To cheat or not to cheat that is the question, an age old debate amongst trainers and clients alike. Far and wide this is a truly confusing issue for anyone who is trying to make physical changes through nutrition and exercise. The right answer, at least in my humble opinion, is both may be right depending on the situation. For many years I preached the value of cheat meals to the body and the mind, as it sits now I discourage them altogether. If I seem a little contradictory let me try to make sense of this issue by explaining the value of either situation with the conclusion justifying my current beliefs.
The Cheat Meal Approach
The logic of a cheat meal is sound. In simplified terms it is a surefire way to dislodge the body from its typical adaptive course. What this means is that with every measure of lifestyle consistency giving you control over your body in terms of composition and performance you will also be met by strong adaptation. Ultimately this sends me back to a headline of a magazine article in Muscle & Fitness years ago. Everything works, and nothing works for long. I have found this to be a profound truth in anything relating to fitness and nutrition. Our body will adapt to every situation and progress will slow down or cease.
Many principles and ideas have sprung from this statement, things like “shocking the body” for instance. Some of these ideas are too dramatic and radical, in my opinion, but the fact that change is needed and needed somewhat frequently is quite accurate. Nutritionally speaking this is the premise behind a cheat meal. If you are restricting calories for weight loss the final adaptation is a more efficient metabolism, not necessarily meaning faster or better, but none the less one that uses less calories.
If a cheat meal is timed correctly it provides an influx of calories, an increase, and instability that now sends our body on a new adaptive path. This new path is to find a way to spend more calories just in time for you to begin restricting and voila one step back two steps forward. Sounds like an ideal plan but with a couple of problems, timing and psychology meets physiology. Timing is a problem because there is no real way that I know of to practically test when your body is adjusting the metabolic rate to less calories so we have to theorize and guess or use some arbitrary schedule.
The second problem is the bigger of the two. Usually a cheat meal involves eating many deviant foods, the justified deserved psychological reward for your continued commitment. The problem is that this is generally a carbohydrate based feeding frenzy, let’s face it carbohydrate tastes great. Physiologically this sends our blood sugar on a rollercoaster of highs and lows. This metabolic confusion creates a number of unusual feelings from emotional instability to increased appetite and cravings making it difficult to return to our commitment of a calorie restricted program.
The No Cheat Meal Approach
The no cheat meal approach means keeping rigid nutritional consistency and then making subtle changes to promote continued progress. After reading the above it may seem like a contradiction, after all we know the body will adapt to our restricted environment and progress will slow down or stop. However the problem I’ve seen and experienced using a cheat meal approach is that the failure or drop-out rate post cheat meal is much too high.
The gylcemic turmoil we create generally takes as many as 5-7 days to subside which in our busy stress ridden environment is often too much for people to overcome. The neat thing about using no cheat meals is once we have maintained a fairly steady state of blood sugar with no major peaks and valleys for 14 days many aspects of our physical feeling begin to change. Most people no longer experience the “brain-fog” or lull in energy mid-morning or mid-afternoon, sleep improves, cravings completely vanish and our productivity increases.
There is no desire for major deviation from our menu and our body becomes like a finely tuned economy car that just goes and goes. But ultimately our weight loss progress will stop and it’s at this point it gets tricky. Even in this environment you will still need to avoid letting your metabolism adapt fully. The way we generally accomplish this as trainers is to make frequent subtle adjustments of foods. Some examples would be swapping faster digesting foods for slower ones, ones that require more energy expenditure during digestion.
Another option might be to increase or decrease total calories for a few days but these adjustments are usually limited to about 100 calories or roughly 3-5% of our total caloric intake. The idea is to force small and frequent adaptations without generating a significant blood sugar variation and the psychological and physiological challenges that occur as a result. It’s hard for most to accept but I have witnessed and experienced personally that beyond the 14 day mark this is the easier of two ideas to commit to when striving toward a long term goal. Ultimately it is because of the increased compliance that I have based my current beliefs.
At the end of the discussion the debate for these two ideas will wage on I’m certain but if you have been trying either approach to this point with varied success it may be time to consider the other. If your not sure where to begin that’s where I would urge you to consider a coach they’re certain to aid you in avoiding the pitfalls of frustration. Good luck.
