Balancing Real Life with Workouts to Prevent a Dad Bod
If you’re the kind of guy who enjoys working out at the gym but you’re not hard core and you don’t pay attention to what you eat all the time, you probably have a Dad Bod.
This is the term used to describe men who work out regularly and try to stay on track during the week – but when the weekend comes, all bets are off.
Watching what you eat and taking time to hit the gym falls by the wayside because it’s time to enjoy life. You might even turn to relaxation, comfort food and a couple of beers every evening during the week, too.
Sabotaging a Good Week’s Workout
The week starts and you’re all about the fitness mindset. It’s almost like you flipped a switch the minute Monday rolled onto the calendar. You’ve divided your life into what you know as good behavior for your health and acceptable behavior.
As long as you work out during the week and are careful then, who cares what the weekend holds? Forget that half a pizza you ate. Never mind all those nachos dripped in thick cheese sauce.
That was the weekend – and that way of eating is over until the next weekend rolls around. You’re working out and it’s all good now. It’s time now to make sure the foods you eat are healthy.
You look for ones that help you keep your weight on track – maybe ones that rev up your metabolism – and you’re careful that you don’t overdo it. When it comes to portion size, you’re going to eat sensibly because during the week it’s time to take responsibility for your health.
You’re “on duty” so to speak. You’re counteracting the bad with the good. What this way of living does is it motivates you to try to stay healthy on a part time basis. Your reward is getting to blow off any kind of healthy eating and any kind of working out on the weekend.
After all, you’ve worked hard. Kicking back on the weekends isn’t a problem because it’s not going to kill you. Besides, you’re in better shape now than you used to be, so what’s the problem?
Having a little bit of extra weight doesn’t make you feel like you’re in bad shape and not only that, but there’s a trend going around that women think men with a slight stomach overhang and a set of man boobs is lip smacking sexy.
There’s proof – because Leonardo DiCaprio and Chris Hemsworth (Thor) both have beautiful women with their new Dad Bods. Surely, it’s not because they’re famous – and rich.
So as long as you work hard during the week, letting yourself go on the weekends and hanging onto the Dad Bod is perfectly acceptable to you as well as the opposite sex. Cuddly is more appealing to women than a lean, fit body.
That’s not the real truth.
The truth is that you shouldn’t fall for a trend or a fad or whatever is the newest craze because you’re not getting to see the whole picture. You don’t want to fool yourself into
thinking that your body is okay with five mostly healthy days and two days where you guzzle beer, eat entire large pizzas and snack uncontrollably on every carb known to mankind.
The fact is – Dad Bods aren’t good for you – and they’re not good for your children, either – to see that it’s okay to let health and fitness not be important throughout the entire week.
How Part Time Health and Fitness Can Hurt You
On a part time basis, where you’re doing your own thing on the nights or weekends – there’s no working out – there’s no watching what you consume. Men who live this way think nothing of wolfing down tons of pizza or fatty foods while washing it down with beer on the weekends.
If that describes you, then you fit into the profile of the average guy. You have some stomach hangover and maybe a set of man boobs going on – but you still view yourself as pretty fit.
If you have stomach hangover and you have enough moobs to fit into a bra, then you’re not fit. You might not be a couch potato on the weekends but you definitely chill and don’t fret about taking care of yourself.
After all, working out during the week, you get in enough fitness. Surely that counteracts all of the laziness and unhealthy eating. In truth, it does not counteract what you do on the weekends.
You can use up your calorie count for your entire week just on the weekends. That might help to explain why you’re not looking as fit as you once did. It might also help to explain why you’re working out just as hard as ever and it doesn’t seem to be making a difference.
Does that mean that you don’t deserve to relax on the weekends? Not at all. You deserve to have your down time after a long week of working. You deserve to not be as rigid with your workout and even with your eating habits on the weekend if that’s the way that you like to reward yourself.
However, you don’t want what you do on the weekends to be so over the top that it negates all of your hard work during the week. You deserve the best version of you. That means that you don’t want to throw away opportunities to stay fit and eat healthy on the weekends.
Make choices that help enhance your week long efforts – rather than derail them. Bad weekends cause you to make bad choices in your lifestyle. Tossing caution to the wind isn’t going to cause you any long term health problems.
But it will if you do it every weekend. Even if you have a slight Dad Bod and you’re not dealing with a full on Santa belly, eating high fat, greasy, high calorie foods will do a number on your heart health over time.
Some men don’t wait for the weekend. Once they get off work, they’re off. When they’re home in the evening, it’s time to relax and have some fun. Spend time with the family, engage with the kids, and after that, drink a few beers and have a late night fuel fest while you watch some entertainment.
The problem with that way of living is that evening and weekend fuel fests give you more fat than fuel because you’re not burning up what you eat. Even if you got a workout done that day, your nutrition has to balance it out nicely.
Improving Evening and Weekend Habits
The habits that you have are what’s led you to the dreaded Dad Bod. You can improve your habits in the evenings and on the weekends and say goodbye to that slightly out of shape (or way out of shape) body for good.
You have to start by making some cuts if you want to say goodbye to that stomach that earned you the Dad Bod title. This entails getting rid of the food that contributes to the fat that bloats the body and puts on the pounds.
You have to let go of bread filled evening and weekend foods. That means saying goodbye to unhealthy pizza. It means not letting sugar be a main course when you’re in front of the television.
It means that pasta isn’t your body’s friend when you have a Dad Bod. It also means you need to free yourself from the empty calories you consume. You’ll find these empty calories in every single can or bottle of beer that you down.
These foods do nothing to improve your health and only cause your fitness goals to be undermined. By eating these in the evenings and on the weekends, you can kiss all of your weekly hard work of eating right and working out goodbye.
Don’t undo your hard work because of these food items. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have them ever. It means you need to be a lot more selective about the kinds of these foods and when you eat them.
For example, you can still have pizza – but there’s a huge difference in unhealthy pizza versus healthy slices. Any kind of unhealthy food that you currently eat can be created in ways to make it low fat and low calorie.
You might think the reason that you eat these foods is because they taste so good and your body craves them. But that’s because you’ve trained your body to crave them. The same way that you trained your body to crave them, you can train your body to not want them.
These unhealthy food items cause your body to develop that beer belly you see on a lot of dads. The more fat you carry around your abdomen, the more damaging it is for your long term health.
Your habits are what contribute to your eating style, too. When you’re tired, you crave the foods that are comfort foods. You want those high calorie, high fat dishes. It’s not just weariness that can make you want to eat the foods that keep your Dad Bod present.
Stress can drive you to the point where you want to eat the pizza and pasta and sugar items. Make sure you start or keep the habit of sleeping well in the evenings and on the weekends.
Let go of the stress of the day. Choose to not let your mind dwell on the things that bother you. Exercise consistently in the evenings and on the weekends. When you exercise instead of taking time off, not only does it help you feel better, but it will keep your motivation up to want to get rid of the Dad Bod.
Staying Fit Without Going Overboard
The key to fighting back against having the Dad Bod is to make sure that you have a regular exercise routine, but not having the all or nothing mindset. That kind of thinking can lead to overdoing it.
Your routine should be one that challenges you to do better each time you work out – but it shouldn’t reach the point where it feels like an agonizing punishment for your body.
There’s a line between working out in a way that’s healthy for your body and going overboard. When you want to get fit, you need to make sure that what you eat and the workouts that you do match your lifestyle.
Going overboard with your fitness routine can become unhealthy to the point that you lose all of the benefits from exercising. When you push your body too hard, you’re not giving it the time that it needs for what’s known as the recovery period among those in workout and training circles.
You can tell if you’re going overboard because you’ll start to see certain side effects crop up. You’ll feel sluggish and more tired than usual. You’ll experience muscle aches and pains to the point that it’s difficult to do your day to day activities.
Mood swings are common when you go overboard with trying to get and stay fit. You can have headaches and stomach pains. You might end up losing weight rapidly because you become too overly focused on getting fit.
When you reach that point, your body can start to have trouble bouncing back from illness or injury. When you’re trying to get fit, you don’t want to burn any more than about 3,500 calories every week if taking weight off is your goal.
If you push yourself beyond that level, then you do more damage to your body than good. No pain, no gain, can be a dangerous mantra if you go overboard. Getting fit and having a workout routine should always focus on what your body is capable of. It should never be used in a way that it ends up punishing your body.
The Biggest Battle Is the Mental Dad Bod
It’s what you think about your body that can contribute to and help you keep your Dad Bod even when you want to be healthy. This is what comes about when you rationalize or excuse why it’s okay to have the bad evening habits or the weekends where you blow off your hard work during the week.
This doesn’t happen because you’re lazy or because you don’t care. The truth is that you’re trying to find some balance between everything you do during the day and time for yourself.
You need that down time – so that’s not a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing when you develop the rationalization that what you do during the day is enough and that you don’t have to try.
You tell yourself that you’ve earned the freedom to eat whatever and do whatever. You’ve set yourself up so that your reward for working out and trying hard is to hold onto those bad habits.
Short term thinking is what contributes to this. You might not even realize you’re practicing a “live for the moment” mentality. Instead of seeing the long term picture, you only see what’s right in front of you at the time.
You don’t see that keeping up the good habits as a way of life will lead you to get rid of the Dad Bod for good. Short term thinking prevents you from seeing that losing the weight and building a leaner body will allow you to be healthier and more active for your kids.
It will also allow you to be there for them because eating right, working out and getting rid of extra weight prolongs your life. So what can you do? You can realize that getting healthy is going to take a commitment that things have to change in the evenings as well as on the weekends.
It’s all about finding your balance between your real life responsibilities and getting and staying fit for good. You can follow through that commitment by making sure you stay active – even in your down time.
It doesn’t mean you have to always hit the gym. You can have a healthier, leaner lifestyle just by engaging in regular physical activity during your time off your workouts. If you’re consistent and change the choices that contribute to Dad Bod, you will see improvements in your body shape that last.