When dieting should i have a cheat day

There are many different ways to incorporate cheats into your program as there are also both positive and negative aspects that go along with cheats. One of the common ways to incorporate a cheat into your plan is to have a cheat day.

This is basically a day where you can eat whatever you want, not following a schedule. How 'intensely' you choose to do this is an individual preference. Some people choose to just go all out and eat anything and everything they can get their hands on, often eating thousands of calories at a time. Similarly some people choose to take a less extreme approach and rather than eating all of the junk foods they normally crave, they just loosen their rigorous plan and eat relatively healthy with regular meals and might have some special for dessert or something.

Another way to incorporate a cheat is to just have a cheat meal rather than a day. In this case the person would just eat whatever it was that they had been craving at one meal and follow their regular meal plan as scheduled. Usually with these types of cheats, the focus is on eating 'forbidden' foods since they will be eating as normal for the rest of the day. Physiologically, cheats can offer many benefits. If you have been dieting pretty hardcore, it's likely that you have low muscle glycogen levels.

Along with this often comes a sluggish feeling during your workouts and less than optimal strength. Glycogen is a polysaccharide of glucose Glc which functions as the secondary short term energy storage in animal cells. It is made primarily by the liver and the muscles, but can also be made by the brain and stomach. You may also find that you are fatiguing faster than normal and are not able to keep up with your previous performance.

A cheat meal or day, since it often means an excess of calories and carbohydrates taken in, will serve to replenish some of these stores, which will help give you more energy and train harder at your next workouts.

In this way, the cheat strategy is adaptable and can be implemented alongside many different diet patterns. Note that the cheat meal approach is not appropriate for all diet styles. Some diets, such as the ketogenic diet , require very strict adherence with no room for cheating. Therefore, the cheat strategy is best utilized in diets that allow for some flexibility. A cheat day is when you allow yourself to consume any foods you want over an entire day.

Weight management and body composition changes are complex processes. Not everyone will respond the same way to the same strategies — the best diet plan is the one you can stick to. Leptin is a hormone responsible for suppressing feelings of hunger. Some research indicates that when someone experiences significant weight loss, leptin levels may decrease.

However, this result is inconsistent with other studies 1. This may lead to rebound weight gain. Proponents of the cheat meal strategy for weight loss further theorize that intermittent periods of higher-calorie foods will trick your hormone cycle into producing more leptin temporarily and prevent the desire for rebound overeating. As a result, more research is needed. Some people can effectively resist temptation knowing that their cheat day is coming up, but not everyone can regulate their own eating behaviors in the same way.

Thus, the same results cannot be guaranteed for every person 2. Even cheat meals or days should be appropriately planned. To reiterate an important point: the most effective weight loss strategy is the one that you can stick to.

For some people, cheat days or meals may be a great way to maintain overall healthier dietary habits — for others, a different approach may be more appropriate. The causes of obesity and the best methods for losing weight can be complex and will look different for everyone. The trend of incorporating cheat meals into your diet plan has become increasingly popular in the Western diet and fitness culture, especially across social media platforms.

While the cheat meal approach may work for some people, it could also have some potentially detrimental effects. Successful and sustained weight loss is about more than eating fewer calories than you burn in a day. Your attitude toward food can also significantly impact your ability to resist temptation and regulate eating behaviors. Using that term to describe a food or meal could impair your ability to maintain self-control even within the cheat meal framework.

One three-month study noticed that people who associated chocolate cake with celebration had more success with their weight loss goals than those who linked this food to feelings of guilt 3. Because the cheat meal or day strategy focuses on a reward-based system, it may be ineffective for those who have a difficult time self-regulating emotional eating. Some people may even experience feelings of hopelessness and guilt 4. Reframing a cheat meal with a more positive message, such as a treat meal, could help to better support self-regulation and healthy eating behaviors with this kind of diet pattern 3.

A major concern with the cheat meal or day strategy is the potential for it to encourage a binge-style eating behavior. The cheat meal method could exacerbate eating-related issues for people dealing with food addiction tendencies, disordered eating or an inability to self-regulate eating habits. Research shows that people who use food as a coping mechanism may be more susceptible to binge eating 5.

Even a cheat meal or day should be approached healthfully and with a plan. This means that in order to lose roughly 1 pound per week, you should be eating at about calories below your maintenance level — which in this case comes to calories per day. This means that, when you average it all out for the week, you would have taken in roughly calories per day, which is only slightly below your maintenance caloric intake.

As a result, you would be unlikely to lose any significant weight that week, and would have spent those 6 days eating perfectly for nothing. And then there is also the whole issue of tending to have these cheat days a little bit too frequently…. As you can see, I feel that having these decadent cheat days are like needlessly playing with fire for many otherwise diligent dieters. They can destroy your progress, leaving you frustrated, and actually less likely to stick to your diet….

On the other hand, you hate the thought of never getting to enjoy foods you love for weeks, months, or even longer…. Both of these options will allow you to achieve your goals without the endless tedium of a boring diet.

Cheat meals are in principle quite similar to cheat days, but the amount of damage that you can do is far more contained. Basically, instead of giving yourself license to gorge all day, cheat meals offer a temporary reprieve from your diet in a more controlled way.