Your Ideal Form

Helping you on your journey to your best self!

Audrey D

Eating Back Exercise Calories

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Should You Eat Back Calories Burned Off from Exercise-

A question I see get asked a lot is whether or not one should “eat back” the calories burned during exercise. You’ve calculated your TDEE, and you’re eating at a deficit to lose weight*, but that exercise raises your TDEE some, so you’re now at a greater deficit. Should you eat those calories back?

This is a bit tough for me because to be perfectly honest, I just don’t get it. After doing all that work, why would you negate it all by eating it all back? There’s also a big potential pitfall with eating back your calories: overestimating how many calories you’ve burned and thus eating back more than what you just worked off. Studies show** that people regularly overestimate how many calories we burn during exercise. And it’s not our fault; cardio machines grossly overestimate how many calories you burn, and even fitness apps can just do a best guess based on national averages. So the treadmill/app tells you that you’ve burned 300 calories when it’s really 200, and you think that means you’ve earned that 250 calorie snickers bar. But in reality, you’ve undone all your hard work, and you’re now over your budget.

Studies also show we tend to be bad at estimating how many calories we eat***. In this case, we tend to underestimate the number of calories in the food we have. With more and more places putting calorie counts on menus, this is getting harder to do, but if this isn’t commonplace where you live yet, it can be easy to convince yourself that your post-workout smoothie is healthy, and therefore much lower in calories than it really is. Combined with the elliptical machine telling you that you burned more than you actually did, and it becomes really easy to eat more than your TDEE for the day.

So, what do you do if exercise leaves you woozy and you have to have something after your workout? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Aim for eating back half the calories you burned at most.
  • If working out is always leaving you feeling ravenous, try switching to lower-intensity exercise.
  • A controversial opinion is to stop exercising all together and just focus on your diet.
  • Try to think of any calories burned during exercise as merely a bonus or a turbo boost to get you to your destination faster!

 

*If you’re trying to gain muscle, you definitely want to eat back those calories, getting as much of them from protein as possible!
** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26469988
*** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

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If you want to get fit, you have to give away only one thing. Your excuses.

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If you want to get fit, you have to give away only one thing. Your excuses.

On our journey toward our best selves, excuses are like roadblocks. They completely stop us, and in order to keep moving forward, we need to find some way around them. If we don’t, we’ll just stay stuck and never reach our goals.

One way to get around an excuse is to re-frame how we think of things. Don’t think of healthy eating has having to “give up” your favorite foods, but rather as you get to eat healthy and feel good. Don’t think of working out as having to miss out on sleeping in, but rather as you doing something to become more badass.

Another exercise that can help bust your excuses is to flip the script. Pretend that you were to invite a friend to do your favorite activity, and they gave you the excuse that you just gave yourself. What would you say to that friend to convince them to join you? How would you suggest that they join you despite their objections? What creative ways can you come up with to overcome these self-imposed barriers?

Which excuse do you struggle with the most? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll help you bust them!

4 Reasons to Be Patient with a Plateau

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Getting Through a Weight Loss Plateau

On your journey to reach your ideal form, there may come a time when the scale just does not seem to be moving. These are plateaus, and they feel like you’re driving across Interstate 10 in Texas. You’ve been driving for 8 hours, and you’re still not out of the state. It can be tempting to just throw in the towel when it seems like you’re spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast, but if you can hang in there, I promise it will be worth it.

We’re going to define a plateau as being at the same weight for three or more weeks. One or two weeks might just be a fluke. Three, and we’re definitely in a plateau.

Here are four reasons to be patient when dealing with a plateau:

  1. A big woosh could be right around the corner at the next weigh in. Weight loss is rarely linear, and often times when the scale seems stuck, when it does start moving again, it does so in a big way.
  2. If it’s only been a week or two, there are a number of things that could be messing with the numbers on the scale: your monthly cycle, a very intense workout session, or eating big meal up to a day before you step on the scale can all increase water retention. Water is heavy, and can easily throw your weight off, so try to weigh yourself first thing in the morning, before any workouts or meals.
  3. Keep in mind that a plateau is being at the same weight for a number of weeks. Often times, when someone starts a new program, there’s a large drop in weight due to water weight loss. But that’s not sustainable. If you’re losing a half to one pound per week, you’re doing great!
  4. It’s a slow process, don’t make it slower by giving up now. Learn to enjoy the process rather than fixating on results and you’ll actually get better results.

If you’ve been at a plateau for more than six weeks, then it’s time to re-evaluate your process. If you’ve lost a significant amount of weight, you may need to recalculate your TDEE.

If you’re stuck in a plateau, now is a good time to go back and look at pictures you took at the beginning of your journey. Inspire yourself by how far you’ve come.

You have the potential to be your own greatest fitspiration. Keep going.

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You have the potential to be your own greatest fitspiration. Keep going.

I love Pinterest. I probably spend way too much time browsing and pinning on that site. It’s fantastic for finding motivation and fitness inspiration, or “fitspo” as the kids are calling it these days. I especially like pictures of people doing crazy flexible poses because that’s something I’m currently working on for myself.

Despite how many pins I have on my fitness motivation board, however, that’s not what keeps me going. Seeing progress each week is. Seeing numbers on the scale go down, the weight of my lifts going up, or the distance I can run stretch a bit further has become my motivation. That feeling I get when I make progress, even if it’s tiny, makes me feel so awesome. Looking in the mirror and liking what I see. That feeling is my fitspo.

What one thing can will you do today to make yourself feel proud?

4 Reasons Why You Should Be Meal Prepping

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Why You Should Be Pre-Prepping Your Meals

Have you ever been stuck going nowhere fast on a busy freeway with lots of traffic and looked on with longing at people speeding by in the carpool lane? Or have you been one of the drivers in that express lane, exceedingly grateful that you weren’t one of those poor souls going nowhere in gridlock? On our journey toward our ideal selves, meal prepping is that +1 in your vehicle that lets you get into that carpool lane and really make progress. Let’s look at four reasons why meal prepping is so powerful in helping you reach your goals.

1. Makes it easier to eat healthy

We humans are lazy efficient. We are always looking for the easiest way to accomplish our tasks. By prepping some healthy meals ahead of time, you take the dread away from having to cook when you get hungry. Simply heat up some food you’d made previously, and dinner is served. Slow cooker recipes allow you to dump a bunch of ingredients into a pot, set a timer, and go off to work. Come home, and dinner is done! And the recipes usually yield big portions, so you are likely to have some leftovers for lunch the next day or dinner later in the week. Prepping can also help with snacking. When I buy grapes, as soon as I get home from the store, I wash the grapes, then stand there and pick each one off the vine and into a bowl. The bowl then goes in the fridge. Whenever I feel the need for a snack, it’s super easy to just open the fridge and grab and handful and start popping them right into my mouth. If at the time I wanted to eat them I’d have to pick them, I’d likely pass for something else. Prepping makes the easy choice the healthy choice.

 

2. Built-in portion control

Another way that prepping can help you reach your goals quicker is with some pre-built portion control. Each week on Sunday, I prep my lunches for the week. Currently I’m doing salads, but in the past I’ve also done tuna with chickpeas and tomatoes, baked chicken thighs, and ground turkey with oats. Whatever the meal, I cook up a big batch, then divide it up into containers and put them in the fridge. In the morning before work, I just need to grab a container to take with me for lunch. By doling it all out beforehand, I know exactly how much I’m eating each day.

 

3. Saves time

Meal prepping sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, it saves so much time.  Take 10-15 minutes to plan out what your meals for the week will be, and write out your grocery list. If you tend to be a bit particular, like I am, you can even put the list in order based on the route you take through the store. It makes shopping trips so much faster. Also, while it does take some time to prep my lunches for the week, it would take longer in total to make a salad each morning than to make all of them at once. Plus, I get to sleep in an extra five minutes. Slow cooker meals are the ultimate in time savers. The prep work for the recipes is usually fairly minimal; mostly it’s just dumping all the ingredients into a pot and setting the timer.

 

4. Saves money

Planning and prepping your meals in advance saves money. You will waste less food when you only buy what you’re going to cook. And since you only bought enough for the one week, you avoid the issue of having too many options and having food go bad because you never got around to cooking it. Using my grapes example again, I eat them all up because they’re easy to eat, so they don’t go bad, and I haven’t wasted my money.

 

Just like any other trip, our journey toward our best selves requires planning to get us to our destination. And meal planning is a tactic that will help get you into the fast lane.

 

What’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Let me know in the comments!

Healthy Starts with the Shopping Cart

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Healthy Starts Here

Whether it’s a trip around the world, a road trip to the next state over, or a trip to the grocery store, having a successful trip is all in the planning. As much as we tend to do it, we really cannot rely on our future selves. Future Self tends to let us down, even if, to Present Self, Future Self is perfect and full of promise. Let’s make things easier for Future Self.

Plan out your meals for the week, write down what you need, and then head to the grocery store with that list. Don’t believe that Future Self won’t make impulse purchases without a list to follow. Stick to the list. Don’t count on Future Self not eating that entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. Just don’t buy them in the first place. Help your Future Self live up to being the best they can be by making the healthy decisions for them in the present.

 

What other decisions can you make now to make it easier for your Future Self to choose the healthier road?