One day a week refuel meal/all you can eat

tamara, the things you did with water and time are good strategy to limit the "damage" but honestly in my case I find it unnecessary and even contradicting. I go to a buffet for a reason. Watching and worrying isn't in line with the intention!

There's a very good Chinese buffet closed by my home. We prefer to go there on weekends for more selections and sea foods. Frankly if I just enjoy normally which means eat drink socialize freely, I get full and satiated fast. Also, they tend to use lots of oil and salt and spices in Chinese foods so you end up guzzling down a ton of drink.

Interestingly, before I took on this "diet" I wasn't minding my eating at all. I would eat several times a week at different buffets but the weight stalled completely around 185 lbs. My accompanying coworker found the same effect. He ate and still does the same way and remains at the same weight ever since I knew him.

Don't dismiss the notion that it's tough to take in a lot of calories at maintenance. For most of us, we've gotten away from calorie dense foods and liquid calories which screwed us over before. I eat fewer calories but more volume by quite a bit compared to pre MFP. Then throw exercise on top of it. I'm gradually working on upping my calories to support maintenance (2160 + exercise). It can be done within the eating constraints you've put in place.

Pizza Hut has a buffet??

dragon_girl26 wrote: »

I guess I don't understand. If you have trouble eating your maintenance calories now to the point where you only get 1500 and no exercise calories, how would an all you can eat day work for you? Wouldn't you be absolutely sick? Seems like if you can do that without a problem, you should be able to eat closer to maintenance calories each day?
I'm asking because I'm really confused by this.

Although, if Im misunderstanding the question, and you're just wanting to know if it's okay to bank a hundred calories or so each day for a bigger "splurge" meal later in the week, then, sure, why not? People here do it all the time.

Simple, you eat more calorie dense foods. You don't feel full because of the calorie counr, but more due to volume of food.

I don't think one treat meal a week is going to hurt you. As long as it's once a week and not all week long. You have to live once in a while. You've met your goal and are at maintenance right? You have to learn to live a regular life again after dieting.

I keep a weekly spreadsheet (actually monthly, but same principle) for the sake of calorie flexibility, but you can replicate that with a simple and crude "calorie bank" without having to keep extensive records. All you need is the "quick add" feature in the app. Here is how it goes:

Let's for the sake of simplicity assume your need to eat 2000 calories a day:
Day 1: you had 1800 calories, Remaining calories are 200 but you didn't feel up to eating them.
Day 2: look at "Remaining" calories of day 1, in this case 200 calories, then use the quick add feature and enter "-200". This will cause your allowance for this day to be 2200 (before eating anything). Let's assume you ate 2500 calories on that day. Remaining calories for this day : -300
Day 3: look at "Remaining" calories of day 2, in this case -300 calories, then use the quick add feature and enter "300". This will cause your allowance for this day to be 1700 (before eating anything).
... and so on.

Basically you look at your remaining calories for the previous day, turn the positive to negative and negative to positive, then use the quick add feature to add them to the current day.

In your case you want to have a one day of refuel, so let's say after a week of eating your "Remaining Calories" are now 2000, with your current 2000 allowance, you would know to eat 4000 calories on this refuel day.

Here is how it looks in practice.

1. Look at remaining calories of previous day



2. Use quick add to add those calories (changing positive to negative and negative to positive)




3. Now you have your new allowance for the day.

Before:



After:



Repeat every morning. It looks complicated but it's simple and only takes a second.