Don’t Sabotage Your Weekend
After a week of planning your meals, eating healthy, avoiding junk food and getting out to exercise, it is a shame to sabotage all your consistent hard work by allowing yourself to be vulnerable on the weekends with no plan. This is a challenge for many who are losing weight and building up a healthy lifestyle. After a week of structure and steady hard work, it is easy to fall off track on the weekends if you are not prepared for it the way you were for your week. For me, if I don’t plan a head of time, I usually start slipping around Friday evenings.
I then redeem myself with a workout on Saturday morning but then feel all virtuous after that and lose focus again with extra food and nuzzling my butt into the couch and it’s all downhill from there until Monday morning. I just got so tired of feeling like every Monday morning I was starting over.. telling myself this time I am going to do it.. only to lose focus again by Friday evenings.
It can be very easy to let ourselves off the hook over the weekend with a more relaxed attitude to what we eat and drink. You may have a party, a cinema evening, a night out in the pub or a meal in a restaurant or just simply sitting on the couch watching TV. We will always find a reason why it’s easier to veer off plan and overindulge than continue on with our healthy lifestyle campaign over the weekend.
Tips to Avoid Weekend Sabotage:
- Limit time on your couch! It is very tempting to catch up on shows you may have missed during the week but lounging on the couch can lead to overeating so integrate more activities into your weekend that don’t involve food but do involve you moving your body
- Don’t allow yourself to get too ravenously hungry if you can help it. Have your breakfast when you get up and plan your meals accordingly, just like during the week. When you allow yourself too many hours between meals, you end up famished feeling like you can reach for anything and everything to eat, resulting in a sabotage weekend all over again.
- If you are going out for a meal in the evening you can plan well by cutting back on your calories for breakfast and lunch a little while still ensuring the meals are filling and nutritious at the same time. Don’t starve yourself or save too many calories as you don’t want to turn up to the restaurant or venue absolutely ravenous. Go online beforehand too and check out the menu to you can plan ahead of time exactly what you will be eating. This will ensure you don’t get tempted by the great smells in a restaurant and/or impulse ordering.
- Time your evening snacks well. If I have my tea at around 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening and I’m still up late that night, I’ll hear my stomach growling at me and my blood sugar levels will dip, encouraging me to go on the prowl into the kitchen for a few tasty calorie-laden morsels. To offset this scenario I need to save some calories for a filling snack for late on Saturday night when the munchies attack, instead of giving in to merciless low blood-sugar cravings and regretting it in the morning.
- Continue to use a food journey to track your foods on the weekend too. We are usually really good about doing
this during the week and forget about the weekends. Committing to using the food journal will help against self-sabotage. - When your routine and structure is more relaxed at the weekend or just simply different, it can be easy to neglect drinking enough water. During the week it can be easier when you are in a routine and can have your bottle of water on your desk at work or on the counter at home but when you are on the go at the weekend this discipline can slip so remember to continue to lash the water in over the weekend.
- Plan your weekly menu over the weekend and batch cook for the week ahead if you can. I used to do this on a Saturday morning and it gave my mindset a great motivational lift. Coming home with the weekly shop at the weekend and spending time preparing and freezing meals for the coming week kept me in control of myself and inspired me to keep going strong. I felt fully prepared and encouraged for the coming days.
- If you go off plan, don’t beat yourself up and don’t wait until Monday to pull yourself back on track. Dust yourself off, draw a line under it and regain your focus and determination to succeed by the next meal of the day. Don’t look back or self-flagellate for slipping up. Allowing your inner critic to torment you with taunts of how useless you are at sticking to your plan over the weekend and continuing with the unhealthy eating until Monday can often carry on a few days into the following week also, allowing the negative impact to spiral and it will. So take control of your journey and be proactive!!!!
- Protect your weight loss. Protect your progress made from Monday to Friday by taking control and maintaining your stamina for the weekend. Remember your goals and remember WHY you want to live a healthier life. Be kind to yourself when you trip up. You won’t always get it right. Remember that learning and living new habits take time and take making mistakes. One day at a time. One meal at a time. One step at a time.
YOU GOT THIS!
