• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

Cheat day is here! Whether you are dieting for a show and finally allowing yourself that Kit-Kat that you’ve been literally dreaming about for weeks, or if you’re an off-season bodybuilder about to engage in your Sunday morning breakfast buffet binge – we all love cheat day. Eating the junk we crave is a wonderful thing, just so long as we do so reasonably and within boundaries. Let’s examine a few limitations to binging, and ideas which can make your cheat food experience more enjoyable and safe!

Plan Your Foods
It can be dangerous to say “I’m just going to walk into a Dairy Queen hungry for my cheat meal”. More effective would be an approach where you know exactly what dessert you are going to enjoy, and you have dinner about an hour before that. This way, you won’t overdo things, and you already possess a pre-set limitation to just how much damage you can do to your physique.

Set Limits
There is no world where a 2000 calorie binge is a good thing. It just doesn’t exist! Your heart sure will not do well with the introduction of 100 to 150 grams of saturated fat entering your bloodstream in the course of a 12 minute eating frenzy. Decide (when doing your cheat meal planning) exactly how many calories you will hit, and stop there.

Binge Early
Enjoying your cheat meal late and night guarantees it’ll be converted to fat pretty quickly. But an 11 am cheat meal – followed by a busy day of work, gym, family, and a late night walk? Surely that meal will do much less damage to your physique. The earlier you can binge, the better! You’ll have an entire day to stay busy and burn off the junk. Plan your day’s events around your planned junk food binge.

Drink Water
You’re about to introduce a great deal of waste into your body, so why not give your system the tools to actually remove these negative things from the body quickly? Drink a few cups of water before and after your cheat meal, and your appetite will be smaller as your body moves out the junk calories faster!

Alcohol?
Using alcoholic beverages as your cheat meal opens up a whole new list of negative effects, from dehydration and internal toxicity (particularly if you are using steroids already) to lowered testosterone levels. Even if those drinks only total 400 calories, they may be hurting your muscle gain progress in more ways than you can imagine. Leave the drinks alone and have some stuffed-crust cheese pizza!

Note To The Post-Show Cheats
There have been cases where insulin level fluctuations in athletes – or just plain fats hitting the bloodstream of a person with already elevated blood pressure – have resulted in situations where a bodybuilder dies. Keep it limited to a single awesomely delicious meal under 1000 calories if you have been living on chicken and boiled rice for 12 weeks!