Many of you ask me this: how to carve out a weekend off while on a diet? How to get weight loss results while indulging in everything on Saturday and Sunday?
In short: is it possible to go on a diet with a weekend off?

So: there are diets with free weekends, but they are mostly diets for sportsmen. The weekend becomes the sportsman’s refeed period after he has trained in a high calorie deficit from Monday to Friday. In this way, you lose body fat while keeping your metabolism high despite the restriction.

An example is Scott Abel’s Cycle Diet: you convert your weight from kg to pounds with a calculator like this,  multiply the result by 10 if you are a woman and by 12 if you are a man, and you get the daily calories to consume from the Monday to Friday, but training at least three times in the gym these days or doing hiit activities at home. Saturdays and Sundays Abel advises not to restrict oneself. So he eats everything and is full. But it can’t be done if you are sedentary.

Another example is the cyclical ketogenic diet: you have a low carb diet with high fat (in deficit) from Monday to Friday, such as this one. They then eat carbohydrates, including pizza and sweets, on weekends. The cyclical ketogenic diet is also more suitable for athletes. The carbohydrates consumed go to replenish the muscle glycogen stores lost in the previous days.

If, on the other hand, a person is sedentary, things for a weekend free diet get complicated for two reasons:
the first: the caloric needs of a sedentary person are lower than that of an athlete. If I am on a 1200 calorie diet because I need 1700 calories, I save 2500 calories in 5 days and then I eat excessively on Saturdays and Sundays, most likely these days I regain the calories I lost with so much effort, and maybe even something more. Indeed, almost certainly.
Result? I can at least stay in weight, but I certainly don’t lose weight. 

the second: thinking of being cramped for 5 days a week and then giving oneself mad joy on Saturdays and Sundays is not very healthy. It is an attitude that borders on eating disorder, but this is my opinion, of course. I explain you. In five days in which we go to work, if we set a strong calorie deficit we put our body in a strong state of stress. This stress will lead us not to live the weekend serenely, but to gorge ourselves as if it were Saturday Christmas and Sunday New Year. Moreover, because we know that Monday is back in tight conditions, therefore the so-called ” last meal syndrome ” occurs .

Furthermore, in 5 days our body has nutritional needs , not only for vitamins and minerals, but also for carbohydrates, proteins and fats, or calories. It means cutting back on foods that are more dense in calories but also in nutrients such as oil seeds, aged cheeses, whole dairy products, fish that are fatter but richer in omega3. Over the weekend, however, we will eat foods that are high in calories, but poor in nutrients. Nobody gorges on just parmesan and salmon. Therefore, in the long run, such an attitude risks leading to severe nutritional deficiencies.

But if I was looking for a way, could I find some compromise? Let’s see what can be done on page two. However, taking into account that, precisely for the reasons I have explained to you on this page, losing weight is difficult and making a similar scheme seems unhealthy to me. But since I want to help you and I know that for many of you the weekend free diet would be a solution to not feel sacrificed, let’s see how to do it.