Who else can have a fabulous five days and then the weekend hits and your will power just disappears. I know for sure this is what has been happening to me for pretty much the last four months.
Despite being religious in my meal planning and ordering my shopping for Friday night to set me up for the weekend and week ahead, I seem to hit lunchtime on a Friday and I just want to eat and drink everything in sight. This weekend I decided to try a new approach and it led to me having an entire weekend on plan which is quite a miracle.
So how did I tackle this weekend differently? I firstly decided to identify the ‘danger’ areas throughout the weekend.
FRIDAY : Afternoon play-date - drinking and eating left over kids dinner. Evening - Continuation of afternoon drinking, boredom eating in front of TV
SATURDAY : Afternoon out with friends : Ice cream van and Coffee shop at walk destination, ‘treats’ throughout the day, distraction eating in front of the TV
SUNDAY : Picking throughout the day
So I had a list of times I would struggle over the weekend and so I needed to find a strategy to get through each of them as I really really really want a loss this week at weigh in.
Friday was fairly easy to overcome all my danger areas in one go. So, before the play-date I let my friend know I would be going for a run that evening and I also informed my husband so I couldn’t back out. My friend was very supportive and didn’t crack open any booze and even if she had, I had already got in my mind I was going to make the most of the weather and get out for a run (I wonder is there a law against drunk running?).
Just thinking about getting out running for some reason made me want to be healthier again and so meant when dinner was being served I didn’t have any desire to pinch a few chips or eat up the leftover chicken nuggets.
The run in the evening meant a) I didn’t feel particularly hungry after so had a smaller portion of dinner b)it took up an hour of the evening I would otherwise have been sat down in front of the tv c) The husband and I decided to actually watch a film on Friday rather than flicking channels which meant I was concentrating on that rather than thinking what I could eat from the fridge.
Saturday I knew we were meeting friends and as the weather was sunny we had decided to meet at our local National Trust which I know has a lovely ice-cream van and also a fantastic coffee shop. My husband and I had already planned a take away so I knew I only had 7 syns for the day. A 99 is about 8 syns and a coffee around 5, so no chance I could have both. I therefore had to make a decision what I wanted more and stick to it. I decided that a coffee was the better choice, the reasons for making that choice are rather poor 1) less syns 2)the sprinkle of chocolate on top feels like a treat lol 3) the queue for coffee is always longer, so by the time I got a coffee everyone else would have pretty much finished their ice-cream 4) a coffee takes longer to consume than the ice-cream so my enjoyment lasts longer – pretty sad reasons but it worked and I was more than happy with my choice and certainly didn’t miss the ice-cream.
Saturday night we had a takeaway, I had planned my syns already so I knew I couldn’t change my mind at the last minute. I served the ‘free dish’ of Bombay potatoes onto my husband’s plate immediately and just gave myself a larger serving of rice, I thoroughly enjoyed the treat meal and still remained within my syns. Saturday night I knew would be hard to resist a beer and something sweet after dinner, so we watched a film in bed, after all who can be bothered to walk down three flights of stairs to grab something naughty from the fridge.
Despite planning my entire family’s meals for the week, the one thing I don’t do is plan snacks. I will plan breakfast, lunch and dinner and how many syns i will have remaining for the day; I will then eat syns as I fancy them. Sunday I decided to actually plan which snacks I would have and when, I realised that I was eating a lot of fruit (which yes is free on SW and entirely acceptable but it does have naturally occurring sugars) so decided instead to have vegetable snacks such as baby tomatoes and mushrooms, then a mid morning cereal bar and a hifi in the afternoon and then I planned to have a fibre one in the evening. Planning my snacks actually made me appreciate them when I ate them, rather than just grazing and then realising by about 2pm I couldn’t have any more treats.
So this was my strategy for the weekend and it worked, I know it won’t work all of the time or if our plans change at the last minute, but I will certainly be putting more thought into the weekends and planning my treats in as much detail as I do my meals. The key to losing the bulk of my weight was planning and organisation and now I don’t have so much to get rid of I am going to have to look for new ways to beat that fat, get back to goal and maybe even set a new weight goal.
Please let me know if anyone else has any suggestions how to stay on plan at weekends.