Cheat Days… Do you work them into your fitness routine?
I hear a lot of mixed thoughts on this. Some people feel that it's alright to have a cheat day every now and then, or to allow yourself to indulge in anything for one day each week. On the other hand, there's people who believe that you have to be 100% dedicated to a fit and healthy lifestyle, and keep your indulgences to healthy, whole foods and natural goodness. I'm leaning more towards the whole natural goodness side of the scale after today.
Allow me to explain… Ramble… Whatever.
Pre-workout:
Today, I thought to myself, "self… You're great with your food intake 95% of the time. You workout. Let's have ONE day where we just don't care about food (as long as it's still vegan)!"
(Do I speak in third person to myself, and talk to myself as if there's more than one of us? Sometimes. Does that matter? Perhaps…)
Anyways… So I gave myself a bit of a cheat day, so to speak. I had some fries at lunch (uh, deep-fried is NOT included in my daily food intake… But it's a cheat day, right? So it's okay…)
Then, I had some chocolate (vegan, of course). And by "some", I mean more than I should've had. I've had 2 desserts worth of chocolate today. I'm not proud of this at all, even as a chocolate lover. I definitely did NOT practice moderation. I also had a coffee with peppermint and mocha syrup (thank you for vegan syrup, Starbucks!)…
So to add it all up, I've probably had 3 days worth of sugar plus a disgusting amount of fat from the deliciously salty deep fried potato thingies.
Let's just say that today was NOT the right day for a cheat day, because today's workout is Plyometrics, and my stomach isn't feeling too hot right now…
But maybe it's just in my head. I'll press play anyways, because I love the soothing sound of Tony's voice in my ear as I happily and voluntarily torture my body into a sweaty pile of torn muscle and released endorphins.
[Time elapsed - a lot longer than the Plyometric workout should be…]
Post-workout:
So, yeah. Cheat day = bad idea for today. I had to extend a few of my 30 second breaks to 1 minute, one break half way through was 5 minutes because I (gross alert) threw up in my mouth a bit. Disgusting!
You really are what you eat. I ate greasy shitty food (pardon my French), and now I feel like a greasy, shitty mess. (Pardon my French, again.)
Oddly enough, even my kidneys are hurting, which I'm guessing means I don't have enough water in my body right now. I do NOT feel amazing at the moment, to say the least.
I was getting a little cocky with how energized and awesome I've been feeling from my workouts, that today I let myself slip a little to "enjoy something tasty", and ended up paying the price of crapping out on a day's worth of progress. In fact, I feel like I set myself back a couple of days with this. I know I shouldn't be this hard on myself, but one slip turns to two turns to three… Then turns to weeks passing with no workouts, bad food, and no progress. So I should be harder on myself.
Starting tomorrow morning - with breakfast - I will be maintaining the better side of my "diet" (I don't do "diets", but I just like to improve my "overall diet", get what I'm sayin'?), and eating as many raw whole foods as humanly possible. No more junk, it just does absolutely nothing for me. I didn't even really enjoy the "junk" that much when I ate it, but had this notion in my head that "hey, this is a cheat day". Silly me…
Well, I feel bizarre checking off today's workout, because I really couldn't give it my 100%, but doing it is better than not doing it either way. So now, I'm going to take my shaky, sweaty self, and go to sleep. Today is just something I'm not all that proud of, so I'm going to write it off. I think that for my "rest day" this week (day 7) I'm going to include another workout because I really don' feel like I've earned that rest day after today's nonsense. My tummy is hating me right now.
I'm not sure if this is a rant, or something that can help anyone thinking about the whole issue of "cheat days", but let me finish with this:
You only get out of your body what you put into it.
Do with those words what you will, I can't put it any more clear than that.
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