Image via Wikipedia

I know that you feel pretty lousy right now, probably beating yourself up over it? I know that you probably don’t want to hear it, but “it happens!” I’ve been a trainer long enough to realize that it happens at some point with my clients. Do I get mad? Do I let them have it when I find out what they’ve done? “hell yea!” Most of the time, I don’t find out until they come clean about it when they can’t give me 110% during a training session, then I know something is up! I only give them hell, because I want them to learn from it, to face where they’ve been, and where they’re heading. Sometimes when a client cheats, it’s a great way for me to remind them exactly why they’re pushing themselves each day, why they’ve began this journey to begin with. We’re not perfect and it’s impossible to be, but what we can do, is learn whatever we can get out of it, so we can get a better understanding of why we lost control, and how it can been avoided in the future. This is the reason why I can’t stress enough the importance of journal writing, that way you can pinpoint the hours, the moments leading up to your cheat. Ask yourself, did you have breakfast that morning? Did you follow you meal ratios of  proteins, carbs, and healthy fats? Did someone or something upset you? Did you feel lonely? Did you overtrain? There are so many variables that could be responsible for your cheating and understanding exactly what’s going on is not that difficult if you analyze your journal or you nutrition and training log. Your feeling of guilt is only natural, because you feel you let yourself down, and now you’re probably stressing over if you’re going to gain weight this week. If you’ve been sticking to a healthy nutrition plan for a while now, you also probably aren’t feeling so great physically right now either? When the body hasn’t had that much sugar in a longtime it doesn’t handle it very well, and you’ll find that you really didn’t enjoy the foods you’ve eaten anyway, so feeling sick and guilty, “not a good combination!” So, what now? You must let it go, put it behind you and make sure tomorrow that you get back on your training and nutrition plan 100%. Do not attempt to starve yourself for the day, in hopes of “catching up” with a calorie deficit, because you’ll only be putting yourself back into bad old habits, and you’ll shut down your metabolism that you’ve worked so hard to repair in the first place, by eating your 5-6 small meals per day. You must put this lapse behind you! Get back to your journal, write about what you’ve learned about yourself through this experience and move on from it. “It happened, no biggie, time to move on!”