Bottom line: it's OK to indulge once in a while! Eating your favorite meal can help keep you motivated. (But contrary to popular belief, cheat days don't boost your metabolism). Any sudden weight gain is not fat.
Many people scoff at the notion that having just one cheat day per week will ruin their fat-loss efforts, but it absolutely can.
A cheat day causes some large weight increases, but weight because of water, not fat. Depending on what kind of diet you were on, loading up on carbs on a cheat day can increase your weight noticeably. If you were trying to lose fat, you likely were trying to cut carbohydrates out of your diet.
Will a Cheat Weekend Ruin My Weight Loss Progress? Having a cheat weekend won't affect your journey as long as you have a calorie deficit at the end of the week. Calorie targets must be calculated based on weekly consumption rather than daily, to provide more flexibility.
The Short Answer: It's absolutely OK to have a cheat meal! If the rest of your diet plan is tight, there's nothing wrong with cutting loose once or twice a week. In fact, the shift in calories may help you avoid plateaus.
'There is not an exact number of calories that you can eat on a cheat day but a good guideline to follow is to not consume more than 150 per cent of your regular calorie intake/limit,' according to Bodies by Byrne, run by a nutritionist and fitness instructor.
Many people choose a weekend day to indulge in a cheat meal or cheat day because these days tend to be less structured. Dr. Sean Kandel, a board-certified internal medicine doctor, recommends one or two cheat meals per week for healthy individuals.
However, going overboard on your cheat day can, of course, also set you back a bit with your fitness goals. If you are indulging in cheat day treats too often, you're body will not have the deficit in calories it needs to lose fat stores.
A cheat day is a scheduled break in a diet. The concept emerged around the same time as 'clean eating', and is based on the idea that a dieter can 'cheat' for one day a week as long as they eat to their diet plan for the remaining six days.
In order to gain a pound of fat, you would need to add about 500 calories a day on top of your normal diet, every day, for about 7 days. This makes gaining any significant amount of fat from even the craziest all-out cheat days extremely unlikely.
Even though you overate on this one day, you are still in an overall deficit for the entire week. Most people get too caught up in a single day, when in reality, our bodies don't reset overnight. If you overeat on a Saturday, it's not like your body is starting back over a 0 calories on Sunday.
A cheat day is when you allow yourself an entire day of eating anything you want without counting calories or watching what you eat. It's something to look forward to, like a reward for being healthy and staying on track with your diet. Also, it helps to keep you from constantly feeling deprived.
The Benefits of Cheating
Research shows that after a cheat meal, the body increases its metabolism, causing you to burn calories faster. This is caused by increased levels of leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells and responsible for maintaining energy balance in the body.
If your goal is to lose 15 pounds this year and you're taking a single summer vacation where you plan to indulge some, you likely don't need to stress about these things. A singular week in the context of a year will have little impact on your overall weight loss and health progress.
How Often Should Be Your Cheat Day? Since every weight loss program is unique, there is no conclusive response to this issue. However, most people recommend having a cheat day once a week. This will allow you to indulge without jeopardizing your diet or weight reduction objectives.
You see, a planned cheat meal only needs to be ~500 calories to boost leptin and provide other physiological benefits. However, a surplus of ~500 calories is basically nothing and won't provide the mental benefit for most people. Because of this, I usually set a cap of around 1,000 calories max for cheat meals.
Get More Exercise
But since you've had a cheat day, you've taken in more calories than usual. As we've said above, to lose weight, you need a calorie deficit; to maintain it, you need to eat the same amount needed for your BMR. When you have a cheat day, you have an excess of calories, so you need to burn them off.
Schedule a High-Intensity Calorie-Burning Cardio Workout
Burn off those calories with a high-intensity workout. Remember, high-intensity does not mean “extended”, so avoid a lengthy workout the day following your cheat day.
One of the most effective tools for this is to utilize Intermittent Fasting and fast for 12-16 hours after your "cheat" meal. Intermittent Fasting helps to shift your body into fat burning mode and reduce the reliance on blood glucose, allowing it to naturally stabilize.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you can have one cheat meal every 10 days to avoid boredom or a weight loss plateau, but if you believe your weight has plateaued, having a cheat day, in that case, is necessary to shock your metabolism.
A weekly cheat meal has been proven to boost your metabolism and ward off any feelings of deprivation, improving not only your ability to lose weight but also the ability to stick to your diet plan too.
On a cheat day, you are allowed to eat whatever you want. It is possible that you may not count the calories as on a normal day. While some choose to go all out, some choose a less extreme version and increase their daily calorie intake with healthy, high-calorie foods.