Now that you know what you’re not supposed to do when you cheat, let’s look at how to do it right.
Here’s how it breaks down:
Cheat once per week and try not to exceed 150% of your current caloric intake for the day.
This allows you to loosen up and enjoy yourself without losing most or all of the week’s weight loss progress.
(And notice I said current caloric intake and not TDEE.)
However you get your calories in terms of meal frequency is up to you, but most people like to confine their cheating to just one meal because it helps prevent passive overeating throughout the day.
In other words, they eat normally throughout for the day and have one larger-than-normal meal (dinner, usually).
Try to keep your dietary fat intake under 100 grams on the day that you cheat.
This not only helps keep your calories under control (remember that a gram of fat contains about 9 calories), it also helps minimize fat storage (a pound contains 453 grams).
[Read: How Many Grams of Fat Should You Eat Per Day?]
Instead of doubling down on your favorite fatty foods, go high-carb instead.
Research clearly shows that a high-carb meal causes less immediate fat gain than a high-fat meal, and you now know why.
Hence my recommendation of going high-carb and not high-fat when you cheat, which results in less immediate fat gain and has other benefits as well.
One of the downsides of keeping your body in a caloric deficit is it reduces the plasma (blood) levels of a hormone called leptin, which is produced by body fat.
In simple terms, leptin tells your brain that you have enough energy stored in your fat cells and that your body can expend energy at normal rates, including metabolically “expensive” functions like muscle growth or pregnancy, eat normal amounts of food, and engage in normal levels of physical activity.
If you restrict your calories to lose fat, leptin production decreases, which tells your body that it’s in an energy deficient state and that it needs to expend less energy and consume more.
It accomplishes this through several mechanisms: reduction of basal metabolic rate and non-exercise activity, and stimulation of hunger, to name a few.
Raising your leptin levels reverses these effects, of course, which is why you feel better when you stop restricting your calories.
[Read: The Definitive Guide to Leptin and Weight Loss]
This is why some people recommend that you “cycle” your calories high and low throughout the week, being in a deficit on some days and at maintenance on others.
That’s one way to deal with some of the negative side effects associated with dieting, but I don’t like that it can really drag out the entire weight loss process.
If you eat maintenance calories just 3 days per week you’re looking at almost doubling the time it will take to reach your goal.
Instead, I prefer the “refeed” strategy, which entails eating a large amount of carbs once per week (when you cheat).
The reason this works well is, as you know, carbs don’t heavily impact fat stores, and they also spike leptin levels (more so than protein or fat).
“Save up” calories if you want to eat a lot.
If you’re like me and like to eat a couple thousand calories in a cheat meal, I have a simple tip for you:
“Save up” calories for it by eating more or less nothing but protein leading up to (or after) it.
For example, my cheat meals are almost always dinners, so I eat a serving of protein every few hours but skip the carbs and fats that I would have normally eaten.
This way, when I get to dinner, I have a large buffer of carbs and fat (and thus calories) before I even hit maintenance calories for the day.
When I cheat at breakfast, the strategy is the same: I eat my entire day’s worth of carbs and fats in that one meal and just have protein from there on out.
When eating out, assume the worst.
That’s just the long and short of it.
For example, a palm-sized piece of meat cooked in a restaurant usually has at least another 120 to 150 calories of fat that has absorbed during cooking.
A cup of pasta or potatoes would range from 180 to 200 calories but if there’s a sauce or other source of fat, that can easily double.
Even vegetable dishes can contain large amounts of “hidden calories” in the form of high-fat additions like butter, oil, and cheese.
As for desserts, well, a good rule of thumb is most contain anywhere from 25 to 50 calories per tablespoon.
So, the point here is you have to watch what you order when you eat out. It doesn’t take much put down a few thousand calories in that one meal.
The first step, then, is familiarizing yourself with the types of foods you like to eat when you dine out.
You can do that on a website like Calorie King, which has an entry for just about any type of dish you could want to eat.
If you’re eating at a chain restaurant, the exact meal might be listed (Olive Garden fettuccine alfredo, for example, which is listed at 1219 calories with 75 grams of fat and 47 grams of saturated fat).
When it is, I recommend that you add 20% to those posted calories (many restaurants underreport actual calories in meals).
If that restaurant’s version of the dish isn’t listed, search for it on Calorie King and look for “Average All Brands.”
If it’s there, add 20% to the calories.
And if there’s no average for all brands, take a look at a handful of the entries and choose a number in the middle and, again, add 20% to it.
This might sound like quite a bit of work and hassle, but it’s really not, and the more you do it, the easier it gets.
And the point isn’t to track every calorie you eat in your cheat meals, of course, but just to avoid feasting away the previous week’s progress.
If you want to be able to drink and still lose weight efficiently…
- Don’t drink more than one day per week.
- Restrict your dietary fat intake that day.
- Don’t eat any high-fat foods while you’re drinking.
- Stay away from carb-laden drinks like beer and fruity stuff (stick to dry wines and spirits).
It’s that simple.
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