Does this scenario sound familiar to you? From Monday to Thursday you plan your meals, ensure you eat plenty of veggies, do your exercise, hit your daily step target and get enough sleep. Then come Friday you perhaps feel you’ve earned a treat so have a muffin or slice of cake with afternoon tea, have drinks with friends, eat out or order takeaway, stay up late and sleep in the next morning.
This means you’re a little tired and dusty on Saturday, 
so you skip exercise in favour of time on the sofa. You’ve been ‘good’ all week so since it’s the weekend you eat more of the foods you limit through the week. Saturday night means more socialising and more food and drink, then when Sunday hits you crave sugary and fatty foods to pick up your flagging energy levels. It’s only one day right?
Except it wasn’t one day, but three. That’s almost half of the week. Yet you feel frustrated you’re not hitting your Get Lean health goals when you feel you’re doing everything right most of the time.
This kind of weekend sabotaging is common and it’s pretty obvious when you think about it. You may not do all of the things above, but most of us have different lifestyle patterns on the weekend. You might not be a party animal, but have a think about what you do differently and the potential impact that has on your health and wellbeing.
I’m not suggesting you don’t socialise or let your hair down at the end of a hard-working week. Life is for living and seeing friends and/or family is just as important to health as the food you eat or the exercise you do. But there are things we can do to ensure we get the balance right and make the whole week a consistently healthier lifestyle. Here are a few tips:
Ditch the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
I mean in relation to both food and in terms of how you view yourself and your day. If you eat a slice of cake you are not being bad, nor eating a bad food. Enjoy and savour the slice of cake if you really, truly feel like eating it and then move on, making a healthier choice at the next meal.
The more you label your days as being good or bad in terms of your lifestyle choices, the more you will feel deprived after ‘good days’ and feel you deserve the ‘bad days’ to compensate. If you don’t have a wagon, you can’t fall off it!
This is not a license to eat cake every day! Rather it means stop the swinging from one end of the scale on a weekend to the other end of the scale on the weekend. The way you eat should just be the way you eat. My Get Lean food philosophy is healthy eating for life and it’s not extreme… that makes it doable every day.
Balance your weekend
Rather than finishing every weekend feeling worn out, plan activities that help you to achieve balance.
If your life is normally in the fast lane with your foot flat to the floor, spend some time on the weekend relaxing and recuperating. Perhaps take a yoga class, go for a walk on the beach or through the bush for some nature time, stay in one night and soak in a bath with a good book or potter in your garden instead of going to the gym.
If you have night out and eat and/or drink too much, go for an extra long walk the next day and rather than choose fatty and/or sugary foods, opt for seriously nutrient dense foods to help your body recover.
Get cooking
Rather than eating out all weekend, use the extra time (for those that don’t work on the weekend of course) to get into the kitchen. Cook up a few dishes that you can pop into the fridge or freezer for those nights when you really don’t feel like cooking or just don’t have the time.
Rather than buying a treat, take a look in the ‘Snacks & Treats’ section of the Recipe Bank and make something healthier at home.
Similarly, if you really feel like pizza or a burger, make them yourself. They’ll almost always taste better, be cheaper and be infinitely better for you.
Get up at the same time
You’re human if you celebrate the idea of going to bed without setting an alarm and relish the idea of a sleep in on the weekend. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really refresh us at all and it just might be the reason you feel more exhausted at the end of the weekend.
Research shows that we sleep most effectively when we get up at roughly the same time every day. This seems to be more important than going to bed at the same time, although that is clearly key to ensure we get the right amount of sleep. It seems however, that staying up late and sleeping in on the weekend is really the same as jet lag. It gets us off-kilter and our diurnal patterns of sleep and wakefulness get out of whack. No wonder that when the Monday morning alarm goes off the snooze button gets a workout!
Rather than sleep in, get up and get some early morning sunlight if you can. By all means have a power nap later in the day, but by getting up you’ll keep your body clock in tune.
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