Weight Loss 101 - The Free Day
October 16th, 2008 Posted by David Lemberg
Weight loss is not about suffering. It could be, of course. Plenty of people go through plenty of suffering trying to lose weight. But why have it that way? Sure there’s some discipline involved, but the process can actually be empowering and personally fulfilling. Losing weight can actually a fun thing.
What do I mean? Well, if you measure your fun by how many doughnuts you ate, or by knocking back a pint of ice cream a few times per week, it’s not that. The fun part of weight loss is the process – the journey.
Del Mar State Fair - Photography by David Lemberg (2005)
What’s a free day? You want to be on a food plan that changes your body’s metabolism – one that flattens out your blood glucose levels, one that flattens out your blood insulin levels. The result is a body that knows how to burns glucose for energy and then burns fat for energy, rather than a body that is out of synch and stores glucose as fat.
The best way to normalize your metabolism is to eat five or six small meals per day. This is not news. This powerful approach to maintaining optimal body weight has been around for many decades.
And the six small meals food plan works as well today as it did back in the 1940s and 1950s.
This approach has a surprise bonus – a built-in fun factor – the free day. The free day fulfills two important functions. First, your body needs to know that it’s not in starvation mode. On six small meals, you’re consuming about 1700-1800 calories (if you’re a woman) or 1800-1900 calories (if you’re a man), and these numbers are definitely NOT what your body’s used to. You don’t want your body to think it’s starving [if it does, you'll begin to store fat], so you actually need to have a free day once a week.
Your free day also has a very important psychological purpose. You’re doing work and following a plan. A break from the plan is necessary, otherwise it’s going to become boring. It’s great to look forward to your free day and the opportunity to break the routine, to let loose and go crazy.
On your free day you can eat anything you want, in whatever combination you want, and whenever you want. Eat a whole pizza. Eat two. Eat a quart of ice cream if that’s what you want to do. Have a box of doughnuts. Slather on the whipped cream. Have two double cheeseburgers with fried onions and a large soda. Have half a chocolate cake. It doesn’t matter. It’s your free day. 
After a while, you become less exorbitant on your free day. You still eat more pure-fun foods, but you find you’re eating less in terms of mass quantities. You just get more normalized, naturally, as you find yourself listening more to what your body really wants and needs.
Your free day – combined with the ongoing positive feedback from your bathroom scale – makes it possible and realistic to continue on the six small meals per day plan.
Over time your weekly weight loss decreases and eventually you stop losing weight – you’ve reached your body’s natural weight. This is a major accomplishment. Your food plan has become a way of life. You’ve learned how to eat so that you’re healthy, fit, and well. Make sure you celebrate!
[And, by the way, eating six small meals per day is a powerful method for fighting insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity! More about this in another post.]
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