So, lately I’ve been asked a lot about cheat days on a diet and I wanted to talk about, you know, how cheating affects your weight loss and your diet.
Now, you have three sources of energy that you normally use up for fuel in your body. Your first and primary source of energy is your glucose or carbohydrate.
And in order to diet, you need to first deplete this first tank. Now the next fuel or energy source of the body is the intram tank which is the muscle which is the easiest one to get to.
Now you don’t want to lose muscle mass when when you’re dieting. So you need to preserve the lean body and muscle mass until you get to your fat mass which is when you get into ketosis, nutritional ketosis.
That’s when you’re burning fat and that’s where you want to stay until you reach your goal.
Now, what happens when you’re cheating?
Every time you deviate from your diet or you cheat, you’re re you’re replenishing this first primary tank and then you have to go through the muscle tank again to get to the fat tank.
So, what happens every, let’s say you have a cheat day once a week, that it takes you about two to three days to get rid of this again and then you burn some muscle until you get to the fat. So once you burn that muscle, that’s gone.
But the fat tank, what happens with it? It just empties and it refills really easily. So every time you do that, you lose muscle, you gain fat. You lose muscle, you gain fat. And that’s what we call a yo-yo diet.
Now, our recommendation definitely is not to cheat. There’s no cheat day on a diet. Once you get here, stay here until you reach your goal.
Now, cheating on a diet is like somebody trying to stop smoking. you don’t smoke for six days and you smoke two packs on a Sunday. Well, you know, that’s not going to work and that’s not going to work for a diet either.
So, we recommend definitely do get on a very um good protocol program, well-designed diet to get you into a nutritional ketosis where you can burn the fat until you’re done and then you go into your maintenance.
So, I hope that helps you with why there is no cheat day on a diet and good luck on your weight loss journey.
