#cheatdays

We know that when you're on a diet, you live for those cheat days. You can stuff yourself silly of all the foods you wish you could eat while dieting. While there is a well known myth that cheat days once a week can speed up your metabolism, cheat days can actually be detrimental for your weight loss progress.

Mentality

Restricting your food intake or groups can lead to you feeling exhausted, craving some sugar or fries, but most of all that satisfied feeling. Salad just doesn’t cut it when you’re eating it 24/7. A cheat day consisting of all your favourite treats will, though – it will definitely give you a kick of temporary endorphins.

Unfortunately, this emotional high is short lived - a second on the lips, forever on the hips! How will you feel when you’re lying in bed with your belly full of rubbish? You may have tricked yourself into thinking it’s good for you. But when you wake up in the morning, getting back to that diet will be tough. Once your body has a spike in blood sugar, it also experiences a sugar low – what goes up must come down! You’ve come so far in your diet plan that a cheat day will send your sugar levels soaring then crashing down because you’re not used to the sugar or sheer amount of food. With a sugar low we feel demotivated and depressed. It will be a struggle to get back on track!

Fat storage

When on a diet, we restrict the volume of food that we eat – even if the aim is to just eat healthy, wholesome foods while cutting out the bad stuff. So don’t you deserve a day off once in a while? Yes, maybe! But you might think differently if we told you that your body will turn your cheat food into higher percentages of fat than if you were to eat it before you started dieting. This is for two reasons.

First, your body isn’t used to it (depending on how long you’ve been dieting for). This means that those fries will enter your stomach and your body will immediately process it as irrelevant, expect for those kcals! i.e. it will deposit it in your fat stores. The second reason? By consuming less food, your metabolism slows down. Doing more exercise can help counteract this, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re not feeding yourself enough energy. When you suddenly inundate yourself with dense foods, your body thinks ‘Hurrah! I’ll save this energy for later when I get hungry again!’ and turns it into fat rather than passing it through. So, while cheat days might be said to increase your metabolism, one day of stuffing your chops will only counteract your weight loss and only give you extra fat to burn.

How to overcome your need for cheat days

When you’re on a health and fitness journey, one of the most confusing topics you’ll hear about is “cheat days.” Some say they’re necessary, others warn they’ll destroy your progress. The truth lies somewhere in between. Cheat days don’t have to ruin your fitness journey—if you approach them with strategy, balance, and the right mindset. In fact, when done right, they can even make you stronger,…