How was your eating this past weekend?

Weekends tend to wreak havoc on even the most dedicated dieter’s plans. If it’s not your son’s soccer tournament, then it’s the dinner party, or the fast food you grabbed while our running errands on Saturday. But, it’s just one day, right?

Well, unfortunately, no.

Yes, it’s just one day on the calendar, but you can undo a week’s worth of work with one day of indulgences.

Let’s look at a few healthy food items that you might grab on the go, and see where they could fit in:

• McDonald’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich. 420 calories. With the small fries, you are now up to 650 calories.
• McDonald’s Premium Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken. 320 cals.  (swap out for crispy chicken and bump up to 430 cals)
• Starbucks blueberry scone. 460 cals. With your grande nonfat vanilla latte, and you are up to 660 calories for that “snack.”
• Almonds. A couple dozen is 169 calories. Almonds (and all nuts) are a great snack, but the portion sizes are the killer — it’s about what you can fit in the palm of your hand.

From that list you can make some really great and some really bad choices. The day I looked up the Starbuck’s scone calories was the last day I ate a Starbucks scone.

Now, what about the dinner party:

• Vodka cranberry. It depends upon the size of the pour, but for a cocktail drink, you are probably looking at 200-225 calories each.
• Margarita. It’s almost 400 calories for an 8oz margarita. But, I venture to guess that most margaritas are well over 8 ounces, so let’s say 600 calories per margarita.
• Red wine. 5 ounces is around 140 calories. 5 ounces is pretty close to what you’d get out at a restaurant, so if your friend’s are heavy pourers, you are drinking more than that.
• Beer. It depends upon what you drink, but a non-light beer is going to be about 200 calories per pint.

What to do?

There are really two options:

1. Plan life out perfectly, so you know exactly what you are going to eat when and where. I believe that that level of planning is unrealistic and unsustainable. Not to mention not a whole lot of fun!
2. Go with the flow and adopt a caloric averaging technique. Rather than trying to shoot for a fixed number every day, shoot for a weekly and monthly caloric average so you can just let life happen. By averaging your days together, you are going to learn to better listen to your body, and make it OK to eat more or less based upon your mood, hormones, activity levels and life events. I talk more about this in my Jen’s Gem’s for the Healthy Writer column.

So, this week, stop and re-assess how you did last weekend, and make plans to get next weekend better.

Need some help with that? My clients will tell you that I’m a great accountability buddy and we can work together to figure out how to keep the weekends from derailing you progress. Drop me a note so we can figure out how to get started!