Weekend Ruins Your Weight Loss Progress? Here’s How to Fix It

I spend a lot of time on social media, and I believe I have some terrible news that you may be able to relate to — people are absolutely awful at maintaining progress during the weekend:

Some (read: many) people are locked in from Monday through Friday to create a meaningful calorie deficit for weight loss, only to achieve a critical level of “fuck this dieting thingy” on Friday night, waking up surrounded by pizza boxes on a Saturday morning.

We see this in the literature, too. For example, a 2008 study found that participants consistently lost weight on weekdays, but on weekends… they became good little consumers of excess food and stopped losing weight:

Not only because they ate too much during the weekends, but also because they moved less on Sundays. I guess when you’re stuffed and maybe hungover, some invisible force sucks your body toward a couch so you don’t feel like getting your steps in.

Does this mean you can’t enjoy weekends without ruining your progress? Of course not. But first, you need to identify why you end up overeating. In my experience working with clients, there are two types of people:

  • The Restricted: Those who lose progress over the weekend because they’re overly restrictive with their food choices during the week, leading to a binge on the weekend.
  • The Unintentional: Those who won’t do the math or plan in advance, failing to pay attention to how much they’re eating because it feels like “too much effort.”

If you fall into the first, The Restricted, group…

Many of you have likely experienced this: you purposely exclude various foods from your diet, labeling them “dirty” or “unhealthy.” Once you can no longer resist, you end up gorging yourself sick on the very foods you claimed you couldn’t eat because of keto or some such shitty fad.

If that’s you — if you keep ruining your progress on weekends simply because you don’t allow yourself any flexibility on weekdays — then, honestly, WTF?

You don’t get extra points for suffering through a diet of chicken breast and kale for five days just to earn permission to eat junk on Saturday because you “deserved it.” It is entirely possible to fit a little bit of “fun” food into every single day of the week. Granted, you still need to manage your portion sizes.

As Alan Aragon once said,

“A diet that’s consistently 80–90% wholesome and nutritious is better than a diet that alternates between striving for 100% perfection between binges on 100% crap.”

Consider this: You may think that avoiding “bad/unhealthy/dirty” foods is good for your health but if the act of avoiding them causes you to feel overly-restricted and periodically binge on them, is it actually doing you any good?

If you want to improve your dietary adherence on weekends, adopting a more flexible approach — where no foods are strictly forbidden, whether it’s Tuesday or Saturday — is likely better for long-term success.

Just keep in mind that the 80/20 rule (80% whole foods and 20% “fun” foods) doesn’t work if the 20% contains as many calories as the 80%.

If you fall into the second, The Unintentional, group…

Here’s the deal: you don’t need to eat the same amount of calories every day to lose weight. You can manipulate your calorie intake based on your preferences, as long as it remains sensible. Eating 5,000 calories on Saturday and 700 calories Monday through Friday is a stupid strategy.

Here’s how I have my clients set up their calorie intake for non-linear dieting:

Step one: Figure out your daily calorie budget

Second, multiply your body weight by… Ahhh, you know whut? You should just Google that part. “TDEE calculator.” Any calculator will do; don’t overcomplicate it. All calculators are based on averages, so it’s likely you’ll have to adjust your intake based on your progress anyway. Let’s say your daily goal is 1,600 calories.

Step two: Choose your “high-calorie” days

And if you’re like, “But I want to have three high days with 3,000 calories on each cuz beer, cheesecake, and stuff,” well, ugh, sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Stop trying to find a way out. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that losing weight is easy. It’s not. And it’s not supposed to be. Sit with some discomfort and sacrifice. So no more than two high days for you.

Step three: Decide how restrictive you wanna be on weekdays

This depends on many factors — your training goals, activity levels, and food choices, etc. — but I wouldn’t go lower than 1,450 calories per day, as it may become difficult to hit your protein targets.

So this is how my calorie intake would look like throughout the week:

Step four: Post-high-calorie-day adjustment

What I’m trying to say is this: Sometimes you will cock up and eat more than 2,500 calories. Sometimes a lot more. What do you do then? Do you…

  • a) Practice self-love and pretend it didn’t happen.
  • b) Practice self-hate and kidney-punch yourself, telling how useless you are.
  • c) You acknowledge the fact that you went bonkers by eating way too much, so you reduce your calorie intake slightly on the following day(-s) to counterbalance the indulgence (as long as you don’t go so low that it resembles some sort of an eating disorder).

~
So yeah. That’s it. I guess.

This isn’t exactly mind-blowing stuff, but hopefully these strategies will help you eat slightly better on weekends and not ruin your progress, because nothing sucks more than spending week after week after week hitting the RESET button every Monday.

If you’re frustrated and you feel like you’re making zero progress because you keep hitting the “Reset” button every Monday, I’m here to change that. Apply for 1-on-1 Coaching here and let’s start your last “Day 1.”

Originally published by me on Medium on May 31, 2026

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