How You Can Cheat Your Way To A Leaner Body
If you’ve included a fat-loss diet in your quest to get fit at last, you know sticking with it will probably to be difficult. It’s going to take plenty of will power to stick with it 100% of the time, and you’re probably already mourning the loss of some of your favorite foods. So this may come as a shock to you, but cheating (on your diet) is 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 eat. To get into really good shape, you will have to consume fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight. This is where things get tricky.
A key reason that any kind of diet doesn’t work well over the long term is because your body adapts. If you regularly consume fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight, your body takes this as an indication that there isn’t enough food. In other words, it acts as if you are in danger of starving.
When your body is in starvation mode, it functions in ways that won’t help you meet your goals. It starts storing every calorie it can as fat, since it thinks there isn’t enough food to go around. Your metabolism slows, leaving you with less energy. It puts less effort into maintaining and repairing your joints and muscles, since the top priority is to survive until there’s more food. If the “famine” last too long, it starts consuming your muscles as fuel while preserving the fat for an even more dire emergency.
As you can imagine, the results are ugly. Because your body is conserving energy, you have little energy to exercise. If you do get up the energy to exercise, your workout will be low quality. You are more likely to get injured, and it takes a long time to recover. Everything you eat seems to instantly turn into blubber around your waist. Your muscles might actually start to wither away. Starvation mode clearly isn’t conducive to working out and getting truly fit. This is why you need to cheat.
Fortunately, your body doesn’t jump from its normal mode into starvation mode if you skip dinner one day. You need to be running on low calories for a number of 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 prevent your body from thinking you are starving. And there’s another benefit. If you eat your favorite foods on these cheating days, 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.
A simple way to cheat 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 your diet, including whether cheating is appropriate for your situation.
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Tags: cheating, diet, fat loss, fitness, Nutrition, Weight Loss
