Over the last few weeks I’ve seen the same group of friends several times at social events – school Dad’s social, a birthday, a few Christmas parties, a lunch, a Sale Sharks game and so on.
As I’ve had at nearly every social occasion for the last 20 years, I got a few comments about what I was eating and drinking.
Standard practise when you work in the Fitness Industry.
People often assume that when you do what I do, you live like a monk.
You never drink alcohol and only eat chicken and broccoli.
And, for many, that’s off putting.
They don’t feel that they can do that so they don’t make any changes at all.
One of the Dads commented “Every time I see you, you’re eating and drinking”.
“I get that mate” I replied.
“But, other than at the school gates, you only see me when I’m out socialising. And that’s, what? A couple of meals out of the 100 odd in the month?”
If I’d not eaten anything else in that time frame, I would have died of starvation.
There was more than enough time to average out what happened at those social events.
If I’d had a thousand calories more than I needed on each of those nights, I’d only need to drop the remaining meals that week by 100 calories each to average out.
Higher over consumption and lower under consumption numbers are available.
But its an easy mistake to make.
Many of us do.
Most people probably have a friend who “can eat whatever they like and never gain weight”.
When, let’s be honest, we probably see them eat no more than 10% of the times that they do.
And it’s powerful to remember that, whilst our energy requirements vary, we all gain weight in a surplus and lose weight in a deficit.
With the vast majority of those energy variances being dictated by our size and activity levels.
When body composition and activity levels are matched, there are only variances of up to +/- 80 calories per day.
And it’s hugely beneficial to use a bit of common sense around some damage limitation on those periods of over consumption.
A surplus of a thousand calories being much easier to pull back than a surplus of three thousand.
There being some tactical swaps that we can make so that we still enjoy socialising just as much but with maybe half the impact.
Remembering that using periods of over consumption to justify future periods of further over consumption, calling it “writing it off”, doesn’t make any sense.
Reminding ourselves that, especially at this time of year, you can still socialise and achieve health and fitness related results (that’ll be far more likely if you jump in here —> www.myrise.co.uk/apply) .
They’re not mutually exclusive.
We just need to create an average across weeks and months that will take us in the direction we desire.
Much love,
Jon ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ Hall
——————————————————————-
RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
