Cheat Meals Are Your Friend

Cheat meals are our friend

By: Ali Schuetz, www.templetrainer.co

When you embark on a new fitness journey, getting up at the break of dawn to get your booty on the stairmaster, or completing a heavy lifting workout after a long day of work seems less than desirable. However, the biggest enemy against our fitness goal is our diet. Don’t get me wrong, all the physical aspects of getting in shape are challenging as well, but our diet is the quickest way we can sabotage all our hard work. I personally have a major sweet tooth, and often times fighting off those cravings is the hardest thing I have to do.

I incorporate a cheat meal into my diet once a week. Yes, even when prepping for a competition. I understand the fear that cheat meals will derail us from our goal physique, but in actuality not only do they help us keep our sanity (amen), but they also can be used as a dietary tool. If we use cheat meals correctly they can help us carve our physiques due to resetting hormones that deal with our metabolism, replenishing glycogen, and keeping our fat-burning tools on high drive.

Let’s keep in mind cheat meals are not meant for us to raid our cupboards like savages, eating everything in site. In order for cheat meals to be beneficial we must learn why they work and how we can incorporate them best. Cheat to the fullest with these three points.

How does it work?

Because our goal is to produce extreme leanness, it’s inevitable that our diet consists of calorie deficits and a low dosage of carbohydrates day in and day out. So here’s what is happening in our body when we eat this way:

Leptin is a protein in our body produced mainly by fat tissue. Its main job is to regulate our appetite and energy balance, and acts on the hypothalamus in the brain to suppress food intake and the use of calories (energy). This protein plays a major role in keeping our body weight and fat mass regulated through it’s relationship with the brain.

There’s another appetite stimulant we have called Ghrelin, a peptide hormone produced by the stomach. With our low calorie diets and grueling, consistent workouts, studies have shown that these components increase our ghrelin concentrations, which can lead us to increasing food intake and body weight.

Our diet also can affect our energy levels, due to our decreasing level of thyroid hormones. These hormones help us regulate and maintain our metabolism; so sustaining a low-carb diet can deplete the body of glycogen (a partner of thyroid hormones) and leave us feeling sluggish and weak.

As competitors and fitness enthusiasts, it’s important for us to keep our energy in balance so that we can train intensely while staying on a restricted diet. A weekly cheat meal that is higher in calories and carbohydrates can raise our leptin levels and lower ghrelin. By returning our hormone levels to normal we prevent any negative effects on our metabolism, energy usage, and hunger levels. The increased calories can also increase our thyroid function, which can boost our metabolism. Our increased metabolism can even last for days as our body works to digest the cheat meal. This can help avoid the dramatic drop in hormones when your strict diet is resumed.

Scheduled cheat meals are beneficial to optimizing our body’s hormones to prevent us from going into starvation mode, and even helps us avoid weight-loss plateaus. Who would have thought eating more would help us lean out!

Optimal cheat meal options

As we talked about before, whether we are prepping for competition or just trying to get lean, our diet consists of calorie-deficits and low-carb dosages, so it’s only natural that we replenish ourselves with a cheat meal high in calories and carbohydrates. Some of the best examples of cheat meals I like to incorporate are pizza, pasta dishes with chicken, fajitas with tortillas, stir fry with chicken and rice or noodles, or a cheeseburger.

All of these meals are high in carbs and calories, but also in protein. Unfortunately, beneficial cheat meals don’t entail chocolate shakes galore. Eating food packed with sugar and lacking any nutrient dense value can ruin your week’s progress, and can even potential off rail your diet. Enjoy a small, sugary treat every once in awhile, but avoid it if you can.

Mark it on the calendar

Cheat meals are a wonderful thing to look forward to after a long, stressful week. Take a look at your current eating plan, and decide when the best day and meal your cheat meal could fall on. Cheat meals are a fun way to relax from the intensity of the process, and to satisfy some cravings you may have. Keep in mind that a cheat meal is simply that: one meal. Make sure you pick a time that won’t tempt you to keep cheating the rest of the day after the cheat is over. I personally enjoy my cheat meal at dinnertime, that way I won’t tempt myself to snack the rest of the day. It’s all about experimenting and finding what works for you. For all I know you could be a breakfast cheat meal person, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Just remember to incorporate a cheat meal you need to be able to stay on target afterwards.

Conclusion

I love the freedom of being able to incorporating one meal a week to loosen the reigns that will even enhance my physique goals. Sometimes prepping for competitions or trying to lean out can get us on a one track mind and create a fear of eating anything off of our meal plans; this is unhealthy. We need to remind ourselves that having a lean physique is great, but so is having a healthy mindset about our body and how we fuel it. Getting wrapped up in our diets can consume us mentally if we don’t do it in a smart, healthy way. Cheat meals can be a reminder to us that it’s okay to indulge sometimes. Bon apetite!

References:

• http://www.chinchem.org/content/50/9/1511.long

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8866554

• http://press.endocrine.org/dol/full/10.1210/jcem.82.2.3757