What are your thoughts on cheat meals? Should I include cheat meals? Are cheat meals bad? If I have a cheat meal will I gain all of my weight back? Will I start to defy the laws of gravity? Will my gym membership be terminated? WILL MY LANDLORD EVICT ME??
Heard it all, seen it all, done it all. So what's the most suitable answer? In short, you tell me; in long, there are relevant factors that change my response depending on who you are at the core.
To expound we’ll chop cheat meals into pros and cons. By the end of this article you’ll be able to look inward and decide how a cheat meal strategy can be done your way for your benefit.
SECTIONS:
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What Is A Cheat Meal
Foundation comes first; what is a cheat meal?
A cheat meal is a deliberate decision to deviate from your daily nutritional procedure for oral pleasure and possible benefit or detriment - it all depends.
Cheat meals involve those foods that are typically deemed off limits: pizza, cookies, ice cream, quadruple cheeseburgers, fried donuts smothered in powdered sugar dipped in syrup alongside a diet coke 😆 (the diet coke is always there for some reason).. all kinds of sugary, high glycemic nonsense, as processed as processed can be.
And I love It, my way, since my way doesn’t deter my fitness aim. Let’s figure out yours.
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Benefits Of A Cheat Meal
Maintain Metabolism
A cheat meal can help in maintaining your basal metabolic rate (BMR) when on a continuous weight loss stint, given your total calories are at or above maintenance for the day.
BMR is how many calories you burn just to survive and your maintenance level of calories is how many calories you burn to survive plus the calories you burn conducting your daily duties IE lifting, cardio, working, etc..
Note: to estimate your maintenance level of calories, use a Katch-McArdle or St. Mifflin-Jeor calculator.
This point is valid when you’re dieting for fat loss. To lose fat you have to consume less calories than you burn over time, that’s a calorie deficit. Calories in versus calories out is the name of the game.
Consume less calories than you burn and you lose weight, even it out.. you’ll maintain, consume more than you burn and you gain.
When you’re in a calorie deficit for an extended period you don’t only risk testosterone levels, you risk the potency of your metabolism.
The body adapts to whatever you do consistently. Eat a certain amount of calories for a while? Your body adjusts accordingly.
When you first cut calories your body is unfamiliar, so weight loss occurs, but eventually it gains familiarity and adaptation takes place.
This adjustment involves your body understanding you can’t be trusted to provide enough energy (calories) for it to perform at full capacity, so it slows its processes and your systems begin conserving more energy than before [1].
This leads to slower recovery and decreased work output.
Symptoms like lethargy, loss of enthusiasm, and so on come into play.
Eventually you’ll need a reverse diet.
This is the main reason it’s common to reach a plateau when losing weight.
A cheat meal can facilitate the maintaining of your metabolism if you consume enough calories to meet and preferably exceed your maintenance level of calories by 300 calories or so periodically [2].
Still calories in versus calories out is to be respected. You need to consume less calories than you burn over time, including the cheat meal calories to keep fat loss going.
For example, if your maintenance calories is 2,000 per day, when you calculate your week you should average 1,999 calories per day or less to make progress.
Note: cheat meal or no cheat meal carb and/or calorie cycling is a great tactic for saving your metabolism while dropping weight.
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Diet Break
A miniature diet break allots some mental relief for the disciplined and undisciplined. Here’s an opportunity at a social event or chance for a smidgen of spontaneity.
"Live a little." Is a popular phrase that I hate a lot.
Although I may or may not have pre-rehearsed rants combating this egregious combination of words.. about the speaker not being so passionate about something that they understand sacrifice, but at times the words hold merit. If you’re always on at full speed you will burn out.
Nevertheless, disallow outside influence to deter you from punching a ticket to gains-ville. You control the on-off lever, no one else, because you’re the one living with the results.. no one else.
A cheat meal can be motivation to go hard in your training and nutrition. If you know you have a date with an oversized plate on Friday at 8, you’ll want to earn it. And it’ll reset your mind for the next cheat meal-less interval.
Another bonus is when a cheat meal is on the schedule you’re more likely to stick to that day than fall to the temptation of a spur of the moment indulgence.
Then for a few there’s purpose.
What if your fitness goal is simply having the ability to survive a periodic cheat meal? In the applicable cases your sole motive is to be healthy and fit, on a level where the occasional tomfoolery won't send you to urgent care.
It’s about health for this individual.
While it’s true one can fill their plate with what’s considered junk food day after day and still have an aesthetically pleasing physique, since it’s about calories in versus calories out, this wouldn’t bode well for long-term health.
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Fitness Reward
A cheat meal may be your pat on the back, a proverbial medal, your personal trophy. We work hard day in and out. This carrot could potentially assist in psychologically keeping you on the campaign trail.
A way of acknowledging your efforts in the short-term.
Hit a string of personal records (PR)? Reached a goal weight that’s been avoiding you for some time? Embarked upon a new level of consistency you never experienced before?
Reward yourself, but don’t leave the course.
The job’s not done.
You can celebrate a little victory on the road to big ones as long as the micro festivity doesn’t take away from the macro momentum.
Note: another cheat meal reward is full muscles, particularly if you are on a low carb diet. Cheat meals tend to provide carbs and sodium.. that next morning, hit the weights and look how full your muscles are, especially if you kept your water intake up on cheat meal day.
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Impediments Of A Cheat Meal
It Is Cheating
Make no mistake, one must understand when you cheat you are doing just that; breaking the rules.
There are always consequences to rule breaking, though the consequence may be that of taking one step backward in order to make two forward strides, it's a consequence nonetheless.
Whether it’s you consuming excess calories or doing the less than healthy choice within your normal calorie range, don’t kid yourself.
Large cheat meal consequences:
You feel like ass, especially if you tend to consume less processed, less sodium laden, lower glycemic foods. The cheat meal will feel like you injected poison intravenously. The day after a sizable cheat meal is usually a tough workout for me. If I wasn’t a binger it wouldn’t be so bad.. but I am 😆.
You’ll gain water weight. More on that soon.
Note: I’ll repeat it indefinitely: calories in versus calories out. A cheat meal in itself won’t add fat to your body, but if it complements a continuous surplus over time, your likelihood of storing adipose tissue heightens.
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Glycemic Impact
Cheat meals usually involve blood sugar spiking foods, which mean they have a high glycemic impact. Dishes with a high glycemic load/index are more easily stored as fat.
High glycemic examples:
Candy bars
Syrup
Cakes
Pies
Potatoes
Soda
Cookies
Pasta
White rice
Foods with a high glycemic impact are riddled with simple carbs. Simple carbs hit the bloodstream rather quickly and leave just as fast. Which also leads to intense hunger pangs.
When this happens insulin rushes in to put blood sugar back in check and send nutrients where they’re most needed. When energy use and non-fat storage demands are met, excess energy is excreted or stored as adipose tissue.
If in a calorie deficit you’ll ultimately burn this stored fat, but in a long-term calorie surplus it becomes part of you until you begin a calorie deficit.
This is why simple carbs are to be largely avoided, along with problems like tooth decay and type 2 diabetes of course.
Complex, slowly digesting carbs can provide the same amount of calories, but their slow absorption rate gives you extra time to burn energy and more importantly helps limit the amount of calories you can consume, because you’ll be full a lot faster and for a longer period of time.
Note: where high glycemic carbs are possibly useful is after an exhaustive weight training session to help limit muscle protein breakdown or pre lift in some instances.
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Bad Fats
Common cheat meal choices like fatty burgers, ice cream, and chili cheese dogs are savory, yet infested with an abundance of saturated fats.
Saturated fat is more easily stored as adipose tissue when compared to monounsaturated fat [3]. Yet it’s necessary in moderation, for testosterone function.
But what’s a bigger deal is artificial trans unsaturated fat AKA partially hydrogenated fat. Artificial trans unsaturated fat is a culprit of heart disease, but if aesthetics trump health for you they're also anti-aesthetic.
Trans fats can permit fat storage even when in a calorie deficit [4].
Artificial trans unsaturated fat is as bad as it gets. Commercially banned in 2018, but still thrives in various fried or baked goods.
Cheat Meal Weight Gain
Weight fluctuates with regularity, yet after a heavy cheat meal it’s weight gone wild.
Not pure fat, but it’s not uncommon for someone to have gained six pounds after cheat day.
I say day, for if you pull that off from one meal you are a rare breed 🙋♂️.
Here’s why.
Eat more sodium than the norm and you retain more water than the norm.
Common cheat meal choices are high in sodium.
When your sodium intake has a sudden jump the scale shall respond, the gained weight is a combination of the physical load of what you consumed along with water attaching itself to sodium [5].
After returning to regularly scheduled programming the excess water retention will subside, eventually.
So 1-2.5 days after your sodium flurry you will notice the extra water weight.
If you go back to a strict regimen it’ll leave you within a week.
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No Food Discipline
No self-control? No cheat meals.
If one cheat meal a week will turn to one cheat day a week, then two cheat days a week turns to one cheat week per week.. you should stay away from cheat meals or start building on your discipline.
If you don’t have the ability to step out of bounds then get right back on the playing field, don’t step out of bounds.
Meal Not Day
A cheat meal is permitted, not a cheat day. Respect it or be faithful.
If constraint is exercised a cheat meal has its benefits.. a cheat day? A cheat DAY is to be rebuked.
A cheat day sends benefits to the digital recycling bin to not be recovered.
A cheat day leads to an exorbitant amount of low quality calories.
A cheat day leads more often to throwing your whole nutritional plan away with a common “I messed up so I’ll just start over next week, or month.”
This week or month often turns into an indefinite amount of time before that restart happens, if ever.
You can throw away a great deal of progress with a whole day of indulgence.
Note: there are cases where you may cheat for a day or days like if on vacation. If you’re methodical enough you can do so while limiting the hill you’ll have to climb afterward. Methodical enough involves you controlling your calorie intake, even while picking from the banned food list. Methodical enough involves you avoiding artificial trans unsaturated fats.
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Cheat Meal Guilt
The intention of a cheat meal is pleasure and/or benefit. It’s a tool for you to utilize for ensuing gain.
If depression is your end result; that’s not a gain.
If one’s desire is to simply keep up metabolism, add 300-500 calories to your maintenance level of calories from the choices you’d usually make, for a "metabolic meal" instead of a cheat meal.
That’ll help keep your metabolism up too, it falls under the calorie cycling umbrella.
But don’t forget: 🗣 calories in versus calories out!!
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How To Have A Cheat Meal
The premium way to have a cheat meal is to go in with a plan.
Ideally it’ll be part of your grand total calorie and macronutrient scheme. In this scheme you account for your overall calorie intake, not just for that day, but where it puts you for the week.
Best case you'll know the details of what you are to consume and would have already plugged them into your app of choice.
Next best case, and most popular case, is you’ll allocate a certain amount of calories for that meal and just go wherever the wind takes you within range.
A good method, especially if on a cut, is if you know today is cheat meal day. Make it a low carb day up until the meal happens and thereafter.
This way you’re more likely to store some of those carbs as glycogen in your muscles, making the cheat meal beneficial in a practical sense too.
If you carb cycle, conducting your meal on a high carb day is another pro move.
Note: a veteran move is to have your cheat meal on a day you burn the most calories in the gym, IE leg day. This way a good amount of those cheat meal calories will go toward you recovering from destroying your lower body.
What To Do After A Cheat Meal
Your post cheat meal moves are simple.
When the meal ends, that's it - it’s over. No sulking, regret, or dread - it’s done. Move on and get back to normal.
No need for a fancy cleanse, no need for some kind of boxed detox, no need to start waist training. Your detox is a return to normal behavior, with that all will fall into place, especially if you went in with a plan. If you didn’t?
Still return to normalcy and all will ultimately pan out.
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My Thoughts
If you F up don’t feel sorry for yourself. If an unplanned cheat meal occurs or you go so hard you feel like you ruined all progress, oh well. Dust yourself off and get back in the game. Figure out the cause and create a contingency plan in case that scenario once again presents itself.
Don’t fall into the “I have no choice, but to give up'' trap. Only respond to your mistakes by improving future behavior.
I’d know better than anyone, as a cheat meal advocate, that knowledge of thyself is key. I go with a strong biweekly cheat meal when cutting and a little less frequently when bulking ironically. It’s since I spend most of my time too full from the calorie surplus to get a cheat meal in, but when I cheat I CHEAT.
Precisely why I spread my meals out so much, I binge. I mean 24+ cookies, pint of ice cream, triple cheeseburger, extra large chilli cheese tots binge.. that’s one meal.
Knowledge of self.
So if your question is how often should I have a cheat meal?
The answer is it depends. For me no more than twice monthly.
For you it could be twice weekly if you control the calories and your weekly calorie intake is still on par for what your goal is.
For you it could be once weekly, or once per month if you’re similar to me and lack the self-control to have a reasonably sized cheat meal.
For you it could be no cheat meals, because you can’t handle the guilt.
Having knowledge of self permits my cheat meals to be guilt proof and keeps macro progress on a positive plane.
It’s important to stress how much of this dialogue is dependent on roughly knowing your calorie intake. I suggest tracking calories altogether, for it’s the only true way to be able to make little adjustments and beat inevitable plateaus down the road.
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So, It’s About That Time
To cap things off, this motorway you chose to ride on is one of many decisions. Here lies a single choice among that many. My most successful clients triumphed from a point of acquired mental strength and knowledge, coupled with direction. A reasonable cheat meal is one that keeps you within 300-500 calories of your maintenance calorie intake based on activity level, age, weight, and body fat.
One that is earned from unwavering adherence to fitness and nutritional guidelines. One that is planned, going in knowing who, what, when, where, why, and how. The choice is always yours to put those muscles to use and Be Great.
Sources:
[1] ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3387402/
[2] pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2204100/
[3] pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15297079/