OK, big weekend coming up here in North America. You have Canada Day on July 1st and then Independence Day on July 4th. There are going to be big parties everywhere.

Now even if you don’t live in North America, feedback from TT readers all over the world show that one of the biggest problems you have with your fat loss program is weekend nutrition.

So I’ve written out the perfect plan for overcoming diet destruction. All you have to do is use these tips and you’ll lose fat and live guilt-free this weekend.

#1 – Shop Now

Buy your groceries before the weekend so that you have the right foods in your house (or in your cooler if you are going to the beach).

Use the PSP system…and I don’t mean PlayStation.

I mean: Plan-Shop-Prepare.

As with anything in life, the more you prepare beforehand to overcome obstacles, you will have a better chance of staying on track.

#2 – Plan Your Reward Meals

Plan when you will have your reward meals/cheat meals. Stick to that schedule. If you know that you are going to cousin Joey’s on Sunday afternoon to feast on his award-winning cookout ribs, then don’t plan an all-you-can-eat pancake-n-bacon buffet on Sunday morning with your ol’ fraternity brother, Bluto Blutarsky.

By the way, if you find that you just can’t stop eating, cut yourself off by going for a walk, brushing your teeth, chewing gum, or simply throwing the junk food in the garbage where it belongs.

A reward meal means ENJOY, not binge-eating to the point where you feel bad. We don’t need that…we want to enjoy eating and living the healthy way instead. Stay strong!

#3 – Stick to the Fat Loss Foundation Diet whenever possible

Whenever possible, choose fruits, vegetables, and raw nuts as your snacks and as the foundation of your meals. Make sure to buy and then pack these for your trips.

If you don’t have good food, you’re going to eat junk. Obvious, right?

But if you at least pack the basics, chances are you’ll make the right choice at least a few times, therefore reducing your diet mistakes and decreasing your feelings of guilt.

Stick to the basics of getting enough sleep and water as much as you can. Obviously when you are on vacation you’ll get out of your schedule, I understand, so that’s why the next tip is so important.

#4 – Start the day right

Reward meals are best left for BBQ dinners, so make sure that you start the day on track with a good breakfast and stick to your fat loss nutrition plan as long as possible. No need to pig-out at breakfast when you know you’ll be around the campfire making S’mores at night time.

Pick your diet battles – breakfast shouldn’t be one of them.

#5 – Have REALISTIC expectations

Listen, whenever I make a “to do” list a mile long, and I only get through half of it, I feel bad – even if I managed to get a lot done. That’s because I’ve set unrealistic expectations for myself.

And the same goes for your weekend rafting trip or weekend down at the Jersey Shore.

If you think that you’re going to eat organic greens at every meal, you’re fooling yourself and you’ll be disappointed and on a guilt trip all weekend rather than a vacation.

So again, use the PSP system. Plan, shop, and prepare – both in terms of buying the right food, but also prepare MENTALLY for what is REALLY going to happen this weekend.

Accept that you’ll have a few more calories than normal…that’s ok, and might even be good for you…and then just get ready to get back on track as soon as you are back home and in control of where and what you eat.

Cool?

#6 – Stay as active as possible

Be a kid again. Look at how they run around at the beach, rather than sitting around reading magazines. Join in their games. Don’t just lounge around sipping boozy drinks and gossiping all day. A little of that is fine, but get your butt off the lawn chair for a few hours each day.

Go for a hike. Play frisbee. Or do some odd jobs around the house or cottage. For example, I love chopping wood. If you ever have me up to your cottage, just give me an axe and I’ll keep myself busy for hours (also make sure your 1st-aid kit is up to date, thanks).

And here are just a few other fun ways to burn calories this weekend:

- Backyard Badminton = 300 calories per hour
- Shooting hoops = 300 calories per hour
- Basketball game with the youngsters = Up to 500 calories per hour
- Moderate cycling = Up to 600 calories per hour
- Bodyweight exercises = Up to 600 calories per hour
- Canoeing = 400-600 calories per hour
- Turbulence Training = 10,000 calories per hour (Ok, maybe not that much…)
- Coaching your kid’s sports = Up to 300 calories per hour
- Lawn darts = 200 calories per hour
- Fishing = 200 calories per hour (more if you are wading in stream)
- Frisbee tossing = 200 calories per hour
- Golf (carrying clubs) = 350 calories per hour

And even if your activity doesn’t burn a ton of calories, you’ll be keeping your hands busy and out of the food, and that is often half the battle when it comes to fat loss.

So use your body for what is meant for – moving – rather than a garbage disposal for junk food.

#7 – Hang with the right people

This is HUGE. If you hang around folks who eat a bag of chips before roasting up a round of hot dogs while drinking a 6-pack of beer, you’re in a heap of trouble.

But if you spend your holiday weekend with folks who want to play in the water, throw the football around instead of sitting inside, and simply stay active while eating moderately, you will be healthier, fitter and leaner, of course.

#8 – Beat the booze

If you’re like me, you might end up at a friend’s house on Saturday night to watch the UFC fight between Lesnar and Carwin. Should be an epic battle.

Of course, that means junk food and booze. Here’s a good plan for you – not only for Saturday, but for any event that involves alcohol.

First, eat a real meal before that fits your fat loss plan. That means protein, fiber, healthy fats, and water. Could be salmon with a sweet potato and broccoli.

Second, go to your friend’s house and take some raw cashews or roasted pistachios.

Third, take beer. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if it’s light beer or not. If you’re going to drink it, take the kind you like. Choose beer (or wine) instead of mixed drinks. A beer or glass of wine contains up to 150 calories, but a mixed drink contains 150 calories from alcohol PLUS whatever mix you add in. So it could be double, triple, or more calories from mixed drinks.

Fourth, alternate between beer and water. So drink one beer, then get a giant glass of water and don’t drink your next beer till you finish it. Snack on the nuts you brought rather than the pizza, chips, or whatever else is sitting around.

Fifth, walk home or get a cab. Arrive alive, my friend!

Alternatively, ignore the above and schedule this as a reward meal/cheat meal night…but don’t overdo it unless you want to feel guilty in the morning.

#9 – Decide what you want more

In the end, your success comes down to this one simple decision:

Figure out what you want more.

Do you want the chips more than a flat stomach? If yes, then eat chips and don’t feel guilty. If the answer is “NO! I want a flat stomach more than I want a stupid handful of potato chips!”, then good news, you won’t eat the chips.

As much as it is Planning-Shopping-Preparation, it’s all about the right mindset. You must be committed.

And if you think that it’s just “easy for you to say, Craig”, well, the truth is that I’ve seen TOO MANY success stories from all walks of life to believe in any excuses.

I truly believe that YOU can do it.

Just take a look at all of the Turbulence Training Transformation Success Stories here:

=> TT Transformation Success Stories

There’s someone from every age group, every gender, every family type (from Mom’s of 3 to single gals, to men over 60 and guys who needed to lose 33 pounds in just 12 weeks).

Read their success stories. It will give you the inspiration you need to believe in yourself.

I love reading those stories, but I don’t need to read them again right now because I ALREADY believe in you.

#10 – Relax, it’s mostly water weight

When you come back from your weekend and see that the scale has gone up, don’t panic. If you consume more calories, carbohydrates, and sodium on the weekend, you’ll also retain more water in your muscles and under your skin.

Weekend weight gain is mostly water. Of course, if you really overate, you will have gained some fat, but not 5 pounds of fat – not in a single weekend.

After all, as you know, it takes 3500 calories to store a pound of fat. And there are 540 calories in a Big Mac. So to gain a pound, you’d have to overeat by the equivalent of over SIX Big Macs…and to gain 5 pounds in a long weekend, you’d have to overeat your needs by the equivalent of over 30 Big Macs.

That’s really tough to do. So relax…and wait to weigh yourself until Wednesday…that’s when you’ll get a more accurate measure.

Hope that helps you stick to your transformation this weekend!

Stay strong,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulence Training

PS – I guarantee that Turbulence Training will work for you.

Try it out for a buck for 21 days. If you don’t think it’s working, just let me know and you won’t pay a penny more.

=> Click here to try Turbulence Training for One Dollar

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

Let’s face it, there’s nothing desirable about a diet in which you’re forced to replace your favourite foods with the same boring, tasteless foods day after painstaking day. And worst of all, most of the time these fat loss diets DON’T even produce optimal results.

So, I recently sat down with Joel Marion, creator of the Extreme Fat Loss Diet and had him take me through some very interesting nutrition, and what he calls, sneaky tips to help you lose belly fat extremely fast.

But first, let’s go over some of the common FRUSTRATIONS people have with standard diets.

Boredom or Lack of Variety:

If you get bored with your diet, there’s a high likelihood that you’re not going to stick to it.

No More of Your Favourite Foods:

Most diets require you to give up your favourite foods for an extended period of time. And when people do end up eating these foods they have a tendency to associate it with feelings of guilt or with it being a negative. 

On top of that, it’s just unenjoyable to think for the next three or four weeks there are certain foods you can’t eat at. It’s this type of restrictive nature of dieting in and of itself that is a huge issue for a lot of people.

Lack of Results:

There’s nothing more frustrating than putting in the time and the effort and seeing very little in return. Unfortunately, this typically happens with most diets – You’ll see an initial surge of fat loss, but as the weeks go on, your results only slowly trickle in.

So I asked Marion…

How long can people stay on a diet, the same diet, and still get results?  

Well according to Marion, it’s NOT through a reduced calorie diet. According to research, after only 7 days of limiting your calorie intake, the hormone levels of leptin decrease to where it has the following side effects on your body:

• Slowed metabolism
• Decreased fat burning hormones
• Increased fat storing hormones

So while in the beginning, this reduced calorie deficit may lead to fat loss results, over time, these results will slow.

But, with a just a few tweaks to your diet and to your workouts, Marion believes you can avoid low leptin levels AND experience incredible fat loss results week after week after week….

Diet Tweaks – Cheating your way thin:

In order to have success with your diet, you’ll need to overcome the 3 most common frustrations we mentioned earlier that dieters face – boredom, food deprivation, and lack of results.

So how can you do that?  The answer, Marion suggests, is in CHEAT DAYS….

After only 7 days of following a reduced calorie diet, the hormone leptin will drop off by 50 percent, meaning your fat burning potential is reduced to 50 percent. 

To counteract these lowered leptin levels, Marion recommends an extreme cheat diet for fat loss. 

Some research has shown a combination of carbohydrates plus fat SPIKES leptin levels the fastest. So, all your favorite foods, the foods that everyone else tells you not to eat while you’re dieting, be it pizza, ice cream, or whatever, they are actually going to be your savior.

What Will This Do?

The leptin hormone will increase back to baseline levels, your fat burning hormones will ramp back up, and your appetite will return to normal levels. But, best of all, you’ll enter the next week of dieting in the same fat burning state as when you started your diet.

Each and every single week you’ll be going into the diet with a RENEWED METABOLISM which ultimately will allow you to burn fat at peak efficiency.

There’s just one rule….

…on your cheat days, only eat until you’re moderately full and then stop.  Because if you’re stuffing yourself to the point of discomfort, then you’ll end up walking around all day feeling sick, defeating the purpose of your cheat day altogether.

Besides burning more fat and avoiding fat loss plateaus, the psychological benefits of knowing that the foods you love are never more than a day or two away help avoid the pitfalls of most diets – boredom and lack of variety. 

And when you start seeing consistent progress week after week after week, it will become so much more psychologically easy for you to stick with the diet, because your motivation level will be extremely high.

Workout Tweaks – Creating Massive Deficits:

So we now know cheat days elevate both your metabolism and the hormone leptin, which in turn presses the reset button on your metabolism…but how can we use this information and take our fat loss to another level?

Here’s what Marion suggests…

…let’s say your cheat day is on Saturday, on Sunday your body, with leptin levels raised, is in a prime position to burn fat – all you need to do is create the deficit and your body will burn the fat.

To create this massive calorie deficit, you’ll want to combine the strategic dietary technique previously outlined with a very strategic exercise technique.

The results of combining these two powerful techniques have so far been incredible – with some of Marion’s clients losing up to a pound of fat a day.

NOTE: This type of massive calorie restriction is only recommended every once in a while, but could mean the difference in adding five more pounds of fat loss a month than you would have experienced otherwise.

Will Cheat Days End Up Overflowing into Fat Storage?

If you think all these calories from your cheat day will overflow into fat stores, then you’re right, BUT…

…Marion shows us how you can overcome that hurdle, while enjoying your delicious foods and cheating your way thin…

Let’s say you gain half a pound of fat as a result of the cheat day, but you did so many positive things to your metabolism that you were then able to lose 2.5 pounds of fat that following week.

Your NET FAT LOSS for the week is two pounds, which is very good.  And if the net fat loss on a weekly basis is two pounds, then you’re going to be on the road to changing your body rather rapidly.

Still, the fact remains that maybe you put on a half-pound of fat because of that cheat day, right? Well, if you can eliminate that extra fat over the course of four weeks, then you will have lost an additional two pounds, equalling 25 percent more results.

So how do you do this?

By using your pre-cheat day to DEPLETE your body’s energy stores.

It’s simple.

If you deplete some of that fat and most, if not all, of the carbohydrates that’s in your body prior to the cheat day, then when you do eat those massive loads of carbs, fat, and calories, you will just be REFILLING those stores, as opposed to having all those nutrients be in excess and SPILL OVER into your fat storage.

And just by following that one simple trick before a cheat day, you can transform your body fast.

But that’s just the start because you’ll need to know what types of workouts to do to really ramp up your results.

Mirroring Your Diet with Exercise:

There are many ways Joel does this in his Extreme Fat Loss Diet Program. For example, if you’re on a pre-cheat depletion day, your goal is to deplete your energy stores, and so you’ll want to follow a low carbohydrate diet for the day
 
Then you’ll also want to use a strategic workout that specifically achieves the goal of depleting carbohydrate and energy stores within the body. So, in effect, this mirroring process of both diet and exercise will maximize your fat-burning results.

If you’re on your cheat day, then you’ll want to do a high volume, bodybuilding style of workout. 

With the massive influx of calories, carbohydrates, insulin, dietary fats, and nutrients going into the tissues within your body and in the blood stream, you’ll not only be stimulating muscle growth on that day, but you’ll also set yourself up to burn fat into the following week, while still enjoying your favorite foods.

In fact,  fitness expert and good buddy of mine, Vince Delmonte was so impressed with the theory behind Marion’s Extreme Fat Loss Diet program that he gave it a 3-week trial before a recent photo shoot of his…the results, 3 pounds of muscle gained, and further leaning out is already lean body.

And it’s these types of fat-burning results Marion insists are possible, especially towards the latter stages of dieting when it becomes exceptionally hard to even think about those kinds of results.

So, you can imagine if you still had 15 to 20 pounds of fat to lose, just how fast you’d be able to transform your body with Joel’s Extreme Cheat Your Way Thin Diet.