Cheat day during weight loss?
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kommodevaran wrote: »You don't have to eat chocolate to treat yourself. If you love food, I'm sure you like a lot of different foods. Most healthy weight adults don't eat chocolate every day. (Some do, but it takes some planning, and it's usually quite small amounts. If you don't feel satisfied with small amounts, it's better to not torment yourself with it.) But you can surely eat chocolate occasionally, and lose and then maintain weight.
I'm a healthy weight and still losing (at a slow rate) and I definitely eat chocolate every day! Try dark chocolate, it's much more flavorful so you don't need as much of it. 20g or dark chocolate a day comes to around 100 calories and is totally worth it during my 4pm slump!4 -
Pre-planning your day also makes it SO much easier to do what you want. I could easily have a full chocolate bar every day if I wanted to (and often do) simply by pre-logging everything that I'm going to eat the next day.
I work full time so I do meal prep for all of my work days. I come up with a good solid dinner because I work graveyards so that's my most important meal of the day which I have at midnight. Then figure out the rest of my day around that.
Then your whole week is sorted with treats built in and calories on track. The last couple of weeks have been about giant brownies. Before that it was big lemon squares. I think next week I'm doing New York style cheesecake every day.
*Oh, I'm also currently on 1,480 calories a day.1 -
Ok every single thing in this post is false. Cheat meals are still calories and yes you can overcome your deficit by a cheat meal. You can stop losing weight and even gain weight if cheat meals are common. Instead log your food,budget treats, and stop cheating yourself.MaximilienZadeh wrote: »Hi ! actually the comments above aren't true (no disrespect
)the logic makes sense though you need to learn that you don't have to eat the whole chocolate to feel satisfied . you cannot gain weight ( and i mean real fat ) on a cheat meal (or cheat day but a meal is better in any ways itll teach you how to restrain yourself from eating your fridge 
) you ll be heavier the day after for sure for many reason (mostly water ) but the upside can be great . the thing is that the idea of a cheat meal comes from the rebound in musculation . the important thing on a cheat is to eat carbs some people forget that . in a good diet the only thing you need to adjust are the carbs . you always eat the same amount of protein and fat . with less carbs your body uses the energy from your bodyfat and your muscles (the point is to keep the muscle as much as possible though ) in the end the important thing is tohave a calori deficit but you cant take aways any kind of calories . to come back to your question a cheat will not have any impact on your diet as long as it is used when you start slowing down (you feel cold tired you look flat and you are not hungry anymore ) it means your hormones are decreasing . for most people the body slows down after 7 to 10 days (i cheat every 7 days ) i lost 25 pounds with a cheat every sunday .1 -
MsHarryWinston wrote: »Pre-planning your day also makes it SO much easier to do what you want. I could easily have a full chocolate bar every day if I wanted to (and often do) simply by pre-logging everything that I'm going to eat the next day.
I work full time so I do meal prep for all of my work days. I come up with a good solid dinner because I work graveyards so that's my most important meal of the day which I have at midnight. Then figure out the rest of my day around that.
Then your whole week is sorted with treats built in and calories on track. The last couple of weeks have been about giant brownies. Before that it was big lemon squares. I think next week I'm doing New York style cheesecake every day.
*Oh, I'm also currently on 1,480 calories a day.
Pre-tracking my days is one of my core reasons for my success, particularly when I've binged. I've found it immensely helpful.2 -
martinaneuwirth wrote: »Hi. I want to know your opinions about cheat days during weight loss? Can I have One cheat day Once a week? Or every two weeks? Daily I eat around 1400calories and Maybe it will start again leptin function and i will catch some new glycogen. Whats your opinion?
It still comes down to numbers...what you don't want to do is have 6 days of a deficit and then blow all your "calorie savings" in one go. For example...if you were in a 250 cal deficit for 6 days, thats a total deficit of 1500 calories. If you go too crazy, you could eat all those calories back and be in a surplus for the week. It's your average over time that matters.
What I do is a semi-cheat. For example, a Chipotle double chicken burrito bowl where the "cheat" is having cheese, sour cream and guac. The majority of the bowl fits my daily macros just fine but the dairy and guac puts me over my fats. End result is the marginal "cheat" is minimal. Hope that makes sense.2 -
A weekly cheat meal, if you wanna call it that, can help expel water weight. A couple hundred extra calories won't slow fat loss by a lot if excericise is adjusted to mitigate.
I say do whatever helps keep you happy and working toward your goals--this strategy isn't for everyone, but I like it!2 -
tabletop_joe wrote: »A weekly cheat meal, if you wanna call it that, can help expel water weight. A couple hundred extra calories won't slow fat loss by a lot if excericise is adjusted to mitigate.
I say do whatever helps keep you happy and working toward your goals--this strategy isn't for everyone, but I like it!
I hope you mean "Retain"0 -
I find that if I cheat for an entire day, it makes it soooo much harder to get back on the wagon the next day. But, if I have a cheat meal on Tuesday and maybe a cheat dessert on Friday, it's a lot better and easier. You also don't want to ruin all of your hard work during the week in one day.3
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joemac1988 wrote: »martinaneuwirth wrote: »Hi. I want to know your opinions about cheat days during weight loss? Can I have One cheat day Once a week? Or every two weeks? Daily I eat around 1400calories and Maybe it will start again leptin function and i will catch some new glycogen. Whats your opinion?
It still comes down to numbers...what you don't want to do is have 6 days of a deficit and then blow all your "calorie savings" in one go. For example...if you were in a 250 cal deficit for 6 days, thats a total deficit of 1500 calories. If you go too crazy, you could eat all those calories back and be in a surplus for the week. It's your average over time that matters.
What I do is a semi-cheat. For example, a Chipotle double chicken burrito bowl where the "cheat" is having cheese, sour cream and guac. The majority of the bowl fits my daily macros just fine but the dairy and guac puts me over my fats. End result is the marginal "cheat" is minimal. Hope that makes sense.
Whoa! be careful of Chipotle, their chicken burrito is 1000 calories. Their chicken burrito bowl is 625 calories. I am not sure how each ingedient works out, but it might be the rice.0 -
Basically, if you crave ice cream, have a little bit. I buy the tiny 4 oz Haagen Dazs, only 10 carbs, so not bad on my 150 carb diet. Sometimes I have 2, so 20 carbs. I also crave a normal coke, so 7.5 oz can, is about 20 carbs. Make sure you do not binge on a cheat day.1
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clayelliott847 wrote: »joemac1988 wrote: »martinaneuwirth wrote: »Hi. I want to know your opinions about cheat days during weight loss? Can I have One cheat day Once a week? Or every two weeks? Daily I eat around 1400calories and Maybe it will start again leptin function and i will catch some new glycogen. Whats your opinion?
It still comes down to numbers...what you don't want to do is have 6 days of a deficit and then blow all your "calorie savings" in one go. For example...if you were in a 250 cal deficit for 6 days, thats a total deficit of 1500 calories. If you go too crazy, you could eat all those calories back and be in a surplus for the week. It's your average over time that matters.
What I do is a semi-cheat. For example, a Chipotle double chicken burrito bowl where the "cheat" is having cheese, sour cream and guac. The majority of the bowl fits my daily macros just fine but the dairy and guac puts me over my fats. End result is the marginal "cheat" is minimal. Hope that makes sense.
Whoa! be careful of Chipotle, their chicken burrito is 1000 calories. Their chicken burrito bowl is 625 calories. I am not sure how each ingedient works out, but it might be the rice.
Did you see his profile pic...a 600-1000 calorie meal is going to be a drop in the bucket. I'd say most males can handle that without too much issue...1 -
To the OP:
You can have unlimited cheat or uncheat days.... because every day is just a day!
What matters for weight loss / gain / or maintenance is whether OVER TIME you are eating less / more / or the same calories as you're spending.
A day with more calories may well modify how long it will take you to achieve your planned goals, but that by itself should not be a problem as long as you're heading in the right direction.
However that question of "chocolate portion control" and how to incorporate "treats" in your life is, in my opinion, a very relevant question for long term success.
I actually think it's more valuable to figure out how to have treats without totally derailing yourself than it is to actually hit your weight loss goals on time.
Because figuring out how to weave unplanned and planned overage days in your daily life is going to be necessary in order for you to maintain your loss eventually.
So yes my personal opinion is that anything you do to train for maintenance is of great benefit while still continuing in the right direction in terms of losing weight.
As to a couple of other questions that I've seen in the discussion... I find Google Sheets or Excel quite useful in helping me calculate how much over or under I'm for the week or for the month...
Much more importantly, and even though it has not come up in the discussion, I find trendweight.com, Libra for Android and happy scale for iPhone extremely useful in helping me to gauge my weight level over time.3 -
tabletop_joe wrote: »A weekly cheat meal, if you wanna call it that, can help expel water weight. A couple hundred extra calories won't slow fat loss by a lot if excericise is adjusted to mitigate.
I say do whatever helps keep you happy and working toward your goals--this strategy isn't for everyone, but I like it!
I hope you mean "Retain"
Nope.
http://100down.org/the-whoosh-effect/0 -
OP, you can have cheat days as often as you want. If you really do want to achieve weight loss for whatever reason, you'll separate your cheat days by several days of obediently weighing and logging all your clean vegan non-GMO plant-based cat barf.0
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