I occasionally see this on social media where bodybuilders will gorge on giant meals of desserts and junk food and somehow dont end up with diabetes, become ill in general, or just wreck their physique. I understand they probably eat healthy on other days that we dont see, but still it seems odd to not have any negative effects from these wild cheat day binges.
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People usually count calories by the day, but you can also go by the week, or even month. Say a bodybuilder needs about 3,500 calories a day.
3,500 calories a day
24,500 calories a week
105,000 calories a month
Bodybuilders are accustomed to lowering caloric intake to cut down bodyfat before competitions, so if they really want to be strict, they can make up for having nearly 3x a daily intake in a day by lowering intake for the rest of the week.
10,000 on day one leaves you 14,500 for the week, or a little over 2,400 a day. Still respectable, still enough to get the protein you need, but you may have to be a little more clever with making foods to keep yourself full.
Alternatively, you can go by the month. 10,000 in a day will leave you 95,000 for the month, or 3,275 per day – not a big difference.
That monthly explanation is why many personal trainers will state to just forgive yourself if you slip up on a diet and eat a bunch of garbage one day. If you go back to your routine and get back on course the next day, then in the long run you’ll still be fine. If you punish yourself by being restrictive, as in the weekly variant – or even worse, by trying to fast to zero calories for a few days or exercise half to death as punishment – then you might lose willpower and fall off your path entirely.
All of that is also how competitive eaters do what they do. They usually follow something closer to a weekly thing – tons of calories on one day, then almost nothing by comparison for the other 6 or so days.
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