How To Get Ripped Abs Challenge – Day 6
It’s Saturday and day 6 on the How to Get Ripped Abs challenge and also a long 3 day holiday weekend so I’m looking forward to getting some time with the family. Sometimes it’s tougher to stick to a diet plan when I don’t have the distraction of work all day to keep me busy. I haven’t had that problem today. I’ve been feeling so great and energetic that I don’t even want to fall back into any of my old eating patterns. Once you start associating the good feelings that you have with how you are working out and eating you develop a neural link in your brain. When this starts happening it gets easier and easier to follow a program because it becomes more of a habit rather than a chore. Ultimately you want to develop your healthy eating lifestyle into a habit that comes without thinking. Any thoughts of straying from your healthy lifestyle start to bring up the painful memories of how you felt when you were tired and overweight.
The How to Get Ripped Abs program will keep you on a nice steady line of fat loss with boundaries that you can easily stay within without a problem? When I set off to do this program I intended to do an honest review as well as throw in some cheat meals. I believe that you can steadily lose body fat while still enjoying your favorite meals. In this case I am limiting my cheat meal to once per week until I have got down to my goal weight. Fat loss will happen faster if you stick to the plan 100% but I wanted to show people that great results still occur when you maintain your sanity and enjoy your favorite meal. My Saturday night ritual will typically be a small pizza with a glass of wine. I’m guessing this will have me downing close to 1,000 calories in one sitting. This is what made me fat in the first place but by doing it several times per week. Late night eating that consists of high amounts of fats and carbohydrates will fatten up just about anyone and especially when you do it consistently. Fat loss can still happen if you keep this meal to only once per week.
I ate a small pizza with pepperoni, onions, and mushrooms and had an 8 ounce glass of wine. I had 1 chocolate chip cookie for dessert. It was very important that I limited myself to only 1 cookie though. That’s all I needed to get the psychological good feeling from that food. If I had eaten 3 or 4 it wouldn’t have had any additional positive effect on my mind but it would have been enough extra calories in sugar to take me backwards a bit in my fat loss. Give yourself a treat but make sure you limit yourself. This is an excellent habit to get yourself into for the rest of your life. I used to be a late night binge eater and the foods I would eat were high in sugar and fat. This is a formula for rapid fat gain and should be avoided at all costs. The How to Get Ripped Abs program will burn fat off your body faster than anything else but you want to stick to the eating plan 95% of the time and you should still see all the results you are looking for. In 7 days I will eat around 35 meals so that 1 cheat meal only accounts for 3% of my eating for the week. It’s important that you just don’t overdo it to much on that one meal and when the meal is over stop eating.
I would also suggest that you don’t weigh yourself the day after your cheat meal. This can be very deceiving because when you eat clean whole foods all week your body has flushed out all the excess water and you will be your lightest. When you take in a cheat meal full of sodium and extra carbohydrates your body can hold onto a couple extra pounds of water. This is not fat gain, it’s just your body holding onto water which will make you a little puffier or bloated. One or two good days back to normal eating and drinking lots of water will flush it all back out. My Sunday will be sticking to my eating plan very strict and drinking at least 10 glasses of water. I’ll end up making several trips to the bathroom flushing that extra water out but by Monday my weight should be back to normal. You want consistency in your weigh ins so if you eat your cheat meal every Saturday and weigh in on Monday you’ll be able to measure accurately. If you change it up and eat your cheat meal on Sunday and then weigh in on Monday you could inadvertently disappoint yourself because you might not show any weight loss. It would be better to wait another full day until your weigh in to keep it consistent. Don’t let your body fool you.
The How to Get Ripped Abs program has you doing 3 cardio workouts per week so today I have my third workout. I chose the jump roping cardio workout and it was very challenging. Jumping rope at 250 pounds is quite burdensome and I found myself not able to complete a full minute for the working round so I doubled the work sets and did 30 seconds straight with 30-45 second rests. By the end of 30 seconds my calves were burning pretty bad and I was breathing heavy. This will be so much easier when I’ve dropped 20-30 pounds. This workout definitely juiced my metabolism up so that my cheat meal of pizza wouldn’t do any damage. I still might actually lose fat today!
Tomorrow is a much needed day of rest from How To Get Ripped Abs training. I’m still sore all over so I’ll do some stretching to work out the kinks and get ready for week 2.
