what do I really value?”. If you honestly value the taste of a doughnut more than fitting into your jeans or seeing those Abs then that’s just the way it is. Don’t beat yourself up over it, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Just realise that you can’t head towards Leansville while the biggest part of you wants to go to Cake town.
If you aren’t aiming for a national tittle then your weekends don’t have to be 100% perfect. The key point for most people over the weekend is to just tread water, don’t go backwards. If you happen to nail it and continue burning fat over the weekend then that’s ok too.