- Is it OK to cheat on your meal plan?
- What do you do if you really want a burger?
- Can your diet sustain ice cream?
For the fitness enthusiast, your daily diet is an important factor on your journey to a leaner body, as well as when you need to reach a specific goal (weight, body fact, etc). However, the typical diet of many fitness professional happens to be very boring, bland and often repetitive.
Everyone, no matter what, will eventually get tired of the seemingly endless mounds of broccoli and chicken. Since diet is such a big part of your success, whether your goals are leaning out or maintaining a particular look for a certain period of time, it’s important that it is sustainable over a period of time. Otherwise, you will not stick to it and progress stops.
If your diet is not sustainable, failure is in your near future. We’ve all heard the stories of someone who ate nothing but brown rice, chicken and broccoli for 16 weeks on a strict diet only to suffer a complete and mindless binge immediately after hitting their goal. All that time spent getting into peak condition is now ruined and likely set back by 4-5 weeks. Sometimes, a few days of bingeing can turn into a few weeks and you’re suddenly right back to their pre-diet state.
The problem here is that a diet lacking in variety can often make one feel restricted. With long-term restriction comes the desire to break the cycle. So it’s no wonder that many fitness enthusiasts find themselves at the local pizza parlor stuffing themselves uncontrollably, then going down the road and loading up on a few pints of ice cream, and finishing it off with an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies for dessert. (OK, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration).
There are a few reasons for this – but let’s focus on one: a constant caloric restriction without any free or cheat meals incorporated into the diet.
The Infamous Cheat Meal
The name is negative and suggests you’re doing something wrong or naughty when in reality, you’re not doing anything bad at all. Since when is eating a bad thing? In my view, eating, for the most part, is fairly a neutral endeavor. Sure it can be bad and good under certain circumstances but that’s out of this context.
To many, a cheat meal usually means going out to a fast food restaurant or staying in to cook something you’d never eat otherwise. It’s one of those foods that do not belong on your weight-loss diet for whatever rationalizations one makes for a food being bad or good.
The problem with this type of thinking is that we become accustomed to a mindset that a specific food is either bad or good but when you break it up, it all boils down to macros: protein, carbohydrates and fat. Now some foods contain more of one macronutrient than others and some contain more saturated fat, but all in all, it’s the same stuff. We use it as energy.
Something I’ve noticed in the fitness community is that people tend to have an unaccounted for, once-per-week, cheat meal. Sometimes they have an epic feast of pizza and ice cream that spans a day, ruining their fat loss efforts for the entire week, or worse, triggering a multiple day, uncontrollable binge.
What I suggest in lieu of these not-so-hot choices is to incorporate unconventional foods into your diet moderately throughout the week.
Here’s what I mean. If you happen to enjoy a certain food like burgers or ice cream for your typical cheat meals, instead of picking one day to cheat and bouncing off your diet, why not just incorporate them into your daily calories a few times per week?
One hamburger is only 250 calories with 12g protein, 9g fat and 31g carbohydrates. Just to put it in perspective, someone who’s dieting on 1,500 calories per day could easily fit this into their diet throughout their week if they wished to do so.
If you’ve got a sweet tooth, Ben and Jerry’s frozen yogurt might be just what you needed. Half a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie low-fat frozen yogurt contains a total of 380 calories with 10g protein, 5g fat and 70g carbohydrates. Just lower your meal frequency to 3-4 meals for the day, drink a big protein shake with your frozen yogurt and enjoy this tasty treat without any negative consequences associated with going off of your diet for an unnecessary cheat meal.
While I’d never advocate a diet full of fast food, these examples suggest how one could incorporate what some call cheat food into their normal diet to maintain some sanity.