What’s Wrong with a Cheat Day?

The Traditional Cheat Day Only Hurts You

A lot of fitness gurus and books recommend that if you are on a diet, you need a cheat day every week to keep you sane. What could be so bad about that? You’ve worked hard all week and you need to reward yourself! You did those extra sprints on Friday and have lost 4 lbs this week because of your hard work! You can’t take dieting anymore and that cheat day will let you devour the foods you have been avoiding all week! What a great idea!

The Problems with Cheat Day

So what’s the problem? There are two. First off, you shouldn’t be on a diet unless you are a professional athlete or bodybuilder trying to make weight, gain mass, etc. If you are a regular guy or girl like me, then your diet needs to change. You are not “on a diet” because you’re trying to lose weight for your summer swimsuit. Your diet has changed permanently. No ifs, ands, or buts. You should be eating healthy all the time and for the rest of your life. Most people over-diet when they are “on a diet,” meaning they go to incredible extremes like calorie restriction and avoiding carbs. This leads to utter resentment because being on such a diet is hard work. You’re eating crap you don’t like to eat and forcing it down your gullet hole because you want to drop as many pounds as possible this week. You avoid food because you don’t want those calories inside you so you’re hungry all the time.

This has been discussed over and over here on Better Body Journal. Don’t “go on a diet.” Eating healthy all the time is not a rocket science. I have changed my diet these past two weeks to be permanent. I am rarely hungry, and enjoy what I eat. The bonus? It’s all good for me. As hard as supermarkets and fast food restaurants try to stuff the wrong kinds of food into your body, you can find good food out there with the benefits of being tasty and healthy. It’s not difficult, you just have to look. You should be at the point where you don’t need a cheat day. Yes I said it! Some weeks you don’t want a cheat day because what you’re eating is perfectly fine. The fact that you have to force some Burger King into your mouth to satisfy your cheat day should sicken you. Easier said than done, but possible.

The first problem with a cheat day is that it implies that you are “on a diet.” Your hard work and effort needs to be rewarded. Rewarding yourself with bad calories, trans fat, and sugar is a bad mental game to play with yourself. It’s wrong and not the key to getting a better body.

The second problem with cheat day is based on the first. Assuming you paid no attention to anything in the first few paragraphs and are “on a diet,” you’re the person that thinks they are eating right during the week, but in actuality may be eating wrong, but just because you’re seeing results you continue to do what you do. (If you don’t eat anything for 2 days and lose weight, it means that diet is working but is it good for you? Of course not.)

So after all this hard work, your cheat day turns into exercise within itself. You build a forest of soft drinks, French fries, cookies, mozzarella sticks and chomp through it like an angry beaver. You sweat because eating all this food is hard work. But it feels great. This is your reward.

People take the cheat day way too far. They eat and eat not knowing that all of these calories add up fast. Sure it’s a cheat day, but you can spend the next 2 to 3 days working off the damage from your cheat day. What’s the point of all this hard work if you’re setting yourself back at least one day. Almost 30-40% of your week is lost due to your cheat day and recovery. It’s like a self-imposed tax on your progress and we all know how much taxes take away from us.

What a Cheat Day Should Be

A cheat day shouldn’t even be a day. It should be a meal or two on that day where you eat a lax version of your regular diet. These meals should not include fast food and 2 pints of ice cream because those are foods you need to avoid forever. (There’s nothing bad about having a little ice cream, but a pint of it? C’mon.). Examples could be adding a buttered potato to your steak, croutons and cheese on your salad, or a soda with your regular meal. A small treat as opposed to devouring everything on the table makes a lot more sense if you’re trying to build a better body.

It’s simple. Don’t let these diet gurus tell you that you can have whatever you want on the day of your choosing. It is detrimental to your goals and leads you to believe you are allowed to reward yourself with something bad for doing something good. Change your cheat day into a temporary lax version of your regular diet. If you must eat out at a restaurant, chose something that’s relatively good for you and don’t pig out. Reward yourself with something good for doing something good and you’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll hit the gym harder on Monday because you didn’t screw up all your progress by eating crap. You’ll be less disappointed when you remained at weight rather than seeing the scale jump 3 pounds. You’ll reach your goals quicker than you thought possible.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.