I ate over my maintenance! What will happen?

Hi!

Well I binged on Saturday night, eating way way to much, everything I saw. I thought the weight would just come off. I gained 6 pounds because I also binged on Friday so that makes two days in a row! I decided that I would be careful and go back to maintenence at 1750 to 1800 calories a day. My weight has not changed, maybe by a pound or so, but not much. I have been drinking 100 ounces of water a day. Today I worked out about 3 hours. I have then eaten 2,080 calories. But yesterday, I had eaten about 1750 because I did no excercise! How quickly can I lose the weight I gained. I want to binge out of frustration!!! :(

Binge then, it sounds like you need it. I have to give you credit, I couldn't eat 21000 extra calories in two days like you did.

I'd guess about a week.  Not fat but excess food weight, which you can process only so fast.  Hit it with a day or two of 500-1000 calorie deficits and most of it should go away.

What will happen? The sky will fall in.

Nothing really...maybe just some water weight for a few days after...but provided this was an isolated incident and that you even worked out and went back to your plan immediately after you absolutely will have no problem weight wise

just kidding, you'll be fine :) don't sweat over it! just get back on track and don't let this put you down!

Original Post by merylwhite1:

What will happen? The sky will fall in.

And your palms will grow hair. 

And you will go blind.

Considering you lose around 2 pounds per week with a 500-700 deficit per day then based on not being silly its going to take you 3 weeks.   The risk of trying to do it quicker is that you will simply end up frustrated with not eating enough and then binge and double the damage.

We all binge once in a while, its about getting back to the regular pattern and remembering you can't change the past.

Why did you binge??

It sounds like you have being doing well, especially if you are maintaining. Look at whatever triggered it and then deal with it.

You are not a failure because you binge, you are just going back to an old comfort system that's all. Get off it now and face the problem.

XGill

So what, you ate a lot for a couple of days!  I just did too (I ate a whopping of 4 days of my normal intake of calories on Monday).  It was GOOD and I enjoyed it immensely.  

It's really okay to pig out every so often.  We're human and many of us enjoy eating too many calories...probably the main reason diet companies and sites like this are so popular.

I only sweat out my first lapse which was in June.  When I saw that I didn't gain weight, but actually lost after the binge I learned something.  Your body is averaging your caloric intake and burn rate over a period of time (days???).  I am sure if I didn't binge, I would have lost more weight (but just ounces more), the bottom line is that I didn't suddenly weigh 100-lbs more for pigging out at my favorite fast food place.

My advice to you:

• Brush the crumbs off your chin and look up at the sunrise.  It's a new day and a fresh start.  We get one of those every 24-hours and we have the opportunity to apply all the wonderful things we learned from previous days.

The 6 lbs is probably not all real weight gain.  Your body retains more water because of the extra sodium in the food and also because it needs water to digest the food.  Some of it is also probably because of the weight of the food if it's not very calorie dense.  With that being said, if you are eating maintenance, then binging will result in weight gain.  The easy solution is to go back to eating under maintenance for a short time to lose the weight.  The more important thing is to not let the frustration of a slip-up result in a longer term binge or to lose your perspective.  Slip ups WILL happen.  I suggest taking a few minutes to think about what happened, why it happened, remind/convince yourself to refocus and then come up with a plan to get back on track.