Personal trainer Emmet gives advice on how not to throw all diet plans out the window when the weekend comes around.

I am going to keep this short and sweet today ladies.

I’m writing this from the airport as I’m getting ready to board my flight to New York.

It is inspired by an overheard conversation that two people were having about dieting and how hard they found the weekends.

The conversation wasn’t very long, but it gave me enough information to write you all some pointers on the subject.

1. STOP BEING OVERLY RESTRICTIVE DURING THE WEEK. 

This is a common theme whenever people start to become healthier and try and lose weight.
They are super strict during the week.
They have all their meals prepared.
They are lazer focused and have a great routine and then Saturday comes and BANG!
It all goes out the window.

Instead of being as strict as you can during the week, try and aim for 90% during the week.

This gives you a small amount of leeway to have a bit of something that you like, without ruining your whole week.

2. GET SOME STRUCTURE TO YOUR WEEKENDS.

Why do you do so well during the week?
It’s simple, structure!
You have assigned breaks, and times to eat from Monday to Friday.
Then at the weekends, you don’t, so the ‘feck it’ mindset sets in and you just get complaisant and binge on crap.

All you need to do is get a bit of that weekly structure into your weekend routine.
Have set times to eat, or have food or snacks prepared so you don’t opt for the easy option and order takeaways.

3. FIND SOME HOBBIES.

Following on from point 2.
The lack of structure is always an issue for some people.
So find something at the weekends that will give you some structure back.
Be active.

Go hiking, start jogging, join a gym, go swimming, go walking, join a club, join a group, just do something that will give you a reason not to sit at home and eat whatever is at arms length.

4. USE THE 90% RULE.

The 90% rule works really well.
It’s simply math done in a dietary manner.
If you eat 4 meals per day, 7 days per week, that is 28 meals over the week.
90% of this will give you 2.8 meals to play with during the week.
So this can be 2 meals and a snack of your choice to plug in wherever you need or want to have them.

You can have these spaced evenly throughout the week.
You can save them all if you know you have a weekend party coming up.
You can use them on Saturday and Sunday if this is where you need them most.
The point is you aren’t ‘cheating’ or ‘binging’, you are simply having 2 meals and 1 snack that you love the taste of guilt free.

The 4 tips above cover most of the reasons why people find the weekends so hard when it comes to staying on track.

Give them a go and try using 1 at a time rather than going all out and trying them all together.

Remember point 1, going super strict isn’t always the right answer, so drip feed these tips in over 4 weeks and try and master 1 before adding another.

If you are unsure of how to start with this or you would like a program that is specifically designed to help you to lose the most amount of fat in the shortest amount of time, please check out my 28 Day Summer Shape Up. 

It has a program for both your resistance Training and your Cardio and best of all, It can be done from home.
http://www.rushefitness.ie/summer-challenge