When was the last time you’d a big pig out? Like a serious binge where you just stuffed your face with chocolate, crisps, pints, gin, jellies and fast food, and didn’t even bother to try and hide it. You just let the wrappers pile up on a table in front of your like a little shrine to nestle and deliveroo??
It happens more often than most want to admit. It seems that primordial drive to slaughter calories when the opportunity presents itself is too strong to resist.
But the biggest mistake you can make, in my opinion, is just burying your head in the sand and acting like it didn’t happen. It can be VERY uncomfortable actually sitting down to figure out how many calories you just consumed, because normally, if you can’t even stand to calculate it, it’s very very high.
So when Padraig checked in with this on week 2 of his online coaching program with us, I was DELIGHTED:
“had a binge on choc on Tuesday. logged EVERYTHING tho. usually, i’d drop the head and tell myself i’m useless but the accountability of this made me think. i really dont want to get my bodyfat done in a few weeks and for it to be the same or worse.”
The day ended up at 4,190 kcals. Which was a fair bit above his daily target of 2,600. But you know what was mad? His weekly calories evened out to 2,560 – almost EXACTLY what we wanted.
What happened?
He could see that Tuesday set him into the red zone (we colour code calorie zones on our check ins to make it really easy to see whether you’re up or down of target) and then adjusted the rest of the days to get back to where he needs to be.
The result? After 14 days in, he started at 109.6kg and was already down to 106.3kg – a drop of 3.3kg.
The next Tuesday a similar thing happened again – 3,800kcals consumed instead of the 2,500 we were targetting. But again, he adjusted and got back on track. Even saying;
“everything going great. delighted. i genuinely feel like its easy.”
By the end of week 3 he was weighing in at 104.9kg for a total drop of 4.7kg off our first 3 weeks of training. Which ain’t half bad!!
But what’s my point? That you can have big fuck off binge and still lose weight?
Well… eh… yes. That IS exactly my point.
There’s nothing wrong with going overboard every now and again once you keep track of it and adjust the week to account. In both instances even tho Padraig had a day far in excess of what we’d like to see, taken across a week it had a negligible impact.
And even if it DID lead to calories being up a bit, who cares if the weight’s still going down?
You can absolutely eat crap and still lose weight. You just have to eat a lot of good stuff too to make up for it 😀 😀 😀