Strength Training – Sports Nutrition – Using Cheat Meals, Not Days, to Keep Your Cravings in Check
In corresponding with many gym-goers and fitness enthusiasts, I have found that there is a huge disconnect in what they say and practice depending on the day of the week.
These are people who train hard, eat well, and do everything they’re supposed to to the point of being on autopilot, flying toward their goal. Then something strange happens. One day, usually the weekend, all these clothes seem to walk to the back of the plane, open the emergency exit door, and jump out without a second thought.
The specific day I’m talking about is better known as your “cheat day.”
Why do people do this?
Because so many magazines, writers, and even experts tell us that it’s okay to have a full-on snack attack one day of the week. Whether or not it will have a lasting effect on the progress you worked so hard for is not mentioned.
The idea of eating a whole day’s worth of junk food is very appealing to many people. Many complain about having to eat 5 or 6 healthy meals a day, but on cheat day it would be hard to catch them without food in their mouths.
The reality is, cheat days, aka crap days a week, are a great way to get fat. The following will make what I am saying very clear.
Many junk foods contain a ridiculous amount of calories. A Burger King Double Whopper with cheese is 1020 calories and Boston Pizza’s Spicy Italian Penne is 1350 calories! For every 21 Doritos chips you will receive about 250 calories. If you think you can get away with “healthy options” think again, the Thai Chicken Salad at Boston Pizza will only set you back 1000 calories.
Let’s take a look at the “Activity Cost” of these extra calories.
A 200 pound person has to run at 5.2 miles per hour for 2 hours straight to burn 1473 calories! Biking at 5.5 mph would take you 4 hours to burn 1,396 calories. Get ready for this, that same person would need 5 hours of walking at 2 mph to burn off those calories. 5 hours!! That’s like a week of walking on the treadmill to eat one of the foods listed above!
If, depending on your weight, it takes 5 hours of walking to burn an excess of 1,400 calories, and one of the above meals easily provides more than 1,000 calories, what do you think would happen if you ate junk food for a whole day? ? What would happen is that you would have to spend the next few weeks burning off the calories from your food festival just to get back to where you were before the food festival.
If you have a cheat day every week, and some do it on the weekend, like two days of binge chewing, you’ll never be able to burn excess calories. You’d start each week so far behind the ball that there wouldn’t be a snowball in hell chance of catching up.
People in this situation eventually give up and stop training. They say “that training thing doesn’t work. I did everything I was supposed to, even tried to work out every day, and I still put on weight!” They may even believe it’s their genes, “it runs in the family” or “I’m supposed to be weak or fat.”
By looking at the amount of time you need to exercise, you can easily see how a day full of meals like this will completely undo the progress you made the week before. Knowing all this makes it hard to believe that some so-called experts would recommend “taking the weekend off.” A good tip if you are looking to make your belt useless and prefer suspenders.
Don’t let this scare you. You can still eat the foods you like, and even eat some high-calorie foods from time to time.
The idea of eating some “junk food” to control cravings is another good idea gone wrong. The point is that if junk foods were a regular part of your diet in the past, simply cutting them out wholesale can cause some to have uncontrollable cravings. If these cravings are not catered to, they will eventually cause the person to go into a blind eating frenzy, only to come to days later with a bucket of ice cream on their head and piles of empty food containers everywhere, or something similar. . Jokes aside, there is some merit to this. The point, though, is to keep cravings in check while gradually minimizing junk from your diet.
The good news is that if you’re trying to lose weight and burn your body fat, an occasional day where you eat a little more calories than usual will trick your metabolism into burning faster. Helps minimize the chance that your metabolism will adapt to your lower caloric intake, which means continued fat loss. Let me say it again though, over do it and you will start to put on weight. I think if you’re going to eat calorie-dense foods like this, you should stick to one, like, two maximum cheat meals a week.
The idea is not to get carried away with all the junk food on offer today and instead start getting used to living healthy and adopting a full time nutritional plan in your diet.
Just because it’s called a cheat meal doesn’t mean you automatically stop using your head. You can minimize the “caloric impact” by dividing the meal into a quarter serving of your favorite “health food” and the rest of your plate made up of your favorite “cheat food.”
This also works for changing the “basics” in your diet. You can switch from a fattier, less healthy type of burger, like medium ground beef, and slowly mix it in with extra-lean ground beef until you’re eating extra-lean only.
You can mix your salad dressing with healthier olive oil a little at a time until you use only olive oil.
You can also start adding vegetables to your eggs, essentially making an omelette, adding a few pieces of whatever vegetables you like, until you get your desired serving size. As time goes by, you can slowly increase the ratio of healthy to junk, and before you know it, you’ll be eating less and less junk.
Don’t limit yourself to thinking that you need to keep eating junk food to stay sane, that’s a bunch of bullshit. Your taste buds will eventually adjust to the new foods and dishes you eat, and the truth is that you will eventually start to crave healthier foods, especially when you feel the difference they make, in and out of the gym.
Also, if you don’t currently eat a lot of junk food, that’s great. You don’t have to eat junk food if you’ve never eaten it or care to stay on the nutrition path. In fact, the longer you eat a certain type of food, the more and more your taste buds will get used to it, regardless of whether or not it is junk food or healthy food.
Time to eat!
Remember it’s “Cheat Meal” not “Cheat Day”. Limit indulgences to once or twice a week maximum.
Slowly reduce, and preferably eliminate, processed foods. If your current diet is loaded with unhealthy foods, don’t try to eliminate them all at once. Phase out junk food with healthier options using the blending method mentioned above.
Junk food is not limited to unhealthy processed foods, fried foods, sweets, etc. One of the keys to a healthy eating plan is balance. Excessive consumption of any of the three macronutrients results in an unbalanced meal. Olive oil is great for you when used properly; using one cup at a time is not so healthy. The same goes for most “healthy” foods. Maintain a healthy amount and eat balanced meals.
© 2008 Raymond Toulany
