Sheeba Singh

When you are on your way to maintaining a rigorous healthy lifestyle, there are days where the pattern feels harder to sustain than others. For the most part, fitness enthusiasts and professionals have a much greater deal of self control and awareness than beginners or amateurs.

The concept of a cheat-meal, cheat day is one which bears in mind this urge to want to give in to unhealthy temptations. The every-so-often occurring thoughts of high-carb foods is overcome through this simple, yet strategically placed phenomenon.

So how do you effectively cheat without ruining your fitness goals? Firstly, it is important to understand what “cheating” in fitness is all about. Depending on the sort of goals you have set for yourself, your body type, weight, lean mass etc., you can provide yourself with degrees of flexibility and leniency accordingly.

For 6 days out of the week, you want to (more importantly, need to) maintain very healthy eating habits. This means eating small portion meals every 2-3 hours ensuring you are giving yourself all the essential vitamins and minerals through proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Again, monitoring your intake is very important as it affects your training input as well as outcome.

On the seventh day, which must remain the same every week, you allow yourself to consume an “infinite” number of calories through carbohydrates.  So, splurging on pastas, rice, breads etc., is what you’re allowing your body to freely do without any sort of inhibitions.  While some do this over the span of an hour, others do it over one meal and the rest, over a day.

The benefits of a cheat are to be considered when incorporating this into your permanent fitness and diet routine. They help to replenish depleted glycogen in your body as your carb intake through the rest of the week is relatively limited. It also helps to boost your metabolism and aide your body in burning calories.

Additionally, it helps to terminate any or all cravings you may have had through the week. So over the span over the past 6 days, whichever foods were on your mind, instead of going gung-ho over them right away, you were able to instill discipline, self awareness and control and prepare your body for them in one day without feeling bad.

It is important to make sure your cheat day occurs every 6 days. So if your cheat last week was on Friday, your next cheat can not be on Saturday presuming your week begins then. Not okay. This means you have to wait until the next Saturday for your cheat again.

Personally, for me, cheat hours work the best. But, just like my workouts, I need to incorporate change into my nutrition- schedule. Perhaps, give a whole day a try?