If all it takes is one slip up for your diet to fail, you’re not dieting, you’re starving yourself.
Don’t you basically have to starve yourself if you want to lose weight? Calories in and calories out. If you just meant a stable nutritional diet then I agree.
There’s a lot of scam diets where they have you starving yourself so that you ultimately end up failing, putting on even more weight, feeling terrible, then buying another book/course/whatever. LPT: If it came from something you had to pay for and not your doctor, it’s a scam.
Thats how I did it when i weknt from 102kg to 75. I cut out most easily replacable sugar (in coffees and fruit juice), and fasted 1 day a week and 1 meal a day. Beyond that, I ate whatever I wanted. Sometimes i would fast for 3 days in a row, but that was more for my own interest than anything. Once I did 6 days in a row, but I dont recommend that, it took ages for my bowels to go back to normal.
But this only worked for be because I like fasting. I like feeling hungry and empty. I like forcing myself to slow down to avoid energy crashes. It also frees up a lot of time that id otherwise spend shopping, cooking, eating, and cleaning up.
This is why I do CICO. Let’s me adjust what I eat based off what I’m feeling that day… and it’s nice because ultimately it’s about eating at a deficit over a week, in my case at least… since I’m targeting 1.5 lbs/week it’s just about being at a deficit overall… so if I have a rough day I can theoretically “make up for it” throughout the rest of the week.
Of course I still need to exercise control and not just eat whatever whenever… but I love the flexibility and it’s allowed me to stay on track for 50 lbs over 6 months…
Yeah, I’m technically also doing CICO, I’ve just added a grams of protein target too, which is really more of a guideline much like the pirate’s code.
But when it’s 6PM and I’ve hit 60-70% of my calories already, and I’ve spent the day bashing my head against an immovable object, that leftover pint of ice cream that will leave me feeling full for all of 30 seconds sure does look like a great use of my last few calories and then some. 😅
I kind of accidentally started intermittent fasting. Never ate much breakfast, got really busy for a while. I ended up eating one big meal late afternoon. My kids eat early, and after cooking and the late meal I’m just not hungry. Now I can’t even eat a big meal (usually). 30 lbs down and most of the time it hasn’t felt like a sacrifice at all. I eat whatever I want for about 4 hours.
Fuck it man, indulge, it’s not the end of the world ya know?
You’re too tired to brush your teeth before bed one night you don’t stop brushing your teeth forever.
It’s okay to mess up, just get back on track the next day. It’s not all or nothing, it’s not a short-term fad die, it’s a lifestyle change, for life.
If your CICO was a line graph and yesterday was normal, today was a big spike, and tomorrow was normal, none of that shit matters when you look at the line over the length of a year of good habits.
You won’t even be able to see this one-off, single-day spike, blip, what have you. It’s a drop of water in the middle of the ocean.
Let yourself make mistakes, just acknowledge it was not the norm, and learn from it. If you bastardize failure you’re setting yourself up to fail harder due to unrealistic expectations, unsustainability, etc.
So I say fuck it. Blow your CICO up today. Just do right by yourself for the rest of the week.
Yeah, this is what I’m trying to get better at. Same with hitting lower than my PR one day at the gym. Fortunately I can graph all of the above thanks to a few apps I like and it’s easy to see that history is full of misses while the trend is still overwhelmingly upward. Gotta remind myself better of that kind of thing everywhere in life.
Thanks for the reminder! 💪
Out of curiosity, and don’t feel obligated to answer, what is your daily schedule like? I work 48-60 hour weeks (12 hr shifts, 4-5 days a week) and I have a hard time working up the motivation to exercise. Even things I enjoy like riding my bike or swimming. I just can’t wrap my head around how people feel like exercising. It’s always a burden and as a result, I rarely do it. But I feel great afterwards and want to incorporate it in my routine but it just never happens
that’s your cheat day. all part of the plan. the moment you finish that meal, you’re back on track
