WHAT TO DO IF I CHEAT ON MY DIET

I love the reasonable, I don't have to be perfect approach in this article! I firmly believe what's most important is to consider 'Long-Term Health' as my first priority! Make the inside healthy and the outside will reflect with vitality!

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What to Do If I Cheat on My Diet, has a short answer and a long answer.

Cheating with a meal or two on your diet has temporary effects like fluid retention which is always caused by excess salt, sugar, and fat intake. In extreme events when you throw caution to the wind and binge massively over an entire weekend you will have actual body fat gain. If this is the case the question of “What to Do If I Cheat on my Diet?” question is out the door. There is nothing you can do about gained fat other than get back to work. The temporary side effects of a meal or two will flush out in 24-48 hours. You have to deal with the effects as you bring them on.

WHAT TO DO IF I CHEAT ON MY DIET

Before we get into the long answer of this question, you need to remember that the scale is really a bad indicator of to whatever damage was caused by a binge weekend. It takes 3,500 excess calories to create a pound of fat. With that said there are also other factors that must be taken into account before you can say that you just are going to put on a pound of fat. Some of those factors include hormonal shifts and gut bacteria levels.

So your weekend binge is really not five pounds of fat when you step on that scale Monday morning, though that doesn’t give you the green light to binge all the time. Bingeing will catch up with you and it’s not good for your health. Our bodies thrive on clean eating. The more clean eating you do, and the less bingeing, the better you will feel.

The majority of the Monday morning scale number is temporary fluid retention due to too much salt, sugar, and fat and a great indication that your muscles are clean fuel-starved.

It is very simple to understand this process. Our bodies like to maintain a certain salinity in our extracellular fluid. If you consume too much salt, the salinity goes up, so your body holds on to more water as it focuses on restoring the balance. Once you stop consuming all the excess salt, your body will restore the balance, and the water will flush out.

Clean fuel-starved muscles are the other factor. Our muscles contain their own internal carb-based fuel source called glycogen. Glycogen brings water into muscle. When you are working on losing weight you are typically creating a calorie deficit, and your muscles tend to run lower in glycogen levels, and therefore the muscle tissue carries less water. So if you suddenly eat at a surplus of calories, sugar, salt, and fat this will stimulate the body to recharge the glycogen stores, which in turn increases the fluid volume in muscle tissue, which will also bring up the number on the scale.

WHAT TO DO IF I CHEAT ON MY DIET

So if you are a person who is consuming 1,200-1,400 calories a day to lose weight but are also add in weight training this will initially cause a weight gain, as the body has to store water as it balances what the muscles need. It will subside after some time. So the scale can go up or down from water during a weight loss, muscle gain regimen.

Having a Cheat Meal every 25-30 days is not necessarily a bad thing. An increase in calories thrown into the middle of a longer period of eating at a calorie deficit can actually benefit your overall goals.

What to Do If I Cheat on My Diet? That is easily answered. You simply get right back on track. Of course you don’t want to go on a pizza binge for days, but to have one meal every 25-30 days where you have some extra calories can actually help.  So dump the guilt trip and jump back in with your workouts and clean eating. Your body will let you know that you cannot do that often. It likes the extra calories now and then, but it wants to be healthy and clean.