Is it OK to have a ‘cheat day’?
Those who are dieting – whether they’re on the weight loss train or they’re pumped-up gym-goers – sometimes allow themselves a ‘‘cheat day’’ where they can eat whatever they want.
The cheat day is a reprieve from the often harsh restrictions of dieting, and it’s what some people look forward to every week.
However, is it good for your body, though, and what effect might it have on your overall dieting efforts?
Let’s drill down to what actually constitutes a cheat day. It’s a calculated, regular move to eat specific things that are completely off-limits to you during your diet.
Maybe it’s fries and chicken wings, perhaps it’s chocolate and biscuits, or maybe it’s as broad as sugar, refined carbohydrates, or alcohol.
At a psychological level, cheat days can be beneficial for sticking to a harsh diet that’s otherwise difficult to maintain. It can satisfy cravings on a weekly basis to ensure you don’t fall off the wagon completely.
However, such cheating must be calculated and finite to have this positive psychological effect. If you engage in an all-out binge, the psychological effects will be detrimental.
This is why most proponents of cheating while on a diet advocate a ‘‘cheat meal’’ rather than a cheat day. One plate of food, once a week, where your dieting rules don’t apply.
Biologically, there may be some benefit to a cheat meal, but there’s no proven scientific evidence to say a whole cheat day is a good idea.
Our bodies produce a protein called leptin, which comes from fat tissue and helps us regulate body weight and how we hold fat by impacting our energy levels and general appetite for food.
When you’re always dieting, you end up with very low energy levels because of your caloric deficit, and this has a negative effect not just on your ability to undertake day-to-day living, but also your mood and the effort you can put into exercise.
When your provide yourself with one calorie-filled meal, there’s some evidence to suggest your leptin production will increase and you’ll maintain a level of energy needed to continue dieting and exercising for the coming days.
The logic of entire cheat days is what has fuelled popular fad diets such as the 5:2 diet, which dictates a low calorie intake five days per week, and a higher intake during the other two. This is known as intermittent fasting, and it’s a scientifically controversial area.
There are many issues with taking a whole cheat day, and fewer with a cheat meal.
Primary, there’s the point of continuing to feed an addiction to a particular food (say, icecream) that you know is your weak point and is completely off limits in your usual diet.
Similarly, there’s the aforementioned bingeing issue, which is why a cheat meat is advised over a cheat day.
If you give yourself carte blanche to eat whatever you want for an entire day, it’s possible to consume an entire week’s non dieting calories and thus ruin your dieting efforts for that whole week.
You may have heard about ‘‘starvation mode’’, which is when your body is supposed to hold on to fat because you’re not consuming enough food for energy.
While cheat meals can help prevent this, starvation mode only comes into play when you have very low body fat – for example, if you are a bodybuilder.
Healthy people with regular body fat ratios who are dieting will not enter starvation mode and cheat meals will not benefit them in this manner.
Many dieters like to apply a 90/10 rule to the way they eat. That is, you stick with your regime 90 per cent of the time, and allow lenience on yourself for the other 10 per cent, such as when you dine out with friends in a portioncontrolled environment like a restaurant.
There’s a lot of merit in this approach, namely for dieters’ sanity. It also would allow you more than one cheat meal a week.
For example, if you eat six small meals every day (a total of 42 meals per week), you can have approximately four small meals every week that don’t follow your strict diet.
For those that find dieting truly excruciating, four little meals of your choice could be the difference between sticking to a diet longterm, or throwing it out the window completely.
Lee Suckling has a masters degree specialising in personal health reporting. Do you have a health topic you’d like Lee to investigate? Send us an email to life.style@fairfaxmedia.co.nz with Dear Lee in the subject line.