Weight loss never occurs at a constant rate like some people believe. I have never seen a weight loss graph where the line has had a continuous downward slope. The following graph is very representative of successful weight loss.
The upticks in weight are where people experience the most frustration and hopelessness. However, if you understand how weight loss is supposed to progress in the first place, the upticks are more like unpleasant bumps in the road than plunges into the abyss.
Avoiding Severe Upticks
Everyone is going to experience upticks in weight no matter how hard they try to avoid them. But it is worth trying to mitigate the severity of these upticks. Severe upticks usually stem from getting out of your normal routine for a long period of time. There’s really no better place to start getting out of your routine than the weekend!
Weekends are meant for relaxation and decompression. It’s everyone’s time to unwind and have fun. But sometimes unwinding leads to taking your eye off the ball with respect to your fitness goals. It’s not that you don’t have the same goals on the weekends, it’s just that you don’t necessarily bring your “A” game with you. But now it’s time for some good news. Weekends aren’t actually as bad as they might seem.
Different Cues
A lot, if not most, of our behavior is dictated by what author Charles Duhigg calls habit loops. Habit loops are made up of a cue, routine and a reward. A cue triggers a routine which is then followed by a reward that reinforces future behavior. For a true habit to exist the cue has to trigger a craving for the reward. Weekends throw our usual habit loops into chaos.
During the week workouts might occur before work, during a lunch break or after work. There isn’t as much structure to the day on the weekend so therefore there won’t be the familiar cues to start a workout either. Some people pack their lunches for work. This is sometimes done the night before. Preparing lunch the night before work ensures that at least one meal the next day will be planned out and potentially healthy. When someone doesn’t have work the next day, there isn’t the cue to pack a lunch. It’s not only the absence of cues for good behavior that occur on the weekends but it’s the presence of cues for bad behaviors that might have the most impact!
Weekends vary from one to the next. One weekend might be mostly spent at home watching TV. Let’s say you spend the majority of your Saturday watching Football or binge watching Netflix. If watching TV is a cue for you to snack then you are likely going to consume a lot of excess calories. If you’re traveling to see friends or family the following weekend then that might be a cue to crack a cold beer or pop a bottle of wine. Just because certain cues are absent or present on the weekends doesn’t mean that you have to follow suit. It can just be really hard to break out of habit loops.
Off The Program
One bad weekend of eating or not exercising will never sabotage your weight loss on it’s own. But weekends are the perfect time to start getting off track for the long term. A two or sometimes three day break in your routine serves as the perfect time for abandoning behaviors that have been bringing you success. People get into the “diet starts again on Monday” mentality on the weekends. If you don’t start up again on Monday then what?
Take Back Control
To combat the lack of structure that inherently exists on the weekends one can insert or remove habit cues. Cues are so powerful because they initiate behavior. Insert a cue and do something. Remove a cue and don’t do something. Focus should be primarily on the cues. Author and habit expert James Clear encourages people to “optimize for the start”. This means people should engineer their days so they introduce cues for desired behaviors. Start doing something for two minutes and the rest of the task tends to take care of itself. You can almost think of it like a rolling a ball down a hill. Once the ball gets rolling it’s hard to stop.
If you’ve had a lapse in your routine don’t worry. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it didn’t collapse in a day either. The same is true of your fitness. The best thing you can do is focus on inserting positive behavior cues where there is little structure. Any structure you can add is going to produce behavior cues as well. Try creating a Saturday or Sunday morning routine so you can keep your momentum going through the weekend. When Monday comes around you’ll have a sense of pride when you didn’t let the weekend kill your weight loss!