What to Do If You Blow Your Diet Plan and How to Get Back on Track
If you stay on your healthy eating plan long enough, it will happen to you – guaranteed! You’ll blow your diet plan.
The key is to not let that one event define you and to get right back on your healthy eating diet plan. It is like riding a bike; when you fell off of it the first time, what did you do? You got right back on and learn to ride! It is the same with a diet plan.
Most of the big holiday parties are past us now (for this year), but we still have birthday parties, anniversaries, weddings and vacations to endure during the rest of the year. To help you minimize the “damage” from overeating at one of these events, here are 6 ways to handle occasional overeating:
1) Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Your Diet Plan
You can’t “undo” what happened, so why dwell on it. Instead, focus your energy again on eating right. A one-time overeating binge may affect your weight loss for that week, but it doesn’t blow your whole dieting plan. If you do gain weight, a good portion of it will be water weight from the additional salt. It will flush out of your system in a couple of days.
2) Think of the Bigger Picture
Many dieters see their diet plan as a daily thing when in fact researchers have found that we typically tend to eat more on the weekends. So if you overate on a weekday, count that as one of your weekend days when you usually eat more calories anyway. Just be sure to make one of your weekend days a regular weekday instead.
3) Eat a Healthy Breakfast on Your Diet Plan
I know, the last thing you want to do when you feel bad about overeating the day before is to eat again now. But eating within 30 minutes of getting out of bed sets the tone of your metabolism for the rest of the day. By eating a healthy breakfast you are burning calories right away.
4) Do An Extra Workout for a Mental Commitment to Your Diet Plan
Granted, one extra workout is not going to totally erase the extra calories you had yesterday; it will do more for your mental state than physical, but it helps you get back in the right frame of mind. A step aerobics class or a light strength training session burns off a few of those extra calories, but its real value is refocusing you toward your goal.
5) Go Back to Your Diet Plan
Get back on track. If you normally eat three light meals per day with a healthy snack in the morning and at night, continue that regimen. There is a common tendency to start skipping meals/snacks as a way to “compensate” for yesterday’s overeating. Don’t succumb to these feelings. What you were doing before was working, so stick to your eating and exercise plan.
One bad day is not life altering. Don’t make more out of it than it is – merely a hiccup in your overall plan.
6) Drink Plenty of Water on Your Diet Plan
Hydrating does a couple of things. First by drinking your 64 ounces of water throughout the day (optimally one ounce of water for every two pounds of body weight), it keeps you full so you have less tendency to overeat again. Second, it helps flush fat and toxins from your system.
Drinking the right amounts of water each day is probably the single most important thing you can do for both weight-loss and your overall health. Read “How to Make Water a More Enticing Beverage” if you’re one of those people who have a hard time getting enough water into your diet plan on a daily basis.
