When in a dieting phase you often hear people say that each week they are allocated a cheat day where they can eat what they want with no guilt attached.
This is usually incorporated as a ‘reward’, something to look forward to and keep you motivated throughout the week to stay on track with your diet.
But is a cheat day really beneficial?
Let’s think about this logically. If you are able to eat anything you desired with no limitation and guilt for one day, what would you choose? I know for me it would be pancakes with a mountain of toppings for breakfast, a burger and fries with maybe even a milkshake for lunch, a pizza for dinner and of course I couldn’t forget desert… a baked ricotta cheesecake!
Now if you take a look at all of these meals and identified the macros you would notice that they are all high in carbs and fats… but we have been told not to feel guilty right? And it’s not about the guilt or even the weight that you might put on after eating this… the issue lies in the brains response to eating these foods.
So here’s a quick science lesson… if you are eating high carb/fat foods, not just high carb or high fat foods your brain has a response called the mesolimbic pathway, which is like a rewards system when eating food that is not macros friendly because it takes good. And why this would be all good and well for just the one day, once your brain has experienced ‘tasty’ foods, it’s going to be thinking about and craving those foods for a lot longer than one day a week.
Your brain will let you know that you are hungry, but it will decipher what you are hungry for without you knowing. Your brain will go through your food log, flick through and select a meal that it knows tastes good… not a meal that is going to work into your macro allocation. If you have never eaten a food, the food is not in your food log right? So if you cut out particular foods long enough your brain will have trouble finding them in your food log. However, as soon as you taste even the smallest amount of that food again, your brain goes right back to square one and that meal is at the top of the list… now imagine doing that every week!
It’s like training anything… you don’t train your dog to go to the toilet outside and then once a week say it’s okay to pee inside today you earned it!
In saying this there does come times in a diet phase where you do need to be rewarded, but instead of a ‘cheat day’ you should allocate a ‘refeed’ where you are able to up your carbs but are still aware and counting what you are eating…. And staying away from high carb/fat foods!
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