For some people it isn’t too hard to eat well during the week so long as they know things will get easier on the weekends.
It’s as if the permission to let go later makes it mentally easier to tighten up your diet now.
The same thing happens in reverse at times. You want to let go and just eat what you want for a night or a weekend. So you plan to start dieting tomorrow or Monday.
Once again, the promise to be strict later removes the guilt of letting go right now.
We obviously don’t want to be in these cycles, nor do we want weekends to be the times when we lose any progress we make during the week.
That said, we do want to be able to enjoy ourselves on the weekend. So what do you do?
The first thing you need to remember is that it doesn’t matter what day it is. Whether it’s the weekend, weekday, vacation, birthday, or travel day – your approach remains the same.
This doesn’t mean your behaviors or your food choices will look identical in all these situations. It just means the core framework for your eating is unchanged.
Break up your eating outcomes into two parts – your operating system and your behaviors.
Your operating system is the constant. This is your relationship with food. It’s how you think about your choices. It’s how you decide what to eat or how much.
Your behaviors are what flow out of that operating system. Your operating system is mixed with the environment you’re in, and you get a unique behavior.
So when I say you should be consistent on the weekends, just as you are during the week, what I’m really saying is that while your behaviors and food choices might be different, they are just natural side effects of the unique situation you’re in and the operating system (identity / relationship with food) you’ve already created.
When you have a healthy relationship with food, you choose foods that satiate, satisfy, and nourish you, and you have full permission to eat what you want, when you want, and in whatever quantities you want.
The food choices that flow out of this are different for everyone and different in every situation – weekends included.
The times in my life when I most struggled with weekend eating had nothing to do with the weekends. That was just a symptom.
The more I tried to isolate and fix my weekends, the more I got stuck in that weekday/weekend cycle.
Until you fix the bug in your operating system and focus on healing your relationship with food, the weekends, and most likely many other situations, will always be a struggle.
Heal your relationship with food and your weekends will FEEL no different than any other day, even if they LOOK different.
But this time you’ll be gravitating towards your Ideal Body.
Talk soon…