Cheat meals: everyone’s favorite topic. Often before someone even receives their diet from me they are asking about cheat meals. How often can they have them, what’s off limits, what do I recommend?
First, a cheat meal is not supposed to be an episode of Man Verses Food. I have seen people blow a weeks’ worth of work by a single cheat meal. I am guilty of this myself. Eating an entire jar of Nutella or gallon of ice cream in one sitting is counterproductive to your goals, no matter what your goals are.
I like to use the analogy of a sponge. When you are training hard and eating clean, your body is going to get depleted. Your glycogen levels will be next to nothing, thyroid levels will start to drop, and leptin levels will be surpressed. Anecdotally most people notice this by feeling cold, feeling tired, not getting the same pump and aggression as normal when training. Your body is like a shriveled sponge at this point. Now, no matter how dry and shriveled that sponge is, it can only absorb so much water. The same is true with your body. Anything above and beyond what your body needs will be stored as body fat. A general rule I like to use for a cheat meal is to double the number of calories in a meal that you would normally eat. For example, if a 200 pound male is eating 6 600 calorie meals per day, on his cheat day he should consume 5 600 calorie meals and 1 1200 calorie meal.
Now with that out of the way, the secondary point to the cheat meal is to enjoy foods outside of your diet and break the monotony of eating the same food every day. You should enjoy the social aspect as much as the physical aspect of the caloric reefed. This is why I always recommend timing your cheat meals for when it’s a friend’s birthday, mother’s day etc. so you can enjoy the social aspect of the meal, as well as the physical.
The same guidelines about trying to eat wholesome, non-processed nutrient rich foods in your everyday diet also apply to your cheat meal. I want you to go out and enjoy yourself and eat whatever you’re craving but don’t just go out and eat junk. Try to stick with calorie dense nutritious options like a quality burger with sweet potato fries, homemade spaghetti and meat balls (hopefully with brown rice pasta), or a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Personally, my favorite cheat meals usually involve breakfast foods. 6 whole eggs, with a big plate of pancakes and sugar free syrup, and some melon on the side is one of my favorite cheat meals.
The last point I want to address is frequency. For the average person, a cheat meal frequency of two meals per week is optimal. However, the leaner you are, the more cheat meals you will need because your metabolism is faster and you have less of energy (body fat) reserves stored. Meaning that someone in competition shape may require 3 cheat meals per week, where as someone with a significant amount of body fat to lose may require only one.