Big OverFeed Ruins Everything? Nope.
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Here it is! Forgive her the still, she has to drive traffic like everyone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeDvYExqhOI 9 -
This is truly what I needed to see. I’m over being emotional over some damn food. Can’t wait for my carrot cake tomorrow 😋5
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Glad I stumbled upon this. Been beating myself up about the +5.6 lbs over the Mother's Day weekend! Quality time with the kids (Friday-Sunday) who were home from out of town. Worth it but I definitely could have made better choices. Oh well...back at it!8
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You call that an overfeed, @AnnPT77?
I went away for an extended weekend a couple of weeks ago and I can top it!
These are my over maintenance amounts and like yours they include guesses but if anything they might be a little low:
Fri +849
Sat +2232
Sun +1767
Mon +2073
Tues +4091
This is enough calories for 3.14 pounds! In the week I ate them I had some deficit days and the resulting overage by math should have been 2.22 pounds.
I assumed that of the 2.22 pounds I would probably gain at least 1 pound but after the water weight receded the numbers indicate that at best I gained back .5 pounds. I would have been okay with more but I will take it.
I did move more during my getaway but not enough to burn over 9000 calories (the difference between what I should have gained and what I actually did gain).
Obviously if I kept eating this way I would start to gain back more of my calories.
ETA: This was not an experiment to see what would happen and not something I recommend someone else repeating because I have been in a calorie deficit for a very long time and so my body was not accustomed to that many calories in such a short time frame. Also, I was experiencing some diet fatigue and after a fairly rough family event I needed to go a little nuts (which I obviously did lol).
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You call that an overfeed, @AnnPT77?
<snip good story that makes a very useful contribution to the thread>
Ah, but @NovusDies , unlike you, I am a petite, elderly flower.
(OK, a medium-sized, medium-old, medium-cranky woman, but still. ).
Either of us did something big vs. our maintenance calories, compared to the folks around here who sometimes freak out because they went 300 or even 1000 over their deficit goal one time . . . which is why I wrote the post. Thanks for underscoring the point! :flowerforyou: or should I say :drinker: ?17 -
You call that an overfeed, @AnnPT77?
<snip good story that makes a very useful contribution to the thread>
Ah, but @NovusDies , unlike you, I am a petite, elderly flower.
(OK, a medium-sized, medium-old, medium-cranky woman, but still. ).
Either of us did something big vs. our maintenance calories, compared to the folks around here who sometimes freak out because they went 300 or even 1000 over their deficit goal one time . . . which is why I wrote the post. Thanks for underscoring the point! :flowerforyou: or should I say :drinker: ?
It was a great idea for a thread and it should help people who do go over by a little to calm down. I didn't have anything to add to it until recently. I normally stop at maintenance plus 50 percent on big days but on this excursion I ate and drank and was merry to a ridiculously high degree. I retain water more than some people so I came back heavy from bloat but it all went away.
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I went on a two week diet break when I was 204.6 I ate at around maintenance some days, quite above it other days. Had a few days on vacation that had to have been in the 4000-5000 range at least. At the end of my diet break last Tuesday, I had jumped to 208.6. Oh noes! I got back on my diet, and stayed on track this last week. Today: 203.8.
One or two days, or even a week or two, will not throw us off our course. Bumps in the road are not only "not bad", but are a completely normal part of the process.15 -
Behold my huge weight spike after yesterday's 3655 calorie day of fun; ~1478 calories over my maintenance for the day. I'm also due for my TOM tomorrow, so I'm sure that helped. Out of curiosity, I weighed myself when I got home from work and was already back down to 112.6.
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@Maxematics Sounds like a fabulously fun weekend! And an amazingly fast recovery! It'll take me longer to recover though
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Just came back from a vacation where I ate a bit more than usual, but was also busy all day exploring and hiking, and didn't really have a lot of time for relaxing on the loo. Plus 3 flights in = lots of water weight gain. 1 short flight, another two nights elsewhere and again 2 flights home. A plus of about 3kg on the scale. Yeah, right. Flying water weight usually sticks quite long with me. But I've just been going to the loo 2-3x per day at the moment, and I'm 'down' 2.4kg.4
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My husband and I just got back from a two-week cruise to Alaska. It was fantastic, BTW. Every day, we ate and drank so much food, things like king crab, lobster, steak, wine/beer/cocktails and we had a decadent dessert every night. We did stay active, however, by walking the open deck daily for 30 minutes or so, except when we were in a port. We did a lot of walking when in port.
When we got back, the first thing we did was weigh ourselves for kittens and giggles. I was up 7 pounds. OMG. and LOL. Four days later, those 7 pounds are gone. Whoosh. My husband lost one pound when he weighed in. Grrrr and LOL18 -
Well, count me in as one of those "woe is me" types today. I KNOW I should not get discouraged, but I cannot shake the blues. I worked my butt off this week. Killing myself in the gym and keeping to 1500 calories a day or less (some days were 1200-1300). Sunday night I went off the rails with wine and food. Today is Thursday and I am 2.2 pounds UP from last week. Does the bad day haunt you four full days later? I am not an overly emotional person but my efforts to see the big picture here are falling short. There is something that is a real mind f*#k about that number on the scale. Looking for my big girl panties and can't find them....
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Those to-be-expected from time to time northerly bumps in the morning BW scale readings are a fact of life in our journeys. For me, they were real motivators to double down my efforts and resolve to continue my journey. Now that I'm solidly in maintenance, they don't nerve me the way they did earlier but I still prefer to have small daily fluctuations now that I"m in maintenance. Do get a big kick out of the scale after a long run knowing that it's an artificial result. Have taken a photo of my lowest low just for kicks. I weigh daily, that's my personality and doing so helped me get my job done.
Don't know what's considered a cheat day. Do you consider it one where you go over a certain amount of calories? If so, I've had overage days but they typically are the result of a previous day's deficit, generally a running day where I'm unable to eat back my exercise calories. Don't think I've ended a week with a surplus though so daily deficits and shortages are no big deal. Never had back-to-back surpluses or diet breaks in my current journey of slightly over 8 months. Haven't yearned for them because I'm well-fed within my budget.1 -
margaret_anne wrote: »Well, count me in as one of those "woe is me" types today. I KNOW I should not get discouraged, but I cannot shake the blues. I worked my butt off this week. Killing myself in the gym and keeping to 1500 calories a day or less (some days were 1200-1300). Sunday night I went off the rails with wine and food. Today is Thursday and I am 2.2 pounds UP from last week. Does the bad day haunt you four full days later? I am not an overly emotional person but my efforts to see the big picture here are falling short. There is something that is a real mind f*#k about that number on the scale. Looking for my big girl panties and can't find them....
I think it kinda haunts you as long as it haunts you . . . it can even haunt you mentally after the scale drops again, if you let it.
The weight proper, though, or more accurately the fat: 2.2 pounds gain would require something like 7700 calories above maintenance. If that many calories didn't happen on Sunday, whether through eating or inactivity or a combination, you still have some water weight or digestive contents yet to be processed out. IF you did eat that many extra calories, you may have some fat to re-lose (though I think part of what we're recounting on this thread is that not all the calories from a truly rare, short over-goal sprint are necessarily going to show up as fat, if we're lucky).
To me, the beauty of calorie counting is that we can calculate these things, after a while (with experience), with fair accuracy, and that gives the scale less power.
You mention "killing yourself in the gym" - could be some additional water weight from that? Do you have a good handle on your normal menstrual-cycle-related water weight changes: Could that be a factor? Do you have a seasonal allergy thing going on, or minor injury, or anything like that? There can be a lot involved in what shows up on the scale (water retention, digestive contents, fat), and sometimes all we can do is trust the process, and try not to stress out (did you know stress can increase water retention? ) or give up.
Hugs, and hang in there. If your calories are in line, the scale will catch up to where you should be. :flowerforyou:
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@margaret_anne Looking for my 'big girl panties' too ... LOL! So far 2 lbs of the 5.5 lbs gained over Mother's Day weekend have come off. Working out like a fiend (2 workouts per day) and eating 1200 calories per day. Not eating back exercise calories, so actually netting 850 calories or so daily (just until I get back to where I was). I feel like my body is hanging on to those extra calories for dear life!2
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bjdavidson964 wrote: »@margaret_anne Looking for my 'big girl panties' too ... LOL! So far 2 lbs of the 5.5 lbs gained over Mother's Day weekend have come off. Working out like a fiend (2 workouts per day) and eating 1200 calories per day. Not eating back exercise calories, so actually netting 850 calories or so daily (just until I get back to where I was). I feel like my body is hanging on to those extra calories for dear life!
If you're logging accurately, please don't net that low. Stress, including the stress of undereating, can increase water retention and really muddy the waters about what's going on, sap calories out of daily life activity via fatigue, and create health risks. In the longer run, it's counter-productive.
The point of this thread is that some high-eating days may cause a few days delay in reaching ultimate goal weight, but there's no reason to stress out about it.
Please, take it gradually, stay strong, energetic, and healthy! :flowerforyou:10 -
@AnnPT77 Thank you for the words of wisdom! I'm trying not to let my frustration lead me into going about this recklessly. In the grand scheme of things, it has only thrown me off by 1 week so I suppose I really should lighten up. Now off to BodyPump and Zumba ... LOL! But I will eat a big dinner instead of the protein shake that I had planned on!2
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bjdavidson964 wrote: »@AnnPT77 Thank you for the words of wisdom! I'm trying not to let my frustration lead me into going about this recklessly. In the grand scheme of things, it has only thrown me off by 1 week so I suppose I really should lighten up. Now off to BodyPump and Zumba ... LOL! But I will eat a big dinner instead of the protein shake that I had planned on!
I'm betting it's thrown you off way less than a week, in reality, when it comes to reaching goal weight: To gain 5.5 pounds of fat, you would've had to have eaten 19,250 calories over your maintenance calories (not just over your weight-loss calorie goal) over Mothers Day Weekend.
That's really a lot of calories. I think I could eat that many extra calories over a weekend, and it might be fun to try ( kidding! ), but it would be pretty hard to do. I'm kind of betting you didn't eat that much.
What probably happened is that you ate more than usual (maybe even enough to gain back a bit of fat, but not much
); the "more" included more than usual sodium and carbs (both of which cause some water retention temporarily while your body's metabolizing them); and the weekend left you with more than the usual amount of food in transit in your digestive system, and until all the residue is excreted (can take multiple days, surprisingly), it has weight.
Neither water nor food-in-transit are fat, so they're really not worth worrying about, scary though the scale may look for a week or so. They'll drop off in their own good time (and under-eating or over-exercising won't make that happen any faster).
A normal dinner after your workout sounds like a really good plan.
Be kind to yourself, relax, everything is going to turn out fine! 9 -
@AnnPT77 You are a Rock Star!! And so kind...many thanks@margaret_anne I hope you find encouragement in these words also! 7
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Yes you are right. I used to not track when I fell off track because I felt guilty. Now I don’t feel guilty. I just brush it off and keep going. As you can see I spiked twice really hard, and ate on both instances around ~4000 calories. Just keep going as if nothing happened!6
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