Q & A: Can I have a cheat day if I am trying to lose weight?
A: What you’re really asking is, How often should I have a cheat day if I am trying to lose weight? And that answer is, Never. This is not the same as me saying you should eat “perfectly” forever, but I am saying that the idea of a “cheat day” needs to hurry up and die already.
What’s a Cheat Day?
In short a “cheat day” is binge eating without purging… you eat like an adult for 6 (or so) days, and then head to the buffet on the way to the drive through after leaving the ice cream spot, and then you wait impatiently for your next opportunity to stuff yourself silly.
Cheat days became a thing in the 90’s because they were promoted by bodybuilders turned supplement marketers. Ironically the bodybuilders promoting the cheat day concept used 16-20 weeks of aggressive dieting (no cheat days for them!) + drugs + 12-20 hours of exercise per week to prep for the photoshoots to promote the books that promoted cheat days.
Reality Check: Everything Counts
If you do adult eating for 6 days, and build up a 3,000 calorie deficit, you should be proud of your hard work. You should also know this whole deficit (and more) can easily be erased with a mild “cheat day:”
- 1 x McGriddle (450-550 calories)
- 1x Java Chip Frappucino (440 calories)
- 1x dinner out with (2,000+ calories)
- wine (200-ish per glass)
- appetizer (400-ish if you split)
- main (900+)
- dessert (450+)
- Total: 3,000 calories
Is this unfair? Definitely. Does this unfairness change reality? Not at all.
If a magic calorie sucking vortex opened up on cheat day and allowed you to eat whatever that would be amazing. Being a few inches taller, and finding the winning lottery ticket in my wallet would also be amazing. If wishes had wings we’d all have nice things, (and nothing nice would ever be special again.)
Metabolic Boost?
There’s even a book series and plenty of articles on the internet that will tell you how having regular “cheat days” will boost your metabolism and/or enhance fat loss. Some even talk about how the cheat day will boost your leptin levels, and that since leptin (kinda) regulates body fat, then a boost will make it easy to lose weight. This is pure bullshit.
First of all there is math. If, on a cheat day, you eat away the deficit you have worked all week to create the net result is no weight lost. Leptin (or any other hormone) does not change how math works.
Second is the very misleading “metabolic boost” claim. We do burn calories to digest our food, and this is misleading when presented in terms like “the more you eat the more you burn.” While eating more total food means burning more total calories in digestion, it’s still only going to be 10% of the increase in calories eaten. This means you’re absorbing 90% of this increase. So, you burn more, but you absorb 9x more than you burn… the extra calories get stored.
Third is that boosting leptin does not help weight loss, but actually drives faster weight gain. The promising research on leptin is on antibodies that neutralize (destroy) it. In other words the truth is exactly the opposite – too much leptin seems to be a big part of what drives our brains to overeat, and less leptin makes weight loss easier.
Bottom Line
I’m saying what economists have said for centuries: there’s no such thing as a solution, only tradeoffs. It’s also what your grandma said: if it sounds too good to be true, it is. You can figure out how to make room for some of your favorite foods some of the time, but there’s no free lunch.
Here are some ways to take action:
- How to have your wine (or other favorite things) and drink it too.
- A very important way to burn more calories.
- Simple ways to reduce your calories.
And if you’d like to watch some of the women we’ve helped share their stories, go HERE.
Josef Brandenburg is an Amazon.com best-selling author, co-owner of True 180 and can be found training clients on a daily basis. Josef was a contributor to the #1 Amazon.com bestselling book Results Fitness, and the author of several other books. He was also the fitness expert for the PCOS Challenge reality TV series and has been featured in The Washington Post, on ABC, News Channel 8, WUSA 9, and in newspapers coast to coast and is a contributing writer for Active Life DC.