First, plan this cheat meal into your weekly diet. In my opinion, the best way to do this is by allocating one day of the week to be what’s called a re-feed day. This is simply a day where you take a “break” from your diet by now eating at your maintenance calories or at a slight surplus. If you wanted to really indulge, then you can make more room for it by eating a little less on the days leading up to it and saving most of your calories for it. That said, be aware of how quickly your calories can add up during your cheat meals.
Next, let’s talk about the actual composition of your cheat meals. Compared to fat and protein, carbs not only have the greatest impact on boosting your leptin levels which as discussed earlier can help with appetite suppression and increasing your energy expenditure when dieting, but they will also best help refill your muscle glycogen to create more muscle fullness and potentially augment your performance and the anabolic response you experience in your following workouts. Also, in the event that you do splurge on your calories and overeat quite a bit, you’d save 0.1 lbs of fat from being put on for every lb of weight that you gain from overeating if you were to do so primarily with carbs, compared to fats. Interestingly, overeating with predominantly protein actually results in the least amount of added fat gain when compared to carbs and fats. Meaning that if you’re going to splurge and overeat, doing so with carbs and ideally protein-rich foods has the greatest likelihood of minimizing fat gain.
And lastly, it’s important that you don’t turn your cheat meal into a cheat day, and then turn cheat days into a cheat week, and then fail to ever get back on track. To prevent this, take the word “cheat meal” out of your vocabulary. I use it in this video just because it’s a commonly understood term, but the very word itself has some negative connotations and guilt associated with it. Instead, name it a “planned indulgence” or “calculated splurge” or “celebration meal” for example, because it’s not a meal that you should feel bad or guilty about at all. Secondly, if all week you’re struggling with cravings and all you can think about is your upcoming cheat meal and “reward” for your diet, then what this implies is that your current diet just isn’t sustainable. You need to consider re-structuring your diet such that you’re not completely depriving yourself. Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for failure in the long run.
Be strategic with your planned indulgences if you choose to include cheat meals while cutting, but enjoy yourselves and remember that at the end of the day what’s most important is the calorie deficit that you create over time and your long-term adherence to that. Which is why it’s vital that you set up your diet based on what will enable you to accomplish those two factors most effectively. And if you do get off track, don’t beat yourself up. Get back on the saddle and take it day by day. And for an easy to follow science based program that sets everything up for you, such that you know exactly how to train AND what to eat week after week without depriving yourself of the foods you love, so that you can lean down and burn off fat most effectively with science, then simply take the analysis quiz below to discover which specific program is best for your body and where it’s currently at:
Filmed by: Bruno Martin Del Campo
MUSIC:
soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired
STUDIES:
PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFIT
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1057740815000443
LONG-TERM DIETING EFFECTS
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26384657
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6359485/
PHYSIOLOGICAL BENEFITS
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1258067
CALORIE ADD-UP
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3740215/
HIGH CARB BENEFITS
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6359485/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7598063
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11029975
HIGH PROTEIN BENEFIT
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/657500
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