Day 7 - Cheats Meals and Family
One week down, seven to go. Working out for an hour plus a day, 6 days a week takes commitment and I'm determined to stick to it! The caffeine cravings are slowly dissipating and fortunately, the caffeine withdrawal headaches are gone. I'm generally a soda fiend, so this is an accomplishment itself. My coach, Melanie, started me off with a meal plan and macros to follow. I'm surprised at how easy it it to stay on track with my macros. I had previously done another program with the intention of "bulking." However, I could not eat enough to meet my macros - which brought me to this clean eating/cutting program. I feel like I'm actually eating more now that I am tracking macros than I was before and I stay feeling full. I guess that's what spreading carbs, fat, and protein over 5 meals a day will do!
While we're talking about food, let's talk about cheat meals. First off, I'm torn - are they cheat meals or treat meals? I'm leaning towards treat because these meals play an important role in our metabolism and after 6 days of intense workouts and 34 other healthy meals, don't we deserve a treat? I traveled out of state this weekend (8 hours each way!) to visit my brother and his beautiful fiancée. I had been hording my treat meal all week to indulge while I was there. Unfortunately for me, my family is so supportive that when the time came we ended up making a mostly-clean dinner anyway. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious. My crab cake had half a tablespoon of mayo and maybe a 1/10 cup of panko breadcrumbs. For sides, we had squash/zucchini and sweet potatoes. So how do you salvage a nearly lost treat meal? With an Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Creme Cookie Sandwich from Whole Foods (see picture below, cue drooling). I have no idea what the macros were in this thing, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt the sugar hit my system. After I shared my "cheat meal" with my trainer, she said that while she was proud I didn't go overboard, I should indulge a little more next week. This is when I learned that cheat meals are important to our metabolism during a program like this. Stay tuned for a future blog on the Science of Cheat Meals.
The weekend travel also meant using a foreign gym at my brother's apartment complex. My mom joined me for leg day (we left my brother behind with his XBox) and we wondered into an empty gym. Had anyone else been there, I'm not sure how well the workout would have gone, it was fairly small. We went squat for squat and lunge for lunge and trooped through half an hour of interval incline on some rather questionable treadmills. Once we finished, we trudged the exhausting 1,000 or so feet back to my brother's apartment, showered, and drank some Blondie Select Protein from PESCience. I get no commission or incentive for saying this, but this protein always picks me up from a hard workout and satisfies my sweet tooth.
All in all for the week, I learned two things: my family is supportive in this process even when it interferes with their schedule or meals and that cheat meals matter! Thanks for checking in! Again, feel free to send me a message from the Contact section. I'd love to hear what your favorite cheat meals are and feature them in my next blog.
End of Week 1:
