Getting Back on Plan

Martha Gallagher wrote:
|| I had an off-plan day (intentionally) and I was thinking about
|| strategies that have made it possible for me to go back on plan
|| fairly easily.
||
|| These are things that have worked for me; your experience may be
|| different.
||
|| Set a limit for what the off-plan eating can consist of: limited to a
|| particular meal, a timeframe, whatever.

Good advice!

Once the limit is over, go
|| back on plan even if there are still brownies in the pan. Throwing
|| them out will not cause you to be personally responsible for world
|| hunger.

With me, there won't be brownies in the pan! They'll either be in me or in
the garbage 🙂

||
|| Go back to normal on-plan eating. Don't try to make up for what you
|| consumed by subsisting on water and a lettuce leaf for the next week.
|| You'll be hungry and more likely to decide to have "one more day" off
|| plan. For me, as long as the foods I'm eating are "legal" I'll let
|| myself have a little more latitute as far as portion size (e.g. all
|| the chicken and salad I can eat), but I stay away from the snack
|| type foods for a while.

Well, this is where we differ. I think in terms of calorie averaging. If I
have a high calorie day, especially one where I ate above maintenance, then
my body has more fuel than it needs that will like turn into fat. So, I try
to balance that will a low calorie day. If that low calorie day happens to
be a monday, I might fast for 36 hours. Or, if not, I'll just have a low
calorie day, using LC to control appetite and eating way less than normal.
Combine that will a little extra exercise, then one can easily compensate.
This, for me, helps be draw myself back in.

||
|| Exercise, by all means, but don't try to do a marathon training
|| session to burn it all off the next day. You probably can't walk
|| that far and it'll just make you less likely to stay with a moderate
|| exercise program that you can live with. Look at this in a lifetime
|| context.
||

Yeah, if you really go way overboard when you go off, you won't be able to
exercise it off. But you can "not eat" it off and use exercise to help.

|| You may want to stay off the scale for a few days while the water
|| weight sorts itself out if you're the sort who finds that
|| discouraging. But, if you otherwise weigh regularly don't develop an
|| avoidance relationship with your scale. Get back on in a day or two,
|| knowing that it may be up a bit but that the odds are that you
|| didn't really manage to consume 15 lbs worth of calories in 24
|| hours. It's water. It'll pass.

One thing is for sure, you won't gain more weight in fat than what the food
you ate weighs.

||
|| Don't look at this in moral terms. It's food. You ate something you
|| normally don't eat. How big a deal is that?
||

Right. Life goes on.