Did You Know Cheating On Your Diet Is Good For You
If your fitness plans include a fat-loss diet as part of your plan to get fit at last, you know sticking with it will probably to be stressful. It’s going to take plenty of will power to stick with it consistently, and you’re probably sad about the loss of some of your favorite foods. Well this may come as a surprise to you, but cheating (on your diet) can be helpful. At least, it can be when you do it right.
When you’re want to lose significant weight, you need to exercise hard, but you also need to control the amount of food you devour. To get into really good shape, you will have to start eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight. And your body isn’t going to like that.
One of the reasons that any kind of diet doesn’t work well is because your body adapts. When you consistently cut back on the number of calories you consume, your body takes this as a signal that you are in the midst of a famine. In other words, it acts as if you are in the midst of a famine.
If your body is in starvation mode, it makes a number of changes to the way it works. First, it stores every calorie it can as fat, in case the “food shortage” lasts. Second, it reduces your metabolic rate to conserve energy. In this low energy state, you become listless and cranky as your metabolism goes down. Even worse, your body puts less energy into internal maintenance and repairs in order to keep you alive. Over time, your joints start to get creaky and you get hurt more often. In extreme cases, your body starts to burn your muscles as fuel, rather than give up those stored fat calories. The goal of your body is to survive until there’s more food.
As you can imagine, the outcome of this adaptation isn’t pleasant. You end up listless, with little energy to exercise. If you do manage to work out, your workout suffers. You tend to get hurt quickly, and healing takes way too long. Any food you do eat gets stored as belly fat. Your muscles might actually start to wither away. Starvation mode clearly isn’t conducive to working out and getting fit. This is why you need to cheat.
Your body doesn’t jump from its normal mode into starvation mode if you skip dinner one day. It needs to experience a significant shortage of calories for several days straight before it switches over. If you don’t experience that significant shortage of calories for that number of days, your body won’t start running in starvation mode. You’ll get the benefits of reduced calories, without the unpleasant side effects of starvation mode.
So, to ensure that your serious fat-loss diet remains effective, you need to go off the plan once in a while. Every so often, you need to eat significantly more than you otherwise would, to keep your body from going into starvation mode. And there’s another benefit. If you eat your favorite foods on thedays when you break the diet, it becomes that much easier to stay on your diet the other days. There’s a big psychological difference between giving up your favorite foods altogether, and still eating them on your high-calorie days.
The easiest way to do this is to just pig out once a week. But this approach isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to go. If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, while still avoiding starvation mode, you should get expert advice on all aspects of the way you eat, including whether and how to go about cheating based on your specific diet, body type and so on.
