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In theory, dieting is quite simple.

When losing weight, your daily food consumption is limited by a caloric deficit and your intake of carbohydrates is often low.

Over time however, your body starts to realize that it’s burning more calories than it’s taking in per day, and this can cause your metabolism to drop.

This is not ideal when you’re trying to shed fat.

And this is where the benefit of cheat- or refeed-days comes into play.

Cheat days are a great way of ‘tricking’ your body into thinking it’s once again getting an efficient amount of calories.

This incorporation of regular cheat days will allow your body to cyclically engage its fat-burning metabolism.

Cheat days are a good thing. Sounds simple enough right? This is where we have to be carful. Technically, yes, as explained above, there is plenty of dietary benefits of the occasional above-average-but-not-extreme meal.

We must, however, be careful not cheat ourselves with misinformation and overindulgent tendencies.

Here’s a list of things to avoid in pursuit of your most effective cheat day yet:

1. Avoid Sliding Into A Cheat Weekend

This is an age-old misconception.

People tend to think that since they’ve had a “good” week from a dietary perspective, they can take the weekend off.

This simply leads to an excessive abuse of caloric intake and lack of sleep (amongst many other harmful dietary and lifestyle attributes), which basically digs you into a dietary hole for the upcoming week ahead.

Skip the weekend bender, and be smarter.

2. Avoid Conventional “Junk Foods”

When learning how to effectively “cheat” on our diet, we must come to terms with a harsh reality. We’re incorporating these cheat days as a way of spiking our metabolism with a caloric surplus; we’re not doing it to fulfill all our dietary fantasies.

Let's face it. Junk food is downright addictive.

And in order to avoid cravings and binge eating, we should simply be avoiding these common junk foods as much as we possibly can.

Allowing yourself to indulge in your cravings of processed junk foods (even just "sometimes") simply fuels these cravings even further.

Avoid the trip to McDonald's and find a way to cheat through homemade (or even restaurant, bakery, farmers market) dietary ventures instead.

3. Stop Thinking of It As Cheating

Negative connotation can often bring out negative behaviours.

As mentioned, you’re doing what’s beneficial for dietary goals, and as long as you avoid detrimental cravings and over indulging, you really aren’t cheating anyone.

A positive and healthy perspective is a key contributor to our healthy-living lifestyle choices.

Remember, you want to see some changes, so start to see yourself in that way. Does the person that you are becoming, the healthier version of yourself, want to be seen as over indulgent, lacking self-control, or do you want to be disciplined, sexy and sensible?

We’re not doing ourselves any favours by falling into negative viewpoints on our own dietary choices.

4. Compliment With a Workout

Going to the gym, consistently raising your heart rate is an great way of doing away with your detrimental dietary cravings.

Don’t think of exercise as a one-way benefit, simply meant to burn away calories.

There are plenty of psychological benefits of a consistent exercise routine but a constantly overlooked one is that you will actually start to crave healthier foods when you’re more active.

Kick those cravings to the curb and go to the gym!

Reframe the term from "cheating."

Your bigger meal is now just "part of the plan."

This will do wonders and help you to avoid overeating, getting off track or the times when pursuing health when you magically gain all the weight back!

Be strong.

Do what you need to do.

Begin to enjoy this new life you're creating!

Make healthy choices that serve you and your body.

Here's an additional article from Livestrong if this interested you: Click here!

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