Cheat Meals!

7 Good Reasons to Ditch the Cheat Meals!

When is cheating good for you? In most cases cheating in any field is frowned upon, but what about a little cheat meal here and there in a well planned diet program. Do people throw in cheat meals purely for a psychological reasons or are there real benefits to throwing in a few cheat meals on a weekly basis?

Many diet plans from trainers include cheat meals or cheat days. They’re supposed to prevent you from feeling deprived, boost metabolism, increase chances of success with a diet, etc.

Well, it may not be as good as it sounds or tastes!
In most cases these cheat meals or cheat days include all sorts of high sugar and fat laden foods. One could ask how can eating “junk food” possibly be even remotely good for us! It isn’t. But human beings are the masters of “self
justification” and many on a strict diet program feel that they deserve a reward for their disciplined way of life.

We all do it. Justify our actions whether they be good or bad. The truth is eating any kind of sugar and fat loaded junk food not even remotely good for us at any time of the day, week or year. But we still do it, right? Of course we do, but is there any real benefit or are we just spinning our wheels and putting  a nutritional spanner in our attempts to get into great shape.

Nothing against occasional “refeeds” – as in eating more good carbs or calories than usual one day. You might call these refeeds healthy cheat meals – they’re absolutely fine and may even be good for you. But claiming that it is
somehow beneficial to pig out on extremely harmful foods with sugar, refined wheat or trans fats just doesn’t make sense to me.

Now, you can do whatever you want with your own body, but I thought I’d give you a few reasons why having a cheat meal or cheat day may not be the best idea.

 1. Your Body Won’t Adjust to The Healthy Diet
When you drastically change the way you eat, a certain adaptation process needs to take place. For example, if you’re doing a low-carb ketogenic diet (keto) then your body needs to change certain hormones and ramp up production of enzymes to make use of fat as the primary source of fuel. If you keep cheating, you will prevent this metabolic adaptation from ever fully completing.

Also, when you abandon the standard western diet and start eating more real foods, it can take some time for the sense of taste to adapt. If you have ever done the paleo diet for an extended period of time without cheating then you may have experienced this. With time, real foods start to taste much better. If you cheat and eat junk foods frequently, your taste sensations won’t adapt completely and you won’t be able to experience the same satisfaction from real foods.

2. You Might Over-Indulge and Instigate Previous Bad Eating Habits
Many people can binge like there’s no tomorrow and ruin a week’s worth of dieting in one sitting. It is so easy to keep eating once the sugar hits your bloodstream and your taste buds spark up. After one big binge it’s easy to knock back 5,000-10,000 calories in one sitting! That’s around 2-3 days worth of calories in one meal! Pretty scary to figure how long you will need to workout to burn off those additional calories.

I am sure you will agree junk foods can be downright addictive. In fact sugar has been proven to be as addictive as cocaine in certain cases! If you have a fairly obsessive personality and have trouble controlling yourself around junk food, cheat meals may be the devil in disguise. This problem appears to be common and people who have issues with cravings and binge eating should probably
abstain from these foods as much as possible.

3. Cheat Meals Can Feed The Addiction
If you keep having something that you’re addicted to, it just keeps the addiction going. In this case, having “everything in moderation” isn’t a good idea as it will be almost impossible to determine whats “Moderate”. For one person
a few squares of chocolate is moderate, where is for another they will clean up the entire block! Moderation is an individual thing so it’s very hard to quantify the term.

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