"Cheat days" and detoxing ?

[AndreaLV]

I'm not sure where to post this, but I thought here would be a good start. I finished my first Whole30 in early June and was totally feeling the Tiger Blood...until I took about a week off and ate not as badly as I did before Whole30, but definitely not W30. It was my birthday week. There was homemade chocolate cake. Nuff said.

I started a new workout program the 2nd week of July. Mind you, in June, I was 95%+ Whole30 with reintros early in the month. I was jogging 2-3 times/week and doing at home body circuits 2-3 days/week. I was also in a challenge group where we steadily increased the number of crunches and squatsee daily, each day, for 30 days. So I was ezercising. I switched to a more weights based at home workouto with HIIT sprinkled in and some light cardio. I feel like I do less now. Anyway, when I switched workouts and cut out most, not all, carbs, my energy plummeted. I decided to go back to Whole30 most of the time. But I do tend to loosen the reigns some on weekends.

Could my lack of energy/feeling like I could fall asleep at any moment be not eating right/enough like I thought, even though I changed my eating and still want to sleep? Or could it be that because of my "cheat days," I'm in a perpetual state of detoxing all the time? Please helprovide!

And please forgive any typos. I'm on my phone...

[jmcbn]

Hey Andrea

 

I've always said that 'cheat days' on weekends & Whole30 on week days doesn't work for the very reason you've stated - come Monday (or which ever day follows your cheat days) your body is having to work hard to get rid of the toxins, and since Friday is pretty quick to come around again I don;t believe you're ever fully getting rid of the inflammatory foods from your system. This of course all depends on how off the rails you go, and is it 1 cheat day? Or 2? Or more occasionally...?

Now don't get me wrong. I don't believe in Whole365. But I do believe that in order to remain 'in the zone' and be the healthiest best possible version of you that you need to take what you learned from your reintros and apply it to your every day life. Does corn floor you? Then don't eat it. Like ever. Does rice make you bloated but you feel fine the next day? Then maybe you want to eat it on the odd occasion as it might make dining out a little easier. Is one square of chocolate like Heaven, but two gives you the migraine from Hell? Only you know.

What is worth it to you? And how much of that food is enough to NOT push you over the edge?

That said, it could also be that the general composition of your meals on your Whole30 days is lacking in some component, and since you're eating off plan foods on the weekend your body is constantly trying to play nutritional catch up. You talked about cutting out carbs, did you increase fat to counter balance this? We wouldn't really be in a position to comment without knowing what your Whole30 eating days look like.

Incidentally I'm not a fan of the word 'cheat' - you're not cheating. Kids at school cheat during exams. You're an adult & you're making a conscious decision to eat foods that may or may not be the best choice for you or your overall long-term health.

[AndreaLV]

Thank you so much for your reply! I used the term "cheat days" for convenience sake. I didn't feel like I was cheating. I knew what I was doing. Depending on which weekend determines if it was worth it. That chocolate birthday cake? Yep? The small serving of banana pudding on a Sunday afternoon? Totally. It had been years since I'd had banana pudding. But the off plan foods I had last weekend as we were traveling and visiting family? Most of it, which I was eating just because it was there? Nothe at all. And hopefully I have learned from that. I may need a whole15 to get me back on track because a whole5 or 6 doesn't seem to be enough.

As far as cutting carbs, I decided to put them back in. It is not worth being tired all the time and giving up my beloved sweet potatoes to shed a couple pounds of fat. Instead I'm focusing on building muscle. However, I had not added fat to counterbalance the decrease in carbs! Good to know in case I should decide to cut carbs in the future.

Thanks again for the response. It confirms my thoughts on why I feel tired all the time. I also wonder if I just haven't been eating enough. I ate a lot on Whole30...and unintentionally lost weight. I don't feel like I've eaten as much the last couple of weeks. Thanks for the ideas, and I'll see what I can tweak to fix it. First thing being "go easy on the sugar on weekends."

[MeadowLily]

Budgeting the weekends for cheat days would get me nowhere good.  I have a positive food management plan that I consistently follow.   You see,  my mind cannot compute eliminating all carbs including fruit for 5 days and then falling back into highly engineered to be craved foods for 2 days.  The uptick in blood sugar that would create for me is a so not worth it 48 hours. 

[ladyshanny]

The weekends off, weeks on thing never worked for me either. Mostly because the weekend started at happy hour on Friday and went until evening ice cream on Sunday.  The week is only 7 days long and if I was eating crap for three of those days, it only left 4 to eat properly.  So basically a little less than half of the days involved some sort of sugar/grains/dairy/alcohol.  

 

And the saying goes that the results come from what you do the most of. Now in my world I go off plan maybe a couple times a month and those times are one item in one meal, not benders.  The other 88 meals in the month are properly composed & timed and not containing terrible ingredients.  If what you are doing most of is alternating crap-eating and good eating what you end up with is.........nothing.

 

On the note of cutting carbs, if you are talking about removing even the carbohydrates from fruits and starchy veggies, you absolutely have to replace that energy from somewhere or you're basically on a calorie-restricted diet and we know how well those work. That said, if you do decide to go LCHF you will likely end up in ketosis which can be highly problematic for some people, especially women.  It can mess with hormones, sleep, appetite, skin, energy etc.  Be very careful if you decide to do that and watch for signs that it might be going sideways. Speaking from personal experience, I was the leanest I had ever been when I was doing LCHF. And then it took over a year to regain hormonal balance and wellness once I stopped. :|

[AndreaLV]

Thank you for your replies. My off plan eating started off controlled, then I decided to "take a week off" because birthdays and 4th of JULY and starting a new workout program the next week. I never went on a full weekend bender. And all my meals weren't horrible that one week. I even shared my cake with neighbors to get it out of my house, but I did have sugar, and I did have gluten, and I'm thinking I just never had time to recuperate from that because I've been tired since.

I am not interested in a LCHF diet. I was following the meal plan of the new program which restricts starchy carbs to training days only and only for one meal for weight loss. Up to two servings of fruit/day every day, though. I think I require more than that on a regulag day with no workout, so I went back to my Whole30 menu that included lots of sweet potatoes! And because I was restricting starchy carbs, I was probably also restricting calories without meaning too.

Thanks again for your help!