Tuesday Tip: Cheat Meals

Tuesday Tip: Cheat Meals 🍔

You’ll often hear people talking about having chest days/ meals when they’re on a ‘diet’ and trying to lose weight / fat. Essentially it’s a day or meal when you eat whatever you want – so you stick to your calories all week and then relax and have anything you want for one day. They’re actually a really bad idea! This is why.

They can ruin your progress and mess up your relationship with food. For example, let’s say you are targeting 1800 cals per day to lose fat. You achieve this for 6 days, then day 7 you have a cheat day – which involves a takeaway, desserts, drinks, snacks etc of over 3,500 cals (very easy to achieve with a large takeaway and a few drinks). In one day you’ve wiped out your calorie deficit for the entire week.

The biggest issue is the word – cheat. Cheating is never associated with anything positive is it? So it already has negative connotations. Plus what are you cheating on? Yourself and your attempt to create healthy eating habits – that’s not good either! The cheat mentality just encourages a restrict/binge cycle approach to weight loss. If your diet is so restrictive you NEED to cheat then something is going very wrong!

Some argue that the ‘cheats’ boost your metabolism. Studies show that in reality there is only a short term increase of 3-10%, the majority of which is due to the thermic effect of food (your body burns more calories trying to digest the thousands of calories you consumed), and an increase in activity expenditure (people tend to move more when overfed). The extra calories burnt was only around 100-150 cals. So why would you eat 1000’s of extra calories to boost your metabolism by 150 cals? It makes no sense.

So does this mean you can’t eat more calories on some days? Of course not – it’s vital to be able to incorporate higher calorie days/meals into your diet but without derailing progress. The better approach is to work on a weekly average for your cals – so 1800 cals per day gives you a total of 12,600 cals per week. So you could lower your cals to 1700 for 6 days and then have 2,400 on one day for example (or however you want to distribute it). Just be careful of trying to go too low in the week to give more cals at the weekend – otherwise you’re back in the restrict/binge cycle.

You don’t have to do this but it’s a great way to be able to accommodate social events etc without derailing your progress!

Happy Tuesday 🤗xx