Did You Know Cheating (On Your Diet) Is Good

 

If your fitness plans include a fat-loss diet as part of your plan to get fit at last, you know that staying on your diet is going to be hard. It's going to take plenty of will power to stick with it 100% of the time, and you're probably sad about the loss of some of your favorite foods. Well this may come as a surprise to you, but cheating (on your diet) is sometimes good. At least, cheating is good when you do it right.

To lose weight (or more precisely to reduce your body fat percentage), you need to eat better and eat less. That's hard because it tends to leave you hungry, and you miss your favorite foods. Giving them up isn't easy on your mind. But consuming fewer calories isn't easy physiologically. Let's talk about why.

Your body adapts to changing situations. If you eat too much, your body adapts by storing the excess as fat. Your body will also adapt to a significant and sustained reduction in the amount of food you eat. If the number of calories you eat drops a lot, your body will eventually adapt to this situation. It adapts by going into starvation mode, as if you were in the midst of a famine.

If your body is in starvation mode, it makes a number of changes to the way it works. First, it tries to store as much energy as it can, in the form of fat, in case the "famine" lasts. Second, your metabolism slows way down to conserve energy. You become listless and cranky as your metabolism goes down. Adding insult to injury, your body conserves more energy by cutting back on things like repairs and maintenance. Your joints start to get creaky and you get hurt more often. In extreme cases, your body starts to burn your muscle tissue as fuel, rather than give up those stored fat calories. It's goal is to survive until there's more food.

As you can imagine, the results are ugly. You end up listless, with little energy to work out. If you do manage to work out, your workout suffers. You tend to get hurt quickly, and healing takes way too long. Everything you eat gets stored as blubber around your waist. Your muscles start to shrink. Not the best conditions for working out really hard and building a muscular body. This is why you need to cheat.

Missing a few meals, or even going without food for a few days won't flip your body over into starvation mode. It takes a sustained reduction in calories for that to happen. If you don't stay a low calorie levels for too long at a stretch, your body stays in its non-starvation mode and your diet will continue to do its job. You'll get all the benefits of your diet program without the nasty side effects of going into starvation mode.

So, to ensure that your serious fat-loss diet remains effective, you need to cheat once in a while. At regular intervals, you need to consume many more calories than the plan calls for, to prevent your body from thinking you are starving. And there's another benefit. If you eat your favorite foods on these cheating days, it is much easier to stay on your diet the rest of the time. There's a big psychological difference between giving up pizza (or whatever) altogether, and still eating them on your high-calorie days.

The easiest way to do this is to just pig out once a week. But this approach isn't necessarily the most efficient way to go. If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, while still avoiding starvation mode, you should get expert advice on all aspects of the way you eat, including whether cheating is appropriate for your current diet and exercise program.