Dieting: The effort and enjoyment
If you read anything about dieting on the internet these days, it can sound like the most boring and most dullest thing ever. Especially when it "seems" all people do is eat out of tuppaewar 5 times a day for 12+ weeks of the year.
The reality of it is we all have social lives and all enjoy family time. Unless you have a strict date to adhere too for a competition, holiday or photo shoot etc. the chances are, your diet doesn't need to be as strict or as boring as it is. - Theres no doubt that to lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit, so if your used to eating out 5 times a week. You don't have to stop eating out, but maybe keep it to a maximum of 2-3 times and be smarter when choosing your meals. With businesses these days a lot of people have to eat out with clients and colleagues. So what can you do to help adhere to your diet, but still enjoy the finer things in life?
- First of all if you know where your eating you can research the menu before, this can help with choosing portion sizes and helps massively with calorie control. So you may not be able to afford the desert but you can certainly go for a better starter and main course. A lot of the time people panic when eating out and over indulge unnecessarily, for example eating at an Italian... Getting a Garlick bread, followed by a pizza and then a desert
- Rather than a Prawn cocktail/melon and parma ham starter, followed by a steak and veg for main course. Your probably saving yourself around 800 calories.
Another thing you can do is "save" your macros for the later part of the day, if you know your eating out in the evening, why not hold back on your carbs and fats for the morning and mid afternoon, this would then allow you to enjoy an evening meal out. At the end of the day if you eat 200g of carbs over 2 meals or 200g of carbs in 1 meal, you've still only consumed.... 200g of carbs. If worse comes to worse, you can always cut back on some carbs and fats for the following day if you over indulged the night before. - Dieting doesn't have to be boring. It just has to be smart!