My Count-Down to the Stage – Part 2 “Cheat Meals & Accountability”
So I’m now in my second week of comp prep and I’m feeling strong, focused and determined!
By far the biggest highlight of my week was my “cheat meal” – Once a week I am allowed to have one meal comprised of whatever I choose to eat – The theory behind the cheat or treat meal is two-fold:
- First off, it is important psychologically to allow yourself a treat once a week so that you still feel a little human and also so that you don’t go crazy from deprivation of certain foods and end up bingeing on the foods you are not supposed to be eating; and
- For your metabolism – the way this was explained to me is that by eating your 5 meals a day of very clean, and easily digestible food, your metabolism starts getting used to this and may start slowing down as it doesn’t have to work as hard. By eating a cheat meal once a week, you basically “spike” your metabolism as your body has to go into over-drive again to process this foreign food, setting you up for the following week….This only works if you have been SUPER strict all week…
Now if this makes you a little sceptical let me tell you my story from the weekend….I had thought long and hard and salivated in anticipation of when I would schedule my cheat meal and eventually I decided that Saturday night was as good a time as any….I decided to do a really high intensity Body Attack class on Saturday afternoon to burn as many calories as possible so I could really feel that I had well and truly earned this cheat meal….I burnt 750 calories in that class so my mission was accomplished!
Now usually by meal 2 I’m not really ready to eat again and it is a bit of a trial to shove more food into my mouth but I can honestly tell you that on Sunday I got busy mowing the lawn and was about 10 minutes over my scheduled meal time and I was STARVING! I even started to get that queasy feeling you get when you desperately need to eat and as soon as I ate I felt better. I have also definitely continued to process my meals way faster since that cheat meal and rather than dreading putting more food in my mouth as I usually do, I’m now watching the time for when I can eat again!! Isn’t the body an amazing machine???
Moving onto one of the other big discoveries of the week is that a fantastic way to keep you focused on your goal is to make yourself accountable for it….While many people have aspirations to generally lose weight or get fit, there is no consequence to them if they don’t succeed so their conviction and will-power often declines quite rapidly when temptation crosses their path….
As this goal is so big in terms of what I have to do and how strict I have to be, I had to find a way to make myself accountable to it….The ways I did this were:
- I entered and paid for the competition;
- I told people close to me;
- I put my goal on social media by blogging about it.
And if all of the above wasn’t enough, every time I feel any type of wavering, I remind myself that in less than 11 weeks I have to stand on a stage in front of hundreds of people in a tiny scrap of material!!!
If you are setting out on a weight-loss or health journey, start by setting yourself goals….(Check out my blog on how to set effective goals).
Once you have set your goal, find ways to make yourself accountable to it…It could be signing up for some event or competition, telling your friends and family or thinking of a really awesome reward you can have once that goal is accomplished….
And on that note, I will leave you so that I can go and boil some eggs, steam some sweet potato and get some more broccoli into my stomach…
