How To Turn A Bad Day On Your Diet Into Weight Loss Success

You had a bad day and messed up your diet? Your slip-up could be the ticket for more amazing weight loss!

You Know How It Goes…

A couple of weeks back you started eating right, did some exercise and saw the first couple of pounds disappear.

Great, wasn’t it?

Then that fateful weekend night came along that drained your self-control, had you start on a couple of chips and evolved into a 4,423 calorie eating mayhem.

Next day you set your fearful feet on the scale, and, as the horrified you expected, the number jumped by a devastating 5 pounds – the exact number of pounds you had lost.

“One night,” you mumble to yourself, “just one night, and all is for nothing? Then I can as well go and eat the food I enjoy!” That thinking turns into the end of your diet and of all hope you had of ever being a healthier, fitter you.

Your New Extra Weight In Perspective

But what if I told you the 5 lbs of weight you gained didn’t really matter?

When you step on your scale its limited capabilities only show you the sum total of your weight: fat, water, bones, skin, organs, hair, muscle etc.

This is how you feel at the moment, right?

The scale jumped by 5 lbs because you ate salty foods and salt has your body store water. Which is what more than 50% of our bodies consist of. To gain 5 lbs of fat within a day, you’d have to eat 17,500 kcal.

Some Math Explains It

Let’s say you weigh 190 lbs (89 kg). To keep your weight at that level, you need to eat about 2,800 kcal per day.

To gain 1 lb of fat, you need an extra 3,500 kcal on top of those 2,800. Because 3,500 kcal is the number of calories in one pound of body fat.

But you ate 4,423, and from those we have to subtract the 2,800 needed for maintenance. That gives us an extra of 1,623.  That is about half a pound of fat. You can lose it within one or two days back on your diet.

Analyze Why The Slip-Up Happened

Instead of getting hung up on the moment you stepped on the scale that sent you on that downward spiral of negativity, go back a step further. To the moment when you ate all that stuff.

Why did you do it? And don’t give me all the self-deprecating stuff about how weak-willed and what a failure you are!

I think your body craved a day of reprieve from the constant stress a diet is. That it needed some reassurance that it hadn’t been transferred to a starving post-apocalyptic world where giant mutant bunnies will hunt it through the wasteland.

When I lost weight I regularly planned for days such as the one you just experienced. Through the math above I knew it would set me back only a couple of days. I also knew it would help me see the light at the end of the parade of plates filled with less food than I cared for.

Plan And Carry On!

The only difference between you and me is that I had planned for those days and yours happened unexpectedly. Treat is as the break you needed, plan for those days like I did, and you have a great chance of going through with your weight loss!

Pictures courtesy of “davidd” and Dan Perry.