So I went (way) over my calories today....

TimothyFish wrote: »

As long as you are normally eating at a deficit, you'll eventually make up for the occasional one day over. But I'm not sure I would agree with the not skipping a meal later idea. My thought there is that since I've already eaten enough to supply the fuel I need for the day, there's really no point in adding more, since it will just turn to fat. The next day, yes, I would continue on with my normal eating plan, since having good habits is a good thing.

There's some sense to this, but since I blew over the target so early in the day that would mean waiting until the next morning. If I do that because I'm not hungry, that's fine, but I want to avoid a reward/punishment dynamic with eating. That's how so many of us got into trouble in the first place.

Having a light dinner avoids building the sense that I must punish myself for "misbehaving" earlier in the day, and also avoiding the converse decision to use the earlier indulgence as an excuse to go overboard with another high calorie meal.

It's as much about retraining and rebuilding a long term habit with eating that renders the short term calorie surplus irrelevant. So much of what passes for dieting lately becomes a "morality contest": did you eat at the right times, did you eat the "clean" approved foods, did you stray from the anointed path set by the creators of the plan. That's what I want to avoid.