Do your diet plan meals include pizza, burgers and fries, cheesecake or any other “bad” foods that have no place on a diet?
What if I told you that you can and SHOULD include fast food (or any food you want to eat) in your diet plan and that it could make your diet work BETTER!
I know it sounds like some kind of fad diet and completely backwards to rational thinking but hear me out, I’ll explain how this strategy can work wonders for you by:
- Satisfying cravings that won’t go away (no foods off limits)
- Allows you to have a social life and eat like everyone else
- Delivers better long term weight loss
- Shock your friends who notice your weight loss by eating junk food and watch them lose their minds!
The last reason alone is worth it, I can’t count the number of people who assume I must have a super-restrictive diet who are then stunned when they see me chowing down on Domino’s finest!
How Can Eating Junk Food Help Me Lose More Weight?
The success of diets is not determined over the course of one meal, one day or even one week. The results you obtain correllate to how you eat over a longer period of time.
We can use this to our advantage and allow ourself little treats which make dieting easier without impacting on our weight.
Taking this approach, you’re diet will feel easier and less restrictive which means you’re more likely to stick to it long term. This becomes a lifestyle change rather than a period of severe restriction followed by returning to your old eating habits and probably your old weight!
If you adhere to your diet plan meals 80% of the time, the 20% will take care of itself. Use that 20% to satisfy cravings, to indulge in that cheesecake or pizza or whatever else it is you NEED to eat.
Look at the bigger picture, you’ve adhered to your diet 80% of the time so don’t sweat the 20% if it makes your diet easier to live with as this is where results are generated.
This is backed up by scientific studies which show that being more flexible with your diet is more effective than rigid diets in terms of weight loss, long term adherence and eating disorders.
Consider my diet plan meals method against the backdrop of “normal” dieting…
Dietings Supposed To Be Miserable…Isn’t It?
Most people will tell you that dieting is a miserable process to be endured only as long as needed to attain a goal.
The problem is, once the goal is attained and people go back to eating the way they did before the diet, they gain the weight back again…and quickly! No surprise there.
The solution is to find a way of eating that ticks two boxes:
- Delivers the fat loss you want
- Allows you to eat the foods you want so it can become part of your life rather than a short term “means to an end”
- Increased appetite
- Your metabolism slows down which means you need less food to gain weight
- Cravings for foods you’re not consuming (fatty foods, sugar etc)
These two ideals appear completely incompatible, after all the foods most people like to eat would blow your diet. The key is moderation and not binging on the “bad” foods you crave.
Don’t Try To Be Perfect
Striving for perfection is usually a good thing, but when it comes to dieting it puts you on the path to failure because even with the best will in the world sooner or later you will eat the foods you crave.
As an Aries, I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy and this was evidenced in how I used to diet before I started eating a bit of junk food when I wanted.
I’d be super strict for as long as possible but eventually I’d fall off the wagon big style and binge gaining back all the weight I’d lost. I’d then diet aggressively to try to lose the weight I’d gained which meant I lost muscle and then usually binge eat again when the diet got too miserable to bear.
You become the hamster in the wheel. You’re putting in the effort but getting nowhere!
Your body tries to stop you losing fat as a survival mechanism (if no food is consumed your body can use your fat stores to keep you alive) so when reduce food intake in order to lose weight it has a number of effects designed to make you eat more food. These include:
So you’re hungry and your body is crying out for a Big Mac meal or a chocolate bar, if you ignore these cravings you will end up binging when the cravings become to much to bear.
For this reason, you should eat the foods you crave and then get back to your “diet” foods the next day.
Before you log off and speed to the nearest McDonalds, you need to know HOW to incoporate this way of eating WITHOUT gaining weight and why eating this why delivers better results.
Allow me to explain…
How To Eat ANY Food Without Gaining Weight!
So we’ve established that dieting makes you crave certain foods and that you’ll need to satisfy those cravings, the remaining question is how to do it without undoing all of your good work up until this meal.
Firstly, let’s look at what not to do.
A Meal Not A Mountain!
Don’t take the principle of a cheat meal to extremes and allow it to become a binge. Clearly, a supersize Big Mac Meal with a McFlurry, Apple Pie and 6 nuggets is excessive. Eat what you like but be reasonable with the quantity of food.
Last Meal of The Day
It’s difficult to eat tasty food then go back to less exciting diet plan meals so try to keep your cheat meal to the last meal before bed.
You’re far more likely to go back to eating diet plan meals the next day than you are to try to eat lean protein and vegetables after a burger!
A Blip Not A Blow Out!
You’re cheat meal might be planned or it might be unplanned and you ate something you wouldn’t usually in a weak moment.
It’s done so forget about it and move on. Don’t turn a blip into a complete blow out because you figured you’d ruined your diet now.
If you’d accidentally bumped into the car in front causing a little damage, would you then decide to plough into it at high speed because your car isn’t perfect anymore?
A single meal isn’t going to derail your diet if the other 80% of the time you eat diet plan meals, just don’t make the mistake of going overboard in the justification that you earned it by being good all week.
The ultimate goal is unchanged, we want to lose weight so don’t take advantage of a way of making it easier but eating excessivley and putting the brakes on your weight loss!
A New Way of Thinking
I’m often asked to devise diet plans for people interested in shedding a few pounds and every one of them is shocked when I present the idea of adding fast food to their diet plan meals.
Once they embrace the idea and still see the scale go down every week they are incredibly motivated and they don’t feel like they’re dieting at all.
They go out to dinner with friends without worrying about what the lowest calorie diet plan meals on the menu are. They live life and indulge in the things that make them happy and more power to them for it!
Final Thoughts and Next Steps!
You really can liberate yourself from the shackles of conventional dieting and join the new world where people can lose weight AND eat the foods they want!
Diet plan meals no longer have to be low calorie, cardboard like substitutes, eat the real thing and feel safe in the knowledge it’s all under your control.
If you want to start putting this into practice now I outlined the system I use to ensure the cheat meal doesn’t impact my diet progress in Make The Calories In Fast Food Fit Your Diet Plan!
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