Cheat day…leaning out for competitions.
So you get to a point during contest prep where your calories are generally low and then maybe your energy for workouts is down a bit or their is a plateau in your progress–you have a two choices—you can continue to drop the calories and then up the cardio…Erik and I both DO NOT like that idea or you can start implementing things like refeeds and BIG cheats. I have seen so many girls do endless amounts of cardio…and I am not about to say that it doesn’t work because these same girls come into their shows…lean and looking good. BUT that option is just not feasible for me. I 1.do not have that kind of time 2.I am just afraid I would lose the muscle that I busted my butt for during off season and 3. the rebound from that seems to be bad. So we are going to put in a HUGE cheat day. Which is today. LOL This will help upregulate the regulatory hormones that govern fat loss, various aspects of metabolism–leptin. The huge carb/caloric intake on such days serves as a trigger to upregulate leptin levels and promote continued fat loss WITHOUT having to resort to continued calorie cutting and continued increases in cardio.
The thing that is hard about this is just the mental side. I have been ‘dieting’ for a while and have a negative mindset on ‘cheating’. That ‘cheating’ is BAD. I hit some nice lows this past week and feel like…uh oh, am I going to negate all that I did. But like Erik always says, this is to make progress BETTER. So I will weigh everyday this next week and watch the weight come back down and hopefully by Friday, I will have seen a nice change in my measurements. The funny part is I have most of this on video LOL and my kids are having a blast. Hopefully I can splice it together and put it up…
Hope your day is as yummy as mine.
