Summer Time Restaurant Indulging?

It seems somewhat counterintuitive, because most people think of summer time as the time when they are more in shape, less likely to pig out and gain a bunch of weight, and be more active because the weather is nice. While it’s definitely true on the being more active part, we’ve noticed that for us, it seems like the restaurant temptations come much harder and faster in the summer, and we actually found for a while that rather than losing summer time weight, we were gaining because we were indulging in going out more, spending more money on food and fun (and inevitably, summer time sugar alcoholic drinks), and essentially packing in way more calories than we should have on a daily basis.

Let’s give a typical weekend (in our old way of living, we don’t do this any more, we made a pact to lose weight and keep it off, plus we’ve been really scrounging to save money lately) as an example of these weekly temptations to go out and indulge in fattening, caloric foods.  It’s the weekend, and Sally and Tom (two fictitious names of course, we don’t have friends by those names), call us up and ask us to dinner at the latest Mexican bar and restaurant that opened up just up the road from us.  Far be it from us to resist the temptation of any easy night of dining, fun, food and drinks and foresake the leftover baked chicken from the night before, so we accept.

This happened almost weekly, we’d have healthy eating plans for the night and either we’d get invited to go out with friends and drink and eat, or we would just say screw it and go to a restaurant out of sheer laziness and wanting the experience and instant gratification.  And there you have the reason why we could never get weight off in the summer time.  We’d be fine during the week, and Friday Saturday and Sunday we’d shed our lunch packing, calories conserving ways and become the weekend warriors of restaurant indulging.

I’m sure you have similar stories.  The moral here is that maybe the recession will spur you to forego the typical weekend restaurant trips that tend to turn into three nights in a row of splurging and overdoing it on the calories.  It may seem harmless and fun at first, but believe me, both your waistline and your pocketbook will suffer in the end whereas if you eat healthfully at home, you will conserve on both your hard earned money, and calories, fat, sugar and extra weight!