You’re dieting and you’ve just overeaten, what do you do now? Do you need to eat less when you’ve overeaten?
It’s 8 pm, you’ve finished dinner, you’ve had your dessert and you’re still picky.
You’re having this back and forth argument in your head, one side of you is saying you’ve had enough, the other side is still not fully satisfied.
In your mind you tell yourself you’ll just go and have a look at what’s in the fridge.
You open up the fridge to see what is going to satisfy that itch, what is going to taste good right now?
Then you look into the freezer and that’s when you see the ice cream, DING DING DING.
You pull out the tub, don’t even worry about getting a bowl and just start to spoon it straight from the tub into your mouth.
Within five minutes you’ve just smashed down a bunch of ice cream and you’re now full to the brim.
Not just full from food, but now you have guilt.
You’ve ruined it, you’ve gone over your calories for the day and you are upset with yourself.
Do you eat less when you overeat? What do you do now?
Should you eat less when you overeat?
It happens…
Now, this is where some people say FK IT, I’ll start again Monday I’ve already ruined the week.
To me this is CRAZY.
Imagine you’re driving down a highway and you pop a tyre.
Who in their right mind would say “well I’ve already popped one tyre I might as well pop the other three”.
You’d be stupid if you did that.
Yet we do the same thing when we fall off track.
So, before you write off the week, say you’ve ruined your diet and start again next week, let me give you some insight.
You don’t have to eat less when you overeat
Let’s say you’re dieting and you’ve been losing about 500g a week.
This means you’ve been in about a 500 calorie deficit a day/3500 calorie deficit a week.
When you smashed that ice cream you had overeaten 1000 calories over what you were supposed to.
Now, this is the cool thing about math if you went over by 1000 calories on one day but you were on track for the rest of the week.
Instead of being in a 500 calorie deficit for 7 days you’re in a 500 calorie deficit for 5 days.
That means instead of being in a 3500 calorie deficit you’re in a 2500 calorie deficit.
This means you’re still in a deficit for the whole week and instead of losing 500g you’re going to lose about 350g.
That’s still pretty good and you’re still losing!
You don’t have to eat less when you overeat.
OVEREATING DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE TO EAT LESS
The other thing to consider is that your body is going to use some of those extra calories you overate and burn it off.
Your NEAT (fidgeting, tapping etc) increases.
Body heat increases and also you’ll probably poop some of it out.
In reality you’d probably still end up losing about 400g a week vs 500g a week which again is GOOD because you’re still losing.
With a little bit of awareness, you can see that it’s not the end of the world if you end up overeating for one day and as long as you get back on track after you’ll be fine.
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