Had an unplanned cheat day - how bad should I feel?

ConicalFern

So yesterday I had a complete 'cheat day' I started off the day ok, logging everything I ate (which was more than normal, but I was sticking to my calorie goal), but then there was tea and cakes and I probably ate about a third of a Victoria sponge cake and a few mini flap jack things. Then I went to a fancy dinner (no way I could count calories there) and ended up over indulging on all sorts of chocolates after dinner. Once I got home I ate a pack of starburst and a whole bag of percy pigs (615 kcal and 94g of sugar in the latter). So safe to say I went over my calorie goal for the day and probably had more sugar than I've had in the past 2 weeks. I haven't logged any of that as I was obviously way over and I don't really see the point.

Apart from today I've been pretty consistently under my calorie goal, on average 400 below my net calorie goal for each day, and I've been losing around 1kg a week.

So the question - how bad should I feel about this? I weighed myself this morning and I've gained a kg since yesterday - how much of that will I keep?

To make up for my behaviour yesterday I have burned 1995 calories* at the gym this morning and I'm planning on not eating into those calories at all, just keeping to my daily goal as though I hadn't done any exercise.

Is this an awful idea? It's quarter to 3 here and I've only had breakfast so far (294 kcal) and I've done all my exercise and I don't feel too bad. Will I crash later? Will I have just burnt muscle mass this morning? Should I eat lots of protein today so I actually benefit from my gym hell session?

*Calories from the gym:

49:03 (2150m) swimming front crawl - 428 calories
2:17:46 on an exercise bike - 1269 calories
35:57 treadmill, slow running at 15% incline - 298 calories

Determined by Garmin with a heart rate monitor for the latter two.

Yi5hedr3

Kick your own butt, and go forth and sin no more!

Cynsonya

My advice would be to shake it off and move on. Use it as a learning experience. But I personally would have logged every last ugly calorie.

TavistockToad

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

chambej7

I went over my goal yesterday too. I feel bad, but like you, I just gotta shake it off and do better tomorrow.
Keep on truckin!

ConicalFern

TavistockToad wrote: »

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

No real reason, just don't typically feel as though I need to reach the full goal, and I feel better if I am under.

I'm 73kg, 177cm, set as losing 0.5kg a week, so net goal is 1850. I am aware that I am within the healthy range of BMI but I still want to lose weight.

Jbell0213

I didn't have a good food day yesterday either. But today is a new day and a fresh start. Don't beat yourself up over it.

TavistockToad

ConicalFern wrote: »

TavistockToad wrote: »

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

No real reason, just don't typically feel as though I need to reach the full goal, and I feel better if I am under.

I'm 73kg, 177cm, set as losing 0.5kg a week, so net goal is 1850. I am aware that I am within the healthy range of BMI but I still want to lose weight.

So you're way under weekly goal, and your binge probably just put you back to a normal deficit, yet you felt the need to exercise off ALL the food at the gym?

ilex70

But I personally would have logged every last ugly calorie.

Agree with this. I would at least take an honest stab at it. Not as a punishment, but an eye opener, an act of honesty with yourself.

And feeling bad about it isn't really helpful unless that bad feeling motivates you to do better going forward.

So just log it, and move on.

Mezzie1024

I think you should feel bad about eating 400 calories below your net goal daily, especially since you're close to your goal. Eat more and you may not feel the need to overindulge as you did. An occasional day like you described isn't going to ruin anything, though I must say ending a day that sounded so delicious with Starbursts sounds like a letdown.

diannethegeek

I'm always careful not to set up any kind of binge/punishment cycle with my weight loss days. You're going to go over your calories sometimes. That's a part of living your life. It's important to learn from it and find balance between high days and low days. But there's a line between learning and beating yourself up, between balancing and punishing. And it sounds like you may be crossing that line at times.

Someone once told me that guilt is a worthless emotion, and boy I wanted to smack them at the time. But when it comes to weightloss, guilt can do far more damage than good. Shake off your bad days. Don't over restrict on your good days. And work on finding the balance without pushing yourself to an injury or any disordered eating patterns.

jeepinshawn

I would have done my best to log everything. Just the act of logging can slow me down enough to realize what I'm doing and stop me from over eating.
There is zero point in starving yourself today. You likely set yourself back a few days, no big deal. After all what's a few days in a lifetime long journey?

kshama2001

ConicalFern wrote: »

TavistockToad wrote: »

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

No real reason, just don't typically feel as though I need to reach the full goal, and I feel better if I am under.

I'm 73kg, 177cm, set as losing 0.5kg a week, so net goal is 1850. I am aware that I am within the healthy range of BMI but I still want to lose weight.

Apart from today I've been pretty consistently under my calorie goal, on average 400 below my net calorie goal for each day, and I've been losing around 1kg a week.

For those of us not on metric:

73 kg = 161 pounds
0.5 kg = 1.1 pounds
1.0 kg = 2.2 pounds
177 cm = 5'10"

@ConicalFern - not eating enough for your weight, height, and activity level can definitely trigger binges. You need to stop under-eating. You will lose lean muscle mass and possibly your hair as well.

diannethegeek

TavistockToad wrote: »

ConicalFern wrote: »

TavistockToad wrote: »

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

No real reason, just don't typically feel as though I need to reach the full goal, and I feel better if I am under.

I'm 73kg, 177cm, set as losing 0.5kg a week, so net goal is 1850. I am aware that I am within the healthy range of BMI but I still want to lose weight.

So you're way under weekly goal, and your binge probably just put you back to a normal deficit, yet you felt the need to exercise off ALL the food at the gym?

^Pay attention to this OP! Balance is important with weight loss and the way you're describing your routing doesn't sound very balanced. It sounds more like you're swinging between two extremes of way over or way under calories. Try to find that happy medium.

emmycantbemeeko

Agreed with "don't feel bad" but "do log it."

It sounds like you're treating food and exercise as a moral/ethical question, and if you're "bad" in your conception of it, then there's no point in even tracking how "bad" you are because bad is bad and you've already been "bad" so why not be extra, deliciously bad and expiate it with feeling terrible and punishing yourself with extreme exercise and restriction tomorrow?

Of course, weight loss/gain is *not* a moral issue, it's one of biology, chemistry, and physics, and going way under or way over your maintenance calories is going to have a more serious impact on your goals and health than going a little over or under. Treating it as a magic/spiritual issue, where you binge and restrict, and stop even thinking about the science of it once you've eaten past a certain point, will leave you feeling awful a lot of the time (whether from extreme deprivation and over-exercise, or from bingeing far more than you can comfortably eat and undoing unknown previous days' worth of self-punishment and then restricting even further the following day).

Track it. Even when you start to binge, track it. This way you know where you're really at, and can stop thinking of binges as "sins" to address emotionally rather than an imbalance in the nutrition plan that you have to address practically.

Realize that if you're having an urge to eat massive amounts of food even semi-frequently, it's a sign that what you're doing the *rest* of the time is leaving you unfulfilled in some way (in this case, probably just ravenously hungry plus tired of feeling deprived) and *is not working*.

Eating at a much more reasonable deficit that you can actually maintain, and allowing yourself to eat at maintenance when you're really hungry and not thinking of food and exercise and weight in such moralistic terms is better and more effective for weight loss than eating at a massive deficit 90% of the time and bingeing to the point you can't even count what you've consumed 10% of the time. Especially when you're already at a normal weight.

girlviernes

Right now you are eating too little, which sets you up for a binge. The excessive exercise will feed into that cycle. My best advice is for you to see an eating disorder specialist to nip this in the bud (much easier to get onto a healthy track early than once this gets entrenched). Reading a book such as Overcoming Overeating may help you a lot as well.

Although I agree generally about logging overeating, in your case I think most important is to increase the amount of food you eat on a daily basis and to limit exercise to 60 min at most

pinggolfer96

Sounds like a bad habit forming. A binge then burn as many calories the next day from it is not healthy. That's how I initially created a bad relationship with food. I would binge then fast or "exercise purge" as some would say and it was awful. Now if I overindulge I may not have the mindset of running it off, but more of kick a** in the gym the next day with all the energy(:

ConicalFern

Mezzie1024 wrote: »

I think you should feel bad about eating 400 calories below your net goal daily, especially since you're close to your goal. Eat more and you may not feel the need to overindulge as you did. An occasional day like you described isn't going to ruin anything, though I must say ending a day that sounded so delicious with Starbursts sounds like a letdown.

kshama2001 wrote: »

ConicalFern wrote: »

TavistockToad wrote: »

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

No real reason, just don't typically feel as though I need to reach the full goal, and I feel better if I am under.

I'm 73kg, 177cm, set as losing 0.5kg a week, so net goal is 1850. I am aware that I am within the healthy range of BMI but I still want to lose weight.

Apart from today I've been pretty consistently under my calorie goal, on average 400 below my net calorie goal for each day, and I've been losing around 1kg a week.

For those of us not on metric:

73 kg = 161 pounds
0.5 kg = 1.1 pounds
1.0 kg = 2.2 pounds
177 cm = 5'10"

@ConicalFern - not eating enough for your weight, height, and activity level can definitely trigger binges. You need to stop under-eating. You will lose lean muscle mass and possibly your hair as well.

girlviernes wrote: »

Right now you are eating too little, which sets you up for a binge. The excessive exercise will feed into that cycle. My best advice is for you to see an eating disorder specialist to nip this in the bud (much easier to get onto a healthy track early than once this gets entrenched). Reading a book such as Overcoming Overeating may help you a lot as well.

Although I agree generally about logging overeating, in your case I think most important is to increase the amount of food you eat on a daily basis and to limit exercise to 60 min at most

Thanks for all this guys. I think you're right - I've been seeing it as a competition with myself how much I can be under my calorie goal, which has inevitably meant that I've been going hungry, and certainly on some days without any good reason for doing so. This has meant that the desire to binge has been building up, without me really knowing. I will take on your advice about actually meeting my calorie goal. Although I would like to lose a bit more, I'm happy with my current weight (it's the lightest I've been in my adult life) and there's no need to starve myself. I would certainly rather eat something I enjoy more regularly than do what I did yesterday...

kshama2001

ConicalFern wrote: »

Mezzie1024 wrote: »

I think you should feel bad about eating 400 calories below your net goal daily, especially since you're close to your goal. Eat more and you may not feel the need to overindulge as you did. An occasional day like you described isn't going to ruin anything, though I must say ending a day that sounded so delicious with Starbursts sounds like a letdown.

kshama2001 wrote: »

ConicalFern wrote: »

TavistockToad wrote: »

Why are you always eating so far under goal?

What are your stats?

No real reason, just don't typically feel as though I need to reach the full goal, and I feel better if I am under.

I'm 73kg, 177cm, set as losing 0.5kg a week, so net goal is 1850. I am aware that I am within the healthy range of BMI but I still want to lose weight.

Apart from today I've been pretty consistently under my calorie goal, on average 400 below my net calorie goal for each day, and I've been losing around 1kg a week.

For those of us not on metric:

73 kg = 161 pounds
0.5 kg = 1.1 pounds
1.0 kg = 2.2 pounds
177 cm = 5'10"

@ConicalFern - not eating enough for your weight, height, and activity level can definitely trigger binges. You need to stop under-eating. You will lose lean muscle mass and possibly your hair as well.

girlviernes wrote: »

Right now you are eating too little, which sets you up for a binge. The excessive exercise will feed into that cycle. My best advice is for you to see an eating disorder specialist to nip this in the bud (much easier to get onto a healthy track early than once this gets entrenched). Reading a book such as Overcoming Overeating may help you a lot as well.

Although I agree generally about logging overeating, in your case I think most important is to increase the amount of food you eat on a daily basis and to limit exercise to 60 min at most

Thanks for all this guys. I think you're right - I've been seeing it as a competition with myself how much I can be under my calorie goal, which has inevitably meant that I've been going hungry, and certainly on some days without any good reason for doing so. This has meant that the desire to binge has been building up, without me really knowing. I will take on your advice about actually meeting my calorie goal. Although I would like to lose a bit more, I'm happy with my current weight (it's the lightest I've been in my adult life) and there's no need to starve myself. I would certainly rather eat something I enjoy more regularly than do what I did yesterday...

ConicalFern

emmycantbemeeko wrote: »

Agreed with "don't feel bad" but "do log it."

It sounds like you're treating food and exercise as a moral/ethical question, and if you're "bad" in your conception of it, then there's no point in even tracking how "bad" you are because bad is bad and you've already been "bad" so why not be extra, deliciously bad and expiate it with feeling terrible and punishing yourself with extreme exercise and restriction tomorrow?

Of course, weight loss/gain is *not* a moral issue, it's one of biology, chemistry, and physics, and going way under or way over your maintenance calories is going to have a more serious impact on your goals and health than going a little over or under. Treating it as a magic/spiritual issue, where you binge and restrict, and stop even thinking about the science of it once you've eaten past a certain point, will leave you feeling awful a lot of the time (whether from extreme deprivation and over-exercise, or from bingeing far more than you can comfortably eat and undoing unknown previous days' worth of self-punishment and then restricting even further the following day).

Track it. Even when you start to binge, track it. This way you know where you're really at, and can stop thinking of binges as "sins" to address emotionally rather than an imbalance in the nutrition plan that you have to address practically.

Realize that if you're having an urge to eat massive amounts of food even semi-frequently, it's a sign that what you're doing the *rest* of the time is leaving you unfulfilled in some way (in this case, probably just ravenously hungry plus tired of feeling deprived) and *is not working*.

Eating at a much more reasonable deficit that you can actually maintain, and allowing yourself to eat at maintenance when you're really hungry and not thinking of food and exercise and weight in such moralistic terms is better and more effective for weight loss than eating at a massive deficit 90% of the time and bingeing to the point you can't even count what you've consumed 10% of the time. Especially when you're already at a normal weight.

I think the reason why I feel so bad (and therefore it sounds like a moral issue) is that as I've mentioned, I've tended to be under my calorie goal each day, and I've worked hard to do that (I burned 4716 calories through exercise last week*). The prospect of wasting a week's worth of hard work, for what was, essentially about 8 hours of over indulgence, drove me crazy, and felt that I needed to rectify the situation immediately.

*Although this probably sounds excessive as well, I do actually enjoy exercise and I have done similar levels of exercise in the past with no intention of losing weight (although, of course, I did).

zdyb23456

I had a "cheat" day yesterday too. We had a potluck at work - superbowl foods, so chili, mac and cheese, layer salad, corn chips, chicken wings, buffalo dip, chips, 7 layer dip brownies... I had a little of everything and logged it as 1000 calories. That might have been underestimated too. Then for dinner we did Chinese takeout. I had a plate of assorted dishes and an egg roll and washed it all down with 2 more brownies. I logged that at 2000. Which might be overestimated, but maybe not.

It was fun, but I'm back on track today.

ConicalFern

zdyb23456 wrote: »

I had a "cheat" day yesterday too. We had a potluck at work - superbowl foods, so chili, mac and cheese, layer salad, corn chips, chicken wings, buffalo dip, chips, 7 layer dip brownies... I had a little of everything and logged it as 1000 calories. That might have been underestimated too. Then for dinner we did Chinese takeout. I had a plate of assorted dishes and an egg roll and washed it all down with 2 more brownies. I logged that at 2000. Which might be overestimated, but maybe not.

It was fun, but I'm back on track today.

So will you try and compensate for yesterday at all, or just carry as though it never happened?

kshama2001

ConicalFern wrote: »

zdyb23456 wrote: »

I had a "cheat" day yesterday too. We had a potluck at work - superbowl foods, so chili, mac and cheese, layer salad, corn chips, chicken wings, buffalo dip, chips, 7 layer dip brownies... I had a little of everything and logged it as 1000 calories. That might have been underestimated too. Then for dinner we did Chinese takeout. I had a plate of assorted dishes and an egg roll and washed it all down with 2 more brownies. I logged that at 2000. Which might be overestimated, but maybe not.

It was fun, but I'm back on track today.

So will you try and compensate for yesterday at all, or just carry as though it never happened?

I like to compensate ahead of time. Afterwards feels too punitive. I am planning on eating lots of calorie dense foods during the Super Bowl tomorrow and will eat a little less today and tomorrow beforehand, and exercise more.

jeepinshawn

Lots of people bank their calories for a day when they know they will likely exceed their daily caloric intake.