How to STOP Sabotaging Your Weekends

Does this sound familiar?

You eat clean all week long then the weekend hits and you find yourself unable to resist the temptations.  You have good intentions for Friday night pizza night and order a veggie pizza with a salad.  BUT you find yourself unable to stop at one piece, end up having 1/2 the pizza and two beers.  Saturday starts with brunch and you aim to be "good" but the bottomless mimosas call to you and after a few you end up eating more food than you anticipated.  The pattern continues through the weekend and come Monday, you're feeling regretful but tell yourself you're going to do better this week.

Sound like something you've experienced?  You're not alone!  This pattern of "good" eating during the week, almost always leads to binging on the weekend.

So how do we break this pattern?  First things first, there is NOTHING wrong with you.  This is a pattern than many people struggle with and can be broken by focusing on a few things. 

1 - STOP restricting!  If you’re following a diet that tells you to cut out a food group or to skimp on eating things you love, find a new diet!  If you’re telling yourself you can’t have pizza on Thursday or wine on Wednesday, STOP telling yourself you can’t have that! All l you need to do is learn to enjoy those foods in balance with the healthy foods that are going to benefit your body the most.

This is why I love macro tracking.  It enables you to eat ALL THE FOODS just in a balance that works for you. I teach my clients to log their daily food intake so they can see exactly where their calories are coming from. We then work to enjoy foods in moderation by making them fit into our daily macros. Learning to do this through tracking, helps you to do so intuitively in the future.

So what might this look like?  It looks like focusing the majority of your day on 80% clean, healthy, whole foods, and 20% of your day on other “fun” foods.  For me this might mean I eat macro balanced, whole foods based meals during the day then enjoy a glass of wine in the evening by factoring it in as a carb or fat. Or maybe I want to have some frozen yogurt on a Tuesday after school so skip the tortilla with dinner for taco Tuesday and have a taco salad. Maybe this looks like a piece of dark chocolate after dinner to end the evening or a cup of protein hot chocolate. Focusing on a balanced approach to nutrition rather than a restrictive approach will help you to stay more balanced over the weekends.

2 - Control the controllable's. This is something I work with my clients on all the time.
You can’t always be in control of your food and beverages. You’re going to have dinners, events, parties, and things that come up. You’re going to spend days at the soccer field or at weekend away at dance competitions. It’s just not possible to control every situation. What you can do, is focus on what you can control when you’re able to. When you’re on the go you focus on packing healthy food options that will keep you full and satiated so you’re not hitting up fast food restaurants or diving into your kids bag of chips. When you're at home your weighing or measuring your food intake so you know your macros are pretty spot on.   When you're heading out to dinner you're looking at the menu ahead of time so that you have an idea for something you can order that will fit your macros or make you feel good.  

You’re taking charge of what you can control when you can control your food intake, so that when you’re not able to it’s not a big deal.   The idea here isn't to restrict it's to focus on what you can control in terms of food intake. 

When things don't go as planned, that's okay!  Knowing that you did the best you could is what's important.  

Give these two tips a try to help you ditch that weekend self sabotage!  As always, if you need help don't hesitate to reach out!