Are You Cheating or Choosing to Eat?

Let’s be honest, dieting is hard! Sure, the outcome can be rewarding, but the process to achieve it isn’t easy.

To achieve fat loss, you must strategically eat less temporarily, whilst making lots of repeated good decisions to aid superior dietary adherence. Yet, the dieting process becomes unnecessarily tough if your mindset is flawed.

To make the fat loss process easier though, you can use a powerful tool - mental reframing.

There are many ways to do this, plus you should customise the reframing according to your needs and preferences. If you’re looking for one powerful reframe to aid dieting success, use this one. 

Mental reframe --> I did not cheat; I chose to eat!

In case you’ve forgotten, food can be delicious and is meant to be enjoyed. The more palatable or tasty the food is, the easier it is to eat more of it!

This can be helpful when your goal is muscle gain and you’re needing to eat more calories. Yet, if you’re trying to lose body fat and eat less calories, hyper palatable foods can be more easily overeaten and lead to excess calories. If you do end up overeating, you’re human!

The key here is to be ok with your choices you’ve already made and to own them. Whilst you can’t change past choices, you can potentially learn from them!

This is why it’s imperative you view any excess calories the right way, plus that you be kind to yourself too. So, if you did overeat, you’re not failing…

Instead reframe the situation and say: I did not cheat; I chose to eat!

You’re the boss and you make the rules... So, ditch the perfectionism and embrace the realism.

With that said, it’s also important to be realistic with the residual impact of overeating. Naturally the weight scale may rise to some degree, which is ok. Though, whether it’s even body fat gained is another story!

The key here is to simply adjust your expectations for your weekly rate of fat loss. Especially if your excess consumption wasn’t a little but a lot…

Ironically though, sometimes the best thing to help you continually lose more body fat later, is to eat more food now!

This is why we at Atlas love using strategic periods with our clients, whereby they deliberately eat more calories! Here I’m talking about refeed days and mini diet breaks periods to aid regeneration, along with superior body composition and dietary adherence.

In this scenario, we proactively prescribe our clients’ more food and temporarily return their calories to or near maintenance levels. In fact, you would likely be shocked how often we at Team Atlas prescribe refeeds and diet breaks! 

The key with cyclical nutrition strategies is knowing how to use them, plus why and when. This is part science, part art and what separates good coaching, from great coaching.

Ultimately though, if you did eat more calories than planned, I hope you mindfully enjoyed your choices!

Plus, if you’re going to eat fun food though, please tune in, not out.

If you just pound down your treat whilst being distracted by the TV, are you truly enjoying and savouring what you’re eating? I doubt it… You’ll also potentially be able to better regulate how much of your tasty food you’re eating too when you’re paying attention!

So, the take home message is you can never cheat on your diet if you’re the boss! You can, however, chose to eat.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your food,
Glen Carroll