Are Cheat Meals Beneficial?

Even if you don’t know what cheat meals are, it just sounds like you’d love it, right? You wouldn’t be wrong. What’s not to love?

A cheat meal is the meal where you get to cheat on your healthy lifestyle diet.

Wait…What?? A cheat is allowed?? Really???

Yes! And, as a matter of fact, it’s beneficial in more ways than one. The obvious benefit is that you enjoy it and it keeps your morale up. Let’s face it, we all love our favorite sinful foods and it sucks that we can’t have them every day. Well, at least not without gaining a bunch of weight. Not being able to have them can really bring people down to the point of depression. The problem with that is, a lot of people turn to food to deal with stress and depression, especially in the beginning stages of their fitness journeys.

Your just reward.

Planned cheat meals are a reward for your hard work throughout the week. It keeps your mood up and your motivation going strong. How long do you think you’ll last on a diet with no planned cheat, with no end in sight? On the flip side, a lifestyle diet habit of eating clean all week long with planned cheat meals on the weekends, for example, is mentally a lot more doable.

If you’re brand new to your fitness journey, you might start off with two planned cheats and wean off to one per week. I mentioned weekends before because that’s usually the time when most people go out to eat and hang out with friends.

But wait! There’s more!

Morale isn’t the only benefit. As you continue along, eating clean for the majority of the time, your metabolism realizes that it no longer has to work as hard to deal with a load of junk food because you’re not eating any. As a result, your metabolism slows way down. Well, we don’t want that, right? We want our metabolisms burning hot so that it continues to burn fat even while we’re sleeping. A dose of not-so-healthy food will do that for you.

So, in order to jump start your metabolism again, enjoy that planned cheat meal. And because it’s doing something good for you, enjoy it guilt free!

So what’s the catch?

There’s always a catch, right? The catch is, you must get right back on track after that meal. You want that high-burning fat capability to burn while you’re eating clean. Why? Because the chances of burning fat are much higher when it doesn’t have to deal with higher fat, higher sugar, processed foods.

And I’ve said it several times now, make sure you plan your cheat meal. You don’t want to waste it on a spur of the moment, drive thru thing. What are you truly craving? What would make your weeks’ worth of hard work worth it? What would be the perfect reward? I used to fantasize all week long about a restaurant style cheeseburger, fully loaded, with a side of sweet potato fries. Sometimes, I’d even get a shake! As a matter of fact, restaurant burgers are still my go-to. Not fast food burgers, mind you, although once in a while I would. But make sure it’s what you want. Make sure it’s something you’ll look forward to and relish while you’re eating it.

I’ll bet your decision to make a healthy lifestyle change doesn’t look quite as bleak now, does it?