The 90% Rule, or How to Cheat Your Way to Victory
When you’re trying to lose fat, it’s not necessary to be perfect all the time in order to succeed. Thank goodness for that, or I’d never make any progress. What you do you need to do, is to be doing mostly the right things, most of the time, over a long period of time. If that sounds familiar, it should, since it’s the key to a lot of things, not just weight management.
You need to be at 90% compliance in each area individually, and all of them composited together in order to progress. I put that in bold, because it’s incredibly important. Be warned, it’s not the 80% rule, or the 65% rule, it’s the 90% rule, you need to get things right 90% of the time. The good news is, the difference between 90% compliance, and 100% compliance isn’t that big a deal.
Let’s take meal frequency for example. You should be eating every three hours, which works out to six meals a day. At seven days a week that’s 42 meals. 90% compliance would be 38 meals, so up to 4 meals can be incorrect and you’ll still succeed. Missing a meal, too many calories, bad food selection, any of these things counts as a bad meal.
So what’s the good news? Given this rule you can plan to cheat once in a while, and it won’t derail you. (when you do it properly) If you lead an active busy life, it’s bound to get in the way of your fitness goals now and then, so generally I cut off two meals for unplanned emergencies, leaving you two to schedule.
Restaurant meals are consistently large, much too large for a diet meal, so an easy rule is to never eat more than half of what you order when going out. (One of the few positive things I learned from weightwatchers) I ask for the takeout box before I even start chowing down, out sight out of mind, and all that. So if you get two meals out of going out once, and you have two cheat meals available, that means you can plan to go out once a week without hurting your progress, and eat the second half later so you’re not wasting money.
Never schedule more than one cheat meal a day, it’s too easy for this to cause havoc in terms of insulin spikes and calorie intake. In addition, if you eat the second half of your cheat meal on a separate day you’ll get quite a bit more psychological satisfaction out of it, and that helps you to stay on track.
Each meal of the day should be approximately 1/6th of your daily intake. I generally allow for it to be up to 50% smaller, or 100% larger so that I don’t have to fuss about exact calories too much, while still ensuring that insulin level stays manageable. If your calorie target for the day is 2374 calories, that would mean you’d want each meal to come in at around 395 calories or so, with the allowed range as 197 - 791. Anything outside that range is not an appropriate sized meal.
When you’re having a cheat meal, you can break one rule, either the size rule or the content rule, but if you break both, that counts as two cheats. So for example if you have two 14″ slices of Domino’s Pepperoni Pizza 628 Calories, 28g Protein that’s an ok cheat because you broke the content rule, but not size. If you had a 16oz. New York Strip Steak 1274 Calories, 86g Protein, that’s an ok cheat because you broke the size rule, but not content. Having a large bowl of Chocolate Ice Cream (4 cups worth, which is not nearly as much as it sounds) 1144 Calories, 24g Protein, would not be correct since it breaks both the size and content rules. Since you’re only supposed to plan one cheat a day, breaking both rules is a no-no.
If you mess up and get off track, just record what you did, and go right back to your plan. Long term success is the accumulation of lots of little victories.
December 28th, 2007 at 10:44 am
[…] lose weight effectively, and while you don’t need to be perfect as I described previously in The 90% Rule, or How to Cheat Your Way to Victory you need to get most of the things right most of the time, for a long period in order to […]