To Cheat or Not To Cheat
Yesterday we spoke of a boring menu that was so tight on choices it could have slipped through a crack in the floor! There is a time and a place for a menu like that but not in everyday life and certainly not for long periods of time. Living that tight requires a purpose—an event or etc.—that mandates a particular look for a finite amount of time. If you have a good amount of dieting to do before that event gets here, you are wasting your time being that stringent. So where do you start when you want to add some fun to your diet? Cheat meals are a great place.
This is an age old question that I get all the time, “When can I have a cheat meal? What can I have for my cheat meal? When do I need to cut out my cheat meal? Etc.”
Honestly, you can have a cheat meal every week when dieting and it really will not make much of a difference. When I take a cheat meal out of a menu it is not because I think it will hamper results, it is because I think you may not be able to handle it. Let me lay this out for you so you can see where I am going.
Say you are eating 5 meals per day and your average meal is 275 cals. I would tell you to have a cheat meal on Saturday by creating a menu for Saturday and throwing your last meal out. Do not try to eat less for the day or anything else. Have all your normal meals except meal 5. That would mean that you would have had 1100 cals before going out. Now you go to a restaurant and you have bread (160), butter (140), dinner (400-600) and a taste of dessert (100). This entire meal comes to 900 cals. Automatically let’s take off the 275 which would have been meal 5. We are left with 625 extra cals for the day. Since it take 3500 extra cals to make a pound of fat, your measly 18% contribution towards that is not going to do much.
Therefore, you having a cheat meal is not really a factor. However, if you have an event coming and you begin to eat more regimented, a cheat meal can do far more harm than good by distracting you from your end destination. The one thing about them that everyone knows is that once you turn that faucet on, it is hard to shut it off. So I take them out close to an event not because those 600 cals are going to make or break the event, but because the two day binge fest that follows just might!
Find “less than 100 calories” things to add fun to your diet: Nestle morsels, pudding made with real skim milk, popsicles, fudgesicles, 1T PB mixed w/Nestle Quick and so on. These little fun moments as brief as they are, may show up in your diet as many as 3 times in a week. If you are spot on with your dieting/menu, add one of these in 2 or 3 times a week depending on progress and it may just be enough to keep you focused long enough to see this thing through.
Now you can still add these things in when you are down to your last 10 pounds, however, now you must take something out to put one of these in. So if you add 100 cals, find something that you can take out of your menu so that you are still maintaining the same amount of food as before. Easy things to take out like salad dressing—make it a vinegar instead; or a banana can become berries which saves you those cals and you now use them for something else. Small substitutions like these will earn you some extra cals with which to sneak a bit of enjoyment in, thereby allowing you more time to get the job done in the gym. Make sure you find ways to add life to your menu! Do not wait until you hate food to try and fix it because by then it is too late.
Next, we need to optimize this so you may repeat it over an over again. Stay tuned for more! 
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