Cheat to Win

To cheat or not to cheat? And how big to go when you do cheat? I answers these burning questions here.

Written By Jim Stoppani, PhD

Updated May 26, 2020

If you've followed any of my nutrition advice, the one thing you should know about my philosophy on food is to enjoy yourself while still getting RESULTS. So most of my diets allow for some fun food choices. You've likely seen some of my social media posts of me eating donuts, ice cream, pie, and other decadent favorites – all while maintaining my body fat below 5%.

Yet just because I can pound burgers, beer, and donuts doesn't mean you can or should just as often. So many people come to me confused about "cheating" on their diet. I get questions ranging from, "Is cheating on your diet a good thing or a bad thing?" to, "Is it better to do a cheat meal or a cheat day?"

Here's my answer...

Cheat Sheet

I highly recommend at least one cheat meal per week, mainly for the sake of your own sanity. You can't go too long avoiding foods you crave without having a massive cheat attack or, even worse, falling off the diet completely. Any diet that restricts too many types of foods, especially the ones you crave the most, is a recipe for failure. A diet MUST be realistic for the person following it – and never being able to enjoy your favorite foods on a diet is NOT realistic.

Adding a in a cheat meal of fun foods can give you something to look forward to, which in turn can help you follow the diet more effectively and for longer. It can also help you better police yourself. Most people want to feel like they earned their cheat food, so knowing that a fun cheat meal is in your very near future can help you better deal with the dietary restrictions that you have on the other days.

"Cheating" can also help you lose fat by keeping your metabolic rate up. If you follow a low-calorie and/or low-carb diet consistently over a long period of time, your metabolic rate (the number of calories your body burns each day) will drop. This is done in an effort to conserve energy in the body. Fat cells are basically spare fuel tanks. If you start emptying all of your fuel tanks, the body wants to conserve some fat for possible future needs. Thus, the body reacts to a diet by becoming more efficient, which means it requires less calories to do the same functions.

When metabolism stalls, it gets harder to continue losing body fat, because you now need to eat even fewer calories to continue dropping fat. If that cycle continues, you'll have to drop your calories so low that it compromises muscle mass, and that's never a good thing.

Cheating, by increasing calories and the amount of calories you get from certain macronutrients like carbs and fat, can help to prevent the metabolism from slowing down so quickly. For example, it's critical while following a low-carb diet to include one weekly high-carb day. In this case, you're "cheating" by eating far more carbs than allowed on normal diet days. Yet, since the high-carb day is important for continued progress, it's technically not cheating.

Cheat Meal or Cheat Day?

A common cheating question I get is, "Should I have a cheat meal or an entire cheat day?" That depends on your diet, your goals, and how your body is responding to the diet and the cheats.

If you're following a low-carb diet, you'll respond better to a high-carb cheat day where total carb intake is drastically increased to 2 grams per pound of body weight or more. Having just one high-carb cheat meal won't be enough to keep metabolism turned up, but since the high-carb day is technically not a true cheat day (rather, it's part of the diet plan), you can add a more decadent meal to that high-carb day. Or, you can add a cheat meal to a different day of the week altogether. The day you choose is up to you.

If you're following a more typical diet where all macros get cut (carbs, fat, and protein) – not that I recommend that style of diet – then you can decide on a cheat meal or an entire cheat day. The choice between meal and day depends on many variables. Generally speaking, the leaner you are and the longer you've been dieting, the BIGGER your cheat can be, and in come cases the more frequent.

If you're under 10% body fat for a male, or under 20% for a female, you can consider an entire cheat day. But again, this all depends on how your body responds to the cheating. If the cheating doesn't interfere with fat loss and only enhances it, then you can either have a bigger cheat day or even consider having your cheat day more frequently than once per week. One cheat day every 4-5 days may work well for you.

If, however, the cheating slows your progress or leads to adding body fat, you know the solution: Reduce the amount of cheating and/or the frequency. If a full cheat day is halting your fat loss, reduce it to two cheat meals that day and reassess your progress from there.

If you're above 10% body fat for a male and 20% for a female, start with one cheat meal per week and see how your body responds. If there's no interference with fat loss, or fat loss is actually enhanced, you can increase the number of cheat meals or even try an entire cheat day.

Self-Monitoring Your Cheats

The nice thing to remember about cheating is that it's easy to tell whether you need more "cheats" or fewer – your body will tell you with how it responds on the fat loss end.

You just need to be realistic with yourself. If eating an entire large meat-lover's pizza, a pitcher of beer and an ice cream sundae every Saturday night is stalling your fat loss progress, the solution is simple: Cut back to a more realistic and smaller cheat meal. If that same cheat meal doesn't interfere with your fat loss, or even enhances it, then you can consider increasing your cheating.

That's the nice thing about dieting – if you're honest with yourself and realistic about it, it's pretty quick and easy to tell if you need to make a change and what that change should be.

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