drtbear1967
Musclechemistry Board Certified Member
Screwed up your diet ? Here's a mental hack to get back on track quickly!
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It has happened to the best of us the first times we dieted, and it happens very frequently to beginners but also "advanced" dieters!
When it comes to losing fat, we know that creating a calorie deficit of around 3500 cals results in roughly 1lb of fat loss. This means that if we eat -500 calories, under maintenance, per day we would need a week of dieting to lose 1lb of fat.
So if we were able to do that indefinitely.. we would lose all the fat right ? Kind of, yeah, if we don't take into account any metabolic adaptation, that's how it would work in theory.
But what happens in more realistic outcomes is that people... screw it up! And it's totally fine.
It's just life, man. Whether it's because you don't felt like dieting or whether it's because you were offered something you couldn't resist saying no... screw ups happen, and "being perfect" is not what we're looking for.
What we need to get better at, is to quickly get back on track in order not to lose the progress made: this means being consistent, not perfect.
Something that "clicked in my mind" back in the days, when information wasn't so readily available and I used to screw up my diets too, was to understand that "if 3500 calories under maintenance" are needed to lose 1lb of fat, then "3500 calories OVER maintenance will result in roughly 1lb of fat".
For how obvious that may sound, you rarely over eat that much over your calories (unless there are other dieting related underlying problems, such as bingeing).
The point I'm trying to make is that, even if some days "you screw up" a little and eat a couple hundred calories extra, you're still good. it doesn't mean you lost all your progress.
Even if you went above your maintenance, you would need to eat +3500 calories *over it* to gain 1lb of fat, so a couple hundred calories, for one day, won't even be worth calculating.
But the scale says otherwise ? It doesn't matter what the scale says: even if it went up by a couple pounds the next day, following a higher calorie day, it's just water retention, at least most of it. Not gained fat.
️
It has happened to the best of us the first times we dieted, and it happens very frequently to beginners but also "advanced" dieters!
When it comes to losing fat, we know that creating a calorie deficit of around 3500 cals results in roughly 1lb of fat loss. This means that if we eat -500 calories, under maintenance, per day we would need a week of dieting to lose 1lb of fat.
So if we were able to do that indefinitely.. we would lose all the fat right ? Kind of, yeah, if we don't take into account any metabolic adaptation, that's how it would work in theory.
But what happens in more realistic outcomes is that people... screw it up! And it's totally fine.
It's just life, man. Whether it's because you don't felt like dieting or whether it's because you were offered something you couldn't resist saying no... screw ups happen, and "being perfect" is not what we're looking for.
What we need to get better at, is to quickly get back on track in order not to lose the progress made: this means being consistent, not perfect.
Something that "clicked in my mind" back in the days, when information wasn't so readily available and I used to screw up my diets too, was to understand that "if 3500 calories under maintenance" are needed to lose 1lb of fat, then "3500 calories OVER maintenance will result in roughly 1lb of fat".
For how obvious that may sound, you rarely over eat that much over your calories (unless there are other dieting related underlying problems, such as bingeing).
The point I'm trying to make is that, even if some days "you screw up" a little and eat a couple hundred calories extra, you're still good. it doesn't mean you lost all your progress.
Even if you went above your maintenance, you would need to eat +3500 calories *over it* to gain 1lb of fat, so a couple hundred calories, for one day, won't even be worth calculating.
But the scale says otherwise ? It doesn't matter what the scale says: even if it went up by a couple pounds the next day, following a higher calorie day, it's just water retention, at least most of it. Not gained fat.
