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How To Stick With Your Diet This Weekend

How To Stick With Your Diet This Weekend
Carly Jacobs

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I’ve recently been quite shocking on weekends when it comes to being healthy. For the past year, I’ve been living walking distance from some of my close girlfriends and I’ve developed a bad habit of spending Friday nights guzzling red wine like a blood sucking vampire and then inevitably ordering takeaway for dinner before running down to the bottle-o for more wine. Then I wake up on Saturday morning feeling like a bear shat in my brain. This usually leads to some kind of greasy deliciousness for lunch and a cleansing afternoon beer by which stage I’m feeling much better excepting the fact that I’ve ingested about a weeks worth of calories in under 24 hours. Not good, not sustainable and also not me. I was practically teetotal when I moved to Melbourne 5 years ago and slowly I’ve built up a weekly drinking habit that I’m keen to cut back on. Here are a few tips I use to get me through the tempting weekends without breaking the good work I’ve done during the week.

How To Stick With Your Diet This Weekend 

Be Smart About Alcohol

Make good choices with alcohol because it’s the biggest motivation killer known to mankind. I’m not asking that you give up alcohol completely, just go easy on it while your sticking to a healthy eating plan. If you absolutely must have an alcoholic beverage have a vodka, lime and soda. There’s only 97 calories in a shot of vodka and if you mix it with soda water you get extra hydration as you drink. Bonza. There’s about 250 calories in most self poured glasses of wine. Ouch.

Try To Be Social Away From Restaurants and Bars

Be in control of the places you go and stay away from pubs where you might be tempted to snack on salty chips and beer or restaurants where you might inhale a whole bowl of creamy curry. The best solution is to host your weekend get togethers in your own home. That way you can prepare a healthy meal and your guests can enjoy their own BYO bevvies while you sip on fancy mineral water. Easy.

Be Honest With Your Friends

Make sure your friends know that you’re trying to eat better and that no, you wouldn’t like to try that new deep fried meatball place that just opened up in the city. Ask them to meet you at places where you can order something healthy and try to get out of habitually eating and drinking alcohol with the same people every weekend. Having a few drinks with your mates on a Saturday afternoon is fine but if it turns into every Saturday and then every Friday and Saturday and then you start meeting at the pub on Thursdays… that’s where it starts to become a problem.

Plan Some Big Workouts 

If I plan to do a serious workout I tend to go easy on the greasy food and alcohol. If you plan a big gym session, long run or an advanced yoga class you’ll be much less likely to give in and go all out on a six pack of beer and a family sized bag Doritos.

Don’t Be Too Hard On Yourself

One little scoop of gelato on a sunny Sunday afternoon never hurt anyone and neither did a shared bowl of wedges with sour cream. It’s the bottle of champagne, 4 slices of pizza, cafe breakfast and burger lunch that does the damage so just be extra aware of what you’re consuming. You can still have fun and you can still have a treat but ‘a’ is the important word there. A treat. As in one treat. Not 48 hours worth of treats.

Do you have problems sticking with your healthy eating plan on the weekends? How do you avoid overindulging?

5 Comments

  1. Nicole 10 years ago

    Oh man, wedges with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce, so good! That’s another thing they’re completely clueless about over here. That and BBQ sauce on breakfast sandwiches. When I’ve asked it to be added, minds have been blown. Now I’m hungry, I think that might of been the opposite to the point of this article haha.
    I am terrible on weekends, though, I don’t drink alcohol. Mainly, my downfall is feeling guilty that if I stick to my regular calorie count of good eating, my husband will have a boring food weekend. I know that’s strange, but it’s almost the act of doing the things, rather than the food itself which makes the weekend more enjoyable. We’ll head out really early (5am) to a bagel place that does amazing breakfast bagel sandwiches, take them next door to starbucks, and enjoy them in this little corner that looks out the window, drinking our coffee. It’s early enough that it’s still pitch black outside and the starbucks lights are dim. It’s cozy and makes for great conversation time. Stuff like that. I think I just need to do research and find atmospheric places that serve healthier fare.

    Also maybe being more prepared with the food in the house. Sunday is grocery day, so by the time Saturday rolls around, there’s barely any food left.

    • Author
      Smaggle 10 years ago

      How can they not do wedges with sour cream and chilli sauce? I guess it must be like the meat pie thing. It’s so hard to get a meat pie in the US.

      I wish more than anything that I didn’t like alcohol. I swear I’d be a stick.

      And that’s totally true if I’m out of food by Saturday I’m all ‘Cafe breakfast! Takeaway for dinner! Let’s eat this whole block of cheese as a snack!’

      • Nicole 10 years ago

        Definitely. It’s hard enough even finding good sweet chilli sauce so the entire concept is very foreign to them. Back in the day, we used to settle by buying wedges to go from KFC and having them at home with our own condiments. You’re seeing a trend, with this and the science experiment that is my fake Passiona, we do a lot of settling to try and eat Aussie-esque food haha.

        Don’t get me started on meat pies. There’s a company here that’s sold in Whole Foods freezer section, claiming to make “Aussie-Style” meat pies. The steak one has more potato than meat! If I want to get a meat pie, I have to have it shipped overnight from one of those import stores. Maybe it’s for the best for my waistline.

        There’s just something so lovely about focusing on sharing delicious food with your best friend on a Saturday and forgetting the calorie count. But then Sunday rolls around.

  2. Heather Lansdowne 10 years ago

    WTF is she eating? A pink caterpillar?? wat. the. actual. fuck.

  3. Alexandra Brovco 10 years ago

    “Welp. It might be too late for me to read this post. For this weekend anyway,” I said, as I spooned out the microwave chocolate cake out of the mug, all the while fondly reminiscing yesterday’s wine and creamy chicken & mushroom pasta. “But I’ll try harder next Saturday.”

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