What To Do When You Cheat On Your Diet
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So you blew it. You went off your diet completely and ate something that you shouldn’t have. What should be your next course of action? Should it be an extra hour of cardio to burn off the offending calories? A resolution to eat less tomorrow to make up for today’s overindulgences? Or should you just sit and contemplate how much of a miserable failure you must be for not having the willpower to stay on your diet? The correct answer to this oft-asked question is none of the above! Crime and punishment, guilt and penance may have some bearing in other parts of your life but it has no bearing whatsoever as far as food is concerned. In fact the more you beat yourself up over eating the wrong foods- the more likely you are to keep on eating it!
Guilt \ˈgilt\: noun
1 : the fact of having committed a breach of conduct especially violating law and involving a penalty; broadly : guilty conduct
2 a : the state of one who has committed an offense especially consciously b : feelings of culpability especially for imagined offenses, sin or from a sense of inadequacy : self-reproach
3 : a feeling of culpability for offenses
In many ways, food has become the new sin and with so many struggling with how to stop emotional eating it’s a serious and global problem. Once upon a time we ate with little thought to waistlines and Body Mass Index but today the act of eating is often thought of as an immoral action. One that so many use to justify self flagellation and lower self esteem. Like so many iniquities, it always seems to start innocently enough with the best of intentions but you slip anyway. Be it the extra slice of chocolate cake, the glass of wine at the company party, the apple-pie at the family holiday dinner or the bag of chips while you’re watching television at home unwinding after a long day. Yet, as much as you hate yourself in the moment, like most transgressions there’s no mistake that you do enjoy it. Whether we like it or not, rich, fatty, salty and sugary food appeal to us on a biological level and they indeed feel sinful for lack of a better word. Nevertheless, after blowing your diet, you feel absolutely guilt ridden afterwards. For many, this feeling of guilt can be overwhelming. But as legitimate as this guilt may feel, is it really helpful? -or does it do more harm than good? Thankfully the answer is resoundingly negative. In fact, from what we know of behavioral psychology, the more you beat yourself up about eating something the more likely you are to keep eating it. It’s a vicious circle and one that traps many in a pattern of indulgence followed by self loathing.
What To Do When You Cheat On Your Diet- Understanding the Feelings Of Guilt
The first step to understanding the harm that guilt inflicts upon us when we associate it with food is to objectively understand our behavior with regard to food consumption. It is said that if you know your enemy and know yourself, in a thousand battles you will never be in peril. These words written by a Chinese sage thousands of years ago apply to the strategies of war just as well as it does to the inner battles we fight to eat better. Behavior modification can only happen if we have an intimate and nonjudgmental understanding of ourselves and what we are up against. Most simply make the resolution to eat healthy with little thought to the subconscious mechanisms that keep us from achieving our goals. As valiant as it may seem to draw a line in the sand one day and declare that you’re not going to eat junk food anymore, this approach is almost always unsuccessful in the long term. If it were that easy, then weight management wouldn’t be an issue and we all know that this most certainly isn’t the case.
Punishing Yourself After Cheating On Your Diet Only Makes Things Worse
To change the way we eat requires far more than a resolution. There must be instead an unrelenting commitment to a very real change in lifestyle- one that includes the possibility that we will from time to time slip and fall while on the path. To change the way we eat we have to first divorce ourselves from the destructive perspective that we must in some way atone for any failures on the path of change. It is human nature to believe that when a ‘wrong’ is committed that some form of guilt is required. In most cases, we feel that this guilt needs to be paired with some form of penance to make things better. As natural as this may seem to us in a predominantly Judeo-Christian society, it doesn’t make things any better with regards to our eating habits. The association of ‘wrongdoing’ with our foods has no positive outcomes. It can be the starting point for lifelong eating disorders because one of our most fundamental acts as human beings is defiled by what we perceive as a lack of willpower. Over the course of my career as a personal trainer, I’ve seen so many men and women suffer needlessly and tremendously from this way of thinking. Sadly, our society as a whole plays a large role in reinforcing feelings of guilt and failure in those who struggle to control their weight. We commonly associate not being able to control your weight with some sense of moral failure. When people yield to the temptation of eating the wrong foods, they tend to fall into a downward spiral of self-hatred and disgust. This self-inflicted form of flagellation is followed by a resolve to either exercise more, diet harder or employ some extreme method to compensate for the ‘damage’ done by their indulgence. Sadly, this is an all too familiar refrain for most people today.
A Healthy Mind and a Healthy Body Has No Place For Food Related Guilt
Physiologically speaking, there isn’t anything you can do to make up for a slip in your diet. No amount of cardio or starving yourself after the fact can change the reality of what has already been done. Any thoughts to the contrary fall neatly into the realms of magical thinking as the universe doesn’t have a rewind button. What is done is done so you just have to move on. And so we must simply move on. Wallowing in guilt and trying to make up for our bad choices with hours of exercise doesn’t bring you any closer to the body of your dreams. If anything, it only pushes you further away from your intended goal of a healthier lifestyle. Instead, we must learn to see our slips for what they are: learning experiences that teach us more about ourselves. Every slip holds the information we need to help us avoid a re-occurrence. Far from being a time to reflect on how much of a loser you are, it’s an opportunity to see what triggers make you stray from your intended path. Is it people? Is it places? Or is it a reaction to stress? Each time brings the opportunity to figure out just what you need to look out for in the future.
It’s a bit of a Catch 22 situation when you resolve to no longer eat unhealthy foods. While you might believe that this affirmation will change your behavior, on a subconscious level it can work against you to reinforce your original habits of eating unhealthy foods. It sounds counterintuitive but behavioral psychology confirms what many of us learn the hard way: that the very habits that we seek to change resurface because our trying hard to forget them keeps them from being forgotten. When we want to change a behavior, both the new and old ways of thinking will co-exist within us as opposing impulses. Impulses that will always be in competition unless we understand what is going on and take active steps to disarm our undesirable attitudes. Consequently, the more you beat yourself over the head for eating that piece of cheesecake, the more you are helping yourself recall the image of you eating the cheesecake. Which then makes it much harder to forget about eating cheesecake… which ultimately is what you need to do.
What You Should Not Do After Cheating On Your Diet
The idea that you can burn off the calories from a bad meal choice is one that we know today to be virtually impossible, and given the psychology of punishment, make it more likely for you to eat the wrong foods again. As trying to work off the calories is not placing you in a space where you can forget about your slip. Metabolically, it doesn’t work either, and if it did everyone at the gym doing cardio would be sporting six pack, and we all know this not to be the case! Let’s say you had two slices of pizza, which would average anywhere from 500 to as much as 700 calories depending on the topping. You go on the treadmill and work up a sweat until the machine says that you have burned 500 calories and you go home feeling relieved that you dodged the bullet. but here’s what really happened, your body is a machine designed to maximize fat stores and so it is not realistic to believe that you can just jog off extra calories. Our ancestors had to hunt and gather everything they ate and this required an enormous amount of energy, and so our bodies learned to adapt to high energy outputs by slowing down later in the day to compensate. That’s right, slowing down. For decades, studies measured the amount of energy burned during exercise, but there was not any follow up on what happens afterwards and so most people were of the mind that you could simply burn off extra calories by upping your activity levels. New research involving the use of indoor calorimetry rooms that can precisely measure show however that this is not the case. When participants are made to perform aerobic exercise, there is a consequent and proportional reduction in metabolic rate in the 24 hour or longer periods after the exercise is completed. So for any “extra” calories burned, your body will slow down to compensate in a perfect example of homeostasis. For more on this see my ebook The Role Of Exercise In Reducing Abdominal Fat. Keep in mind as well that by exercising after overeating or eating the wrong foods, not only are you not doing anything to correct the situation, but you are teaching yourself a method of remembering the act and thus making yourself more prone to eat the same foods again.
What You Need To Do After Cheating On Your Diet- Move On And Keep On Moving!
So, how do you forget the wonderfully decadent foods that you shouldn’t eat? As impossible as it may sound, it can be done and be reassured by the fact that people do it all the time. But it doesn’t happen overnight, and it does require some patience on your part. What needs to happen is a gradual shift in your eating patterns over time where new healthy foods replace the old unhealthy ones. As time goes by, the new healthy foods will stay at our primary level of consciousness and the once almost uncontrollable desires for the old unhealthy foods simply fade away. It’s a very subtle shift- one that often goes unnoticed until one day you realize that you just don’t feel like eating junk food anymore. You can’t get this from fad diets, pills and powders as it is a very private process that you have to personally work towards. It’s a journey that leads to a true definition of health; one where you really want to eat the foods that are good for you as opposed to avoiding the bad foods because you know you shouldn’t eat them. Such a state requires fundamental change in perspective, as it is only when you are able to enjoy the foods that are good for you that you will be able to break the cycle. In the meantime, do your best not to eat the wrong foods, but if you do -just keep going. Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up if you slip here and there.
Not Bad For Training Only Three Days A Week!
Because it's three days a week with soul crunching intensity non stop for the past 33 years.
There's no gimmick to it and it means being uncompromisingly all in for your workouts and with your nutrition.
I don't think there's that much that special about me.
There's nothing enhanced, nothing boosted by testosterone and there weren't any special "supplements" along the way.
Just three days of blistering hard work each week and meticulous attention to what I eat.
Being 90% on point each week means you are 100% off after 10 weeks and I can't emphasize enough how much of a difference unshakeable consistency makes to your overall results.
Most of the natural athletes didn't get where they are by any genetic advantage, they just did what is so very rare- which is stick to their process 100%.
It's not easy as it's not always easy and certainly not always popular, but you owe it to yourself to see just how far you can go if you go all in!
Looking forward to seeing your results and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
#naturalbodybuilding #naturalbodybuilder #fitover40 #homegym #drugfreebodybuilding #gymselfie #hometraining #naturalbodybuildingmotivation
What I Eat To Stay Lean and Keep Building Muscle All Year Round.
If there every was a "secret" to how I consistently stay in shape (and almost 20 years since my last competition) the answer would be my diet.
Diet is the deciding factor in what your body looks like and your overall performance and I want to stress that while this is a layout of the foods I eat on a daily basis, it's not a blueprint for your YOU should be eating.
What it can be is an example of what it takes to maintain a certain degree of size and muscularity at all times as a natural athlete, and also the underlying principle to how I select my foods.
Which is that I don't eat junk foods or highly processed foods and I only drink water.
(No protein shakes, ever!)
If you can start with that, there's no doubt that you will be on the right track in terms of your nutrition.
So stay away from processed foods, know that I believe in you and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
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Post workout physique check in.
The contest gets closer and closer as the sun meanders across the sky, as my contest is and always will be, did I do everything I possibly could that day to improve?
Did I train hard enough?
Did I push it enough?
The dietary part isn't an issue.
It hasn't been for many years as I always make sure that my nutrition is on point, and there's no leeway on that front.
I don't feel good when I'm not eating optimally, and I respect myself enough to not settle into a place where not feeling my best is the norm.
And to be honest, it feels really good to put my head down at the end of the day knowing that I gave it my all.
Not that I was the best or was even necessarily successful at everything that I set out to accomplish, but knowing that I gave everything nonetheless.
It's a feeling I want everyone to have.
To sleep soundly knowing that you gave it your all.
That you didn't miss an opportunity to improve on what you are passionate about, because in so doing, you experience an eagerness to do the same the next day.
It's the ultimate contest and I invite everyone to submit their application forms, as it's one of the few competitions where everyone who does the work and shows up, is in the winner's circle.
Keep striving, keep pushing and as always, Excelsior! #naturallyintense
(Thanks @indi.anna.r or taking the shot, as I know your arm was probably shaking after that workout!)
#naturalbodybuilding #naturalbodybuilder #fitover40 #homegym #drugfreebodybuilding #gymselfie #hometraining #naturalbodybuildingmotivation
Motivation vs Discipline. What You Really Need To Be Successful!
I am often asked what was my motivation to keep going starting off as a skinny 125lb kid who no one believed could ever be a successful bodybuilder.
The answer is that motivation didn't have that much to do with it.
Motivation may have played a part in getting me started, but it was discipline that got me to where I wanted to be.
Motivation is fleeting and ephemeral, it's not always going to be there and on the days when you don't feel like eating right or training hard, you need a disciplined practice to see you through.
A disciplined practiced based on doing what you need to do to be successful regardless of the circumstances.
That's how I made it through all those tough times when I felt I wasn't getting anywhere, and it's what will help you as well.
So forget motivation, focus on building a disciplined practice, know that I believe in you and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
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Kevin's Ultimate Secret Six Pack Abs Tip!
If you ever wondered how I maintain a six pack all year round and have kept that six pack for decades on end, here's the secret.
This is one tip that will honestly get you on the path to a six pack.
There's no magic to it.
But if you follow this simple piece of advice, you will be able to do a lot more than get yourself a six pack, as it's a proven formula for success.
Give it a try and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
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Happy Archery Day, everyone!!!
Yeah, it's a thing and can't say how much it's my thing!
To be honest, I am a barebow shooter and almost never shoot my compound bow (the monster in my hands) but it's all really good fun!
If you haven't tried archery or are thinking about doing it again, go give it a shot (no pun intended!!!)
And as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
#archery #archeryday #bowtech #naturalbodybuilder #naturalbodybuilding #fitover40 #blackandwhite #bowtech
Do You Have Good Genetics for Natural Bodybuilding?
I don't believe it's the question that needs to be asked.
Far too many, myself included, who went on to be successful natural bodybuilders would never have been the men and women you would expect to have the genetics for bodybuilding.
But we put in the work, the years, the dedication and the consistency, and so what matters isn't the question of genetics, but rather do you have the passion, the drive and the discipline to train hard and focus on your diet nonstop for years on end to realize your potential?
That's the real question, and yes, there are men and women who have great genetics for natural bodybuilding, but there are even more who would be amazing onstage but don't know it because they didn't believe enough in themselves to put in the time to see how far they could go.
So I am here to say that I believe you have it in you to do amazing things, so if it's your goal, or even if you just want to improve the way you look, stick with it and don't quit!
Know that I believe in you and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
#naturalbodybuilding #nosteroids #fitnessgoals #bodytransformation #nodrugs #naturalbodybuildingtips #naturalbodybuilder #naturalbodybuildingvideos #excelsior #fitover40 #personaltrainer #naturalbodybuildingtips #naturalbodybuildingmotivation #beleiveinyourself
Nope it's not a contest cut- it's just another day on the Path.
There are two ways to get cut, the fast way that requires going to extremes and which is inevitably temporary.
Or the Path-based way. Whereby your lifestyle and sustainable healthy practices get you there and keeps you there.
It takes time. It takes patience but it's an extremely honest endeavor.
If you put in the work and stay consistent with your training and following a processed food free and healthy diet, excellence is just a matter of time.
It takes time but as long as you draw breath, you have the time and you can do this.
So take the Path-based way and as always, Excelsior!!!
#naturallyintense
And my thanks to my son @reid_443 for snapping the shot, and the approval rating! 😂
#naturalbodybuilding #naturalbodybuilder #fitover40 #homegym #drugfreebodybuilding #gymselfie #hometraining
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What To Do If You Cheat On Your Diet
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Featured everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to CBS News, Kevin Richardson’s Naturally Intense High Intensity Training have helped hundreds lose weight and transform their bodies with his 10 Minute Workouts. One of the top natural bodybuilders of his time, Kevin is also the international fitness consultant for UNICEF and one of the top personal trainers in New York City.
