Charging Day

I didn't really want to talk about refeed days on this blog, because for a woman to talk about refeed days is like sending a guy in a relationship to watch a movie with a famously promiscuous girl. The basis of successfully completing a program is to stick to your meals, and to eat what you're supposed to, when you're supposed to, and how you're supposed to. On Formspring, a girl (who else) wrote to me that on the 35th day of her program, she ate 2 cottage cheese pancakes and was overwhelmed with guilt, wondering if she had messed up or not. The biggest problem with these slip-ups is that they initiate processes that will bring down your program like an avalanche, and most of the time, there's nothing you can do about it. The best example of this is smokers who quit half a year, 2 years, 5 years ago, it doesn't matter when, but if they light up just once, it's 100% certain they will get back into it, even though we're talking about just one damn cigarette, which will, of course, turn into whole packs within a few days. It's exactly the same with dieting. A single slip-up is just a single slip-up that wouldn't cause any problems, but the shit hits the fan when this is followed by another bad meal and "this much is still okay," but if it was okay just now, it will be okay next time too, and this is the point where we arrive at a place of no return, and this was only the mental part of the process, and we haven't even talked about the body yet. While we can control our minds, our body's instinctive demands can be quite deadly, so in addition to mental failure, there is also the physical factor that will cause us some unpleasant moments...   

The beginning of a diet is the worst because the body is used to a certain rhythm and lifestyle. It received plenty of carbohydrates, and the endorphin center received enough sugar to satisfy our hedonistic needs. This is an ancient hoarding instinct, which we needed in the past, but today, to satisfy these instincts, we don't need to constantly gorge ourselves, fearing that one day there will be no food and we will starve to death in Blaha Lujza Square. Our body will therefore protest against the reduced carbohydrate intake, which also lowers our energy levels, and on top of that, there is the detoxification caused by healthy foods, which makes us feel so incredibly bad. After a while, however, the body realizes that the conditions have changed, there is no unlimited food, and it will react by slowing down its metabolism, thereby switching itself into a standby mode, preparing itself for lean times. 

Our body senses that it will not be able to cover its daily energy consumption from the foods it has used so far, and begins to draw on the reserves it has stored precisely for this purpose, preparing for such periods. That's why we could constantly eat as much as we want, because our body always wants to keep our food intake above our basal metabolism, so that it has something to draw on during periods of food scarcity, and that's why it's so incredibly difficult to maintain our weight. So, metabolism slows down and tries to convert everything into energy, which is why it's so frustratingly hard to lose fat, because the body considers everything carefully and doesn't really waste anything, only if forced to, which we can only achieve with a continuously maintained diet, and here's the point...

The refeed day, I repeat DAY, so not a week, or days, but a refeed DAY, comes into play here, which means that within one day, we need to incorporate 1-2 meals that are high in carbohydrates and would otherwise be forbidden during the program. The ideal choices for this are pasta, potatoes (but not fried or croquettes), cornflakes, or even gyro pita. However, on refeed days, all forms of sugar are strictly forbidden, so cottage cheese pastries or jam bread won't be among these 2 meals. With these 2 DAILY meals, we trick the body into thinking it's Disneyland again, the dry season is over, and it speeds up the metabolic processes it had previously held back, accelerating fat loss. Yes, but we're only talking about ONE DAY, and after that, we continue the diet as usual, meaning we eat at a calorie deficit. The body has revved up, weight loss starts again like crazy, giving new momentum to our continued weight loss. So, this is the refeed day, which is one of the most useful and effective tricks we can use to boost our weight loss and metabolism, but as I mentioned, this is a very dangerous dance because it carries the risk of a chain reaction. It's very difficult to get back into a strictly maintained diet after this day, and as I've experienced, not everyone succeeds, but well, anyone who has as much perseverance as talent for life can just wither away, wrapped in a blanket in the summer at the beach, or generally wherever the period of confrontation reaches their pathetic fate…

Oh yes, after all, only the essence was missing. Incorporate a refeed day every 15-20 days. Not earlier, so not weekly, not every 3 days, but every 15-20 days…