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.
My VERY Different Approach To Staying Lean All Year Round.
Losing weight is doable.
As is getting leaner.
The struggle is maintaining it.
And in this video I go over my rather different approach.
One that allows me to maintain a sub-10% bodyfat percentage all year round in a SUSTAINABLE way!
You don't need drugs, you don't need supplements, magic pills or powders.
It's a matter of mindset and once you understand the approach, you will see that you can do it!
It's not easy, as nothing worth doing ever is, but it is sustainable!
Moreover, if you follow this path it leads not just to a tighter waist and a passible six pack, but also a true sense of self realization and self discovery.
To see the video you can access the link in my bio or look me up "naturally intense" on YouTube.
Thanks as always for tuning in, know that I believe in you and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
#naturalbodybuilding #naturalbodybuilder #naturalbodybuildingvideo #naturalbodybuildingmotivation #naturalbodybuildingtips #highintensitytraining #drugfreebodybuilding #nodrugs #fitover40 #fitoverforty #spirituality #selfdiscovery #healthylifestyle
Dumbo, Brooklyn 2004
This one was taken towards the end of an hours long photoshoot for my DVD and I remember being utterly exhausted!
Photoshoots can be tougher than competing as with a competition you are only onstage for maybe maximum of a half hour, whereas with a shoot it's hours on end of having to be on point.
Thanks for tuning in and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
My thanks to @miranda_maher and @stephaniecorne for the shot!!!
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Don't Train To Maintain, Always Train To Excel!
I am 49 years old.
My last bodybuilding competition was 19 years ago and yet I train with the same intensity and focus towards results as I did in my teens, my 20's and my 30's.
I don't believe in "train to maintain" and I think it's a massive mistake!
In my experience, most people take their foot off the gas way to early in life and as a result never realize their full potential.
In many sports getting older is associated with decline, but take a look at natural bodybuilding and you'll see men and women peaking in their late 40's to 50's.
Natural bodybuilding legends like Carmi Smith, Dwayne Broadway @
https://pulse.ly/crdg43u5ec and Yvette Arthur, @https://pulse.ly/m2iwofkkqz all won World Championship titles in their silver years and my friend and mentor, the late Kenny Hall competed with a ridiculously impressive physique into his late 60's!!!
Ever since I was a kid that's what I have been striving for and it's a central tenet of my personal training practice.
The passage of time is not an adversary you surrender to, it's an ally that can help you get far further in life than you might imagine, but only if you keep pushing!
So don't train to maintain, train to grow, train to improve, train to excel and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
5th Avenue Gym circa 2009- 5 years out from my last show.
As you can see, trophies and competitions were NEVER the driving force behind why I train the way I train and why I eat the way I eat.
It's always been my passion to see how far I could go as a natural athlete and perhaps even more so, to show what can be accomplished without using drugs.
And 5th Avenue Gym was the perfect place to do it.
I really miss that gym.
It was a place where legends came to train and while it wasn't pretty, it had everything we needed to do the work we needed to do.
And boy did we work!!!
5th Avenue for life as they say!!!
Hope you are still training hard and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
And thanks @pit_bulls_67 for snapping the shot!!!!
#naturalbodybuilder #naturalbodybuilding #throwback #fifthavenuegym #5thavenuegym #drugfreebodybuilding #naturalbodybuildinglifestyle #gym #gymlife #gymmotivation #naturalbodybuildingmotivation #bodybuilding #bodybuildinggym
Why Are Pull Ups So Hard For Some But Not For Others?
Pull ups are an exercise people love to hate!
They love to hate it because in my experience, most untrained men or women can't do one pull up and those who train can often struggle to do 6 or 10.
Why?
Because pull ups are hard!
And yet people like myself can easily do as many as 20-25!
So what's the reason for this discrepancy?
Is there some secret that allows me and others to do pullups so easily?
There isn't, and in this video I go over exactly why I can do as many as I can and why it can be so much harder for others.
I also go over my #1 pull up variant that ANYONE can do, even if you can't do one pull up.
And yet it can build strength and muscle size in some cases even more so than regular pull ups!
So click the link in my bio to see the full video on YouTube or go to my channel by looking up naturallyintense!
Thanks in advance for watching and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
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Maximize Biceps Growth With High Intensity Arm Blaster Hammer Curls!
50lb Dumbbells For 20 reps!
The Arm Blaster is a fantastic piece of equipment for a home gym or any gym!
It doesn't take up much space and allows you to add variety to your biceps training.
It locks your elbows in place, thus increasing training intensity, and by doing a hammer curl, you can use more weight (thus increasing intensity even more) and target your brachialis muscles which help add density to your biceps!
This was my last set and I couldn't go any heavier as I am still nursing a wrist injury, but the 50lbers were more than enough to do the job!
Try them out next time you train arms and let me know how it goes!!!
Still training, hope you are too and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
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Injury-Proof Your Training: The Power of Workout Variation!
One of the main reasons why I can still train heavy and intensely at 49 after 35 years of nonstop training without any training related overuse injuries is the fact that I vary EVERY workout!
Overuse injuries come from doing the same movements over and over and by always changing your routine, you radically lessen the likelihood of chronic injury.
Squats, deadlifts, barbell curls and bench presses are great exercises, but if you do them all the time, you do increase the odds of getting injured.
And as a natural athlete, it bears mentioning that it takes years to realize your full potential, and so it's crucial to have a training program that is sustainable, and one that will allow you to train injury free for as long as I have or longer!
Thanks so much for tuning in and as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
#naturalbodybuilding #naturalbodybuildingtips #naturalbodybuilder #naturalbodybuildingvideos #injuryprevention #fitover40 #workout #gymlife #workouttips #trainingmotivation #naturalbodybuildingmotivation #drugfreebodybuilding #highintensitytraining #injuryfreetraining #longevity
High Intensity Training Leg Extensions To Failure!
And as always, Excelsior!!! #naturallyintense
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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.
