Does One Bad Day Ruin Your Entire Weight Loss Diet?
It happens to the best of us during weight loss: a day of weakness, where calories and all the foods you avoided take their revenge with a vengeance. Does that mean that all your dieting was for nothing?
A Moment Of Weakness
So for four weeks you religiously followed your diet, counted calories, ate salads, learned to like low-fat yoghurt and embrace the fun that is found in a raw carrot.
Then it happens. You start fantasizing about chocolate cakes, nachos, pizzas with double cheese, creamy milkshakes and everything else you strictly avoided. The first direct confrontation with any of these and you just can’t say no anymore. And after having that shake at lunch, it becomes easier to go all out and indulge yourself fully.
Usually that lasts until the evening, when after the last bite you feel really, really guilty. You are so full, it seems that in the course of one day you made up for every morsel you avoided over an entire month.
Is it really that bad? No, and I’ll show you through a simple calculation.
The Math
Let’s say to maintain your weight, you need 2,600 kcal / day, but during your diet ate 1,800 / day. This is a daily deficit of 800 kcal and if you did it for one month (800 x 30) that’s 24,000 kcal, equaling a loss of almost 7 lbs (because losing 1 lb of body weight requires a deficit of about 3,500 kcal).
To give you an idea how much food you already said no to at that point, here are 24,000 kcal measured in food:
- 41 Big Macs
- 8 14″ pepperoni pizzas
- 240 brownies
- 20 gallons of Coca-Cola
- 81 Snickers bars
- 75 cream-filled donuts
- 7 gallons of chocolate milkshake
Alright, on that bad day it does feel like you ate that much, doesn’t it? So let’s say you really and totally pigged all out. I let my imagination run wild:
- 4 cream donuts for breakfast (1,280 kcal)
- a large pepperoni pizza and large Coke for lunch (3,350 kcal)
- 2 Snickers bars as afternoon snack (592 kcal)
- 3 Big Macs and a large chocolate shake for dinner (2,310 kcal)
- 8 brownies as dessert (800 kcal)
This, mind you, is an amount most people won’t manage even if they tried to get as much food down as they could.
Yet even if your day of sin really looked like this, you “only” managed to eat 8,332 kcal. From these you still have to subtract the 2,600 needed to keep your weight steady, leaving an excess of 5,732. Only seven days of your diet were turned to nothing.
Forgive Yourself A Day Of Weakness
The moral of the story is: it is really hard to outeat your diet through one single day of weakness. The worst you could do is take it as a reason to end your diet. That will certainly keep you fat. Instead see it as what you needed to carry on and keep losing weight.
I, in fact, encourage people to plan regular cheat days in my weight loss advice. Because they allowed me to keep my sanity when I lost weight and helped me see the end of the road.
Picture courtesy of Ryan Hyde.
7 Comments
Cool illustration!
I have bad days for 2 days each month, and I still get results. Just not as fast as if I was always good.
We have to give ourselves some slack. Eating super clean 90% of the time is enough! 🙂
Yep, exactly! It’s better to go a bit slower than not to get there at all.
No, but I know someone who worked her butt off to get fitter and then “one bad cruise on Carnival lines” with her mother for five days of a feeding frenzy and she went on to gain it all back and more and NEVER has been able to lose the weight again.
Then the problem may be different. I failed on my first attempt as well and then took stock how I could make it work for me.
That imaginary day of indulgence is crazy – 3 Big Macs?!
I’m with you – a bad day of eating is no different than a bad day of working out!!
The “worst” I ever managed was two Big Macs. But that was after a day of having eaten not very much 🙂
I think those days can actually sometimes be good for the metabolism if you don’t let it defeat you. Extra food can get things burning.