How to Eat Like a Weekend Warrior

Do you find yourself losing your fitness and nutrition motivation as the weekend rolls around? Maybe your Monday through Friday is chock full of nutritious meals, but somehow the weekend brings with it a ton of junk food and bad decisions?

Then these tips I learned from Precision Nutrition are for you! Read up on how to become a true Weekend Warrior!

1) Ditch the perfectionism.

You’ve probably already heard me say this around the studio, "Perfect is the enemy of good!" Be kind to yourself and reasonable in your food and alcohol choices on weekends, which will often involve catching up with friend

over meals or celebrations of big life events. Don’t stress out over the piece of birthday cake you had! Allow yourself to be good enough.

2) Stop seeing things in black and white.

When you’re having a fabulous weekend and your normal food routine has been interrupted, remember that your food choices exist on a spectrum. There is no “good” and “bad” food. Look at your options and find something “pretty good” or “not too bad.” And remember #1 — there is no perfect!

3) Get back to the why.

Study your habits and feelings to learn your personal hunger and fullness cues. A lot of diet “failure” occurs when people decide they can’t handle all the “rules” they’ve set for themselves. Instead of imposing restrictions on yourself, eat when you’re physically hungry and stop when you’re physically full. Don’t eat because you’re at a party where everybody else is! Eat because you need the fuel. Once you get back to the why of your food consumption, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to stop overeating.

4) Scrap your “cheat day.”

The cheat day is a popular technique in dieting, and many people find it useful to desig

ate one day a week to relax their dieting “rules.” If it works for you, more power to you! But for most people, knowing that they “can’t eat cookies” (or whatever food they’re craving) until Saturday will only increase anxiety about the scarcity of cookies! Instead, focus on the fact that you can have cookies whenever you want. There will always be enough. This abundance will allow you to feel calm and relaxed so you can examine how your body feels and your personal hunger to decide if you actually want cookies right now — or if there’s something else driving your decisions at the moment.