Tête-à-Tête-Tête

I have had to fight the urge to engage in emotional binge eating due to the crucifixion of God’s Other Son but I am pretty much over that now.

This is some advice that you’ll hesitate to follow, but believe me when I tell you that it’s true and it’s advice that you’ll welcome. Plan a ‘cheat meal’ or a ‘cheat day’. If you’re wanting to binge on an entire large pizza topped off with a six-pack, go ahead. Throw in some cake & ice cream, too. No problem. Your body can handle it. Why? Because it’s starting to adapt to your strict regimine of low calories and so if you threw a large quantity of fat/carbs at it all at once, it’d temporarily be shocked into hyperdrive and burn at a higher rate & waste the rest. Buck, this is not a joke…I won’t even throw in a link & will let you find web-sites on your own just to remove the probability that I’m cherry picking data. Search on “fitness cheat day” or “free day” or throw in words like ‘diet’ & ‘bodybuilding’ and the like and you’ll get plenty of material. A lot of body-builders use cheat days to get them through the grinding diet phase. I generally use an entire cheat day, I call it a ‘free day’, & usually plan it on Saturdays. Thus, I can better prepare to go the rest of the week sticking to the ‘plan’ as long as I have that proverbial carrot awaiting my successful week come Saturday. If I’ve been ‘bad’, I’ll have a healthy breakfast & then start cheating in the afternoon, otherwise I pig out all day. I average just under a half-gallon of ice cream every Saturday. No joking.

And, there’s science to back up that entire piece of advice. Your body really does kick it into gear if you have a bunch of ‘junk’ after a prolonged period of dieting, just as it starts to shut down the metabolism should you start to ’starve’ yourself. As always, the body adapts. If it’s used to going on 1,800 calores per day and you suddenly throw 2,500 calories at it all at once, it’ll do a short-term shift into higher gear in order to process this alien encounter. The trick is to keep this a truly ‘rare event’. So, go ahead, engage in some good food. As “The Rock” said in an article in “Muscle & Fitness” (he uses the ‘cheat meal’ concept, as well), “treat yourself, don’t cheat yourself”. Mark your calendar for Friday night & if you’ve done well this week, take the misses out to a nice restaurant and gorge yourself in a nice fat-laden meal. You’ll enjoy it and you can use it as an incentive to do well for another week, plus your body won’t punish you for giving your taste buds the orgy that they’ve been craving.

Progress is progress. Daily weighing doesn’t make sense unless you are going to keep the results in a spreadsheet and apply a rolling average. Otherwise, maybe twice per week

Okay, everyone surprised that Mr. geek Ricky has a spreadsheet? And it goes back five years? Complete with graphs? And body fat measurements?
Yeah, that’s me.
Until recently, I weighed *daily*. Not because I was obsessed with weight, but I like to experiment and have all the data at my disposal, so I could gauge trends. So, after many hundreds of points of data, I know that my weight on Monday & Tuesday was generally the highest of the week (due to the cheat day on Saturday) & that TFriday or Saturday morning was pretty much my weekly low point. Also, and this is surprising, my body fat levels ROSE after a bout of cardio & it is LOWER after a heavy weight lifting session. Not sometimes, but every time. You’d think that burning some calories would give a better reading, but it’s the opposite. My best guess is that the blood vessels within the muscles are filled after a training session & thus the body fat meter (it’s electronic & sends a current through the body) distinguishes it as mass & not fat, while a cardio session causes the muscles to fatigue & shrink up afterwards, leaving the water/mass being measured as fat. I dunno, that’s just a guess, but my experimentation has shown me that if I want a lower BF reading, then I need to do a heavy workout with weights.

I stopped weighing so regularly because my goals for this year, aside from the legs/shoulders, don’t include me being at a certain weight. But, I can tell you with no amount of uncertainty that the body weight can fluctuate wildly over a period of time without the diet being the overriding factor. You can eat great for a while & not lose a thing & then eat some fried chicken with potatoes and a few days later drop a few pounds. As noted above in the ‘cheat day’ section, our metabolism is a wonder & I stopped trying to map out a strategy to lose X pounds over a certain period. Heck, I stopped trying to lose pounds a long time ago & have been on a slow gain for almost two years.

[note: I type all this after almost two weeks of unadulterated cheating on my diet. After my wife’s episode w/the diverticulitis & bacterial infection, nary a thing has been cooked in our house for going on 15 days. So, either tomorrow or Thursday, I go back to eating right. I think I told my wife “we’re going hard core on our eating plan”, since that’s about the only time I’ll ever get to use the words “hard” and “core” around her. Yep, two more days, at most. I’m gonna miss the beer.