Be wary of cheat days

No matter what type of body you may have, there is always room for losing weight, particularly if it is driven by a desire to be healthier rather than looking better physically. But regardless of your reasons for trying to lose weight, a major component of the transformation process is diet. And although it is admittedly often overlooked in favor of the exercise component of losing weight, it is just as important for achieving that goal, if not more important.

One popular aspect of a weight loss diet is a cheat day, which interestingly enough isn’t a critical component required to lose weight. Instead, a cheat day is the culmination of many other days of diligent dieting, in which you can supposedly eat whatever you want, even if the nutritional values go in direct conflict with the overall goals of your diet. The reasoning behind this is that the numerous days of eating right with your weight loss goals in mind may be offset by a cheat day, but not enough to keep you from losing weight over the long-term. With this in mind, the cheat day acts as a way to reward yourself for your hard work, hopefully keeping you motivated along the way to achieving your weight loss goals.

However, cheat days should most definitely be viewed with caution for anyone serious about dieting and exercising. Although the premise does make some sense, it is important to realize that a cheat day could end up doing more harm than good. Although you may think that a cheat day cannot undo multiple days of consistently good and healthy eating, there is no guarantee that is the case.

In fact, many people go way overboard on their cheat days, since they know that it is the only day that they are “allowed” to eat whatever they want, with supposedly no consequences. When these people have that sort of mindset in particular, they are much more likely to overeat and actually completely undo their progress, rather than just mitigating it.

And when this happens and results are not observed over time, this can just lead to them overdoing their cheat days even more out of frustration, or just scrapping their diet altogether, which can lead to weight gain rather than weight loss.

Plus, when you really think about it, even an effective cheat day will do nothing but slow down your progress. Even if you are losing weight slowly but surely, having a cheat day in place is just delaying the type of results that you are looking for. Is a bit of uninhibited eating really worth delaying the goals are you trying to achieve not just for your body, but for your overall health? Most people would say no.

So while cheat days can seem appealing on the surface, there really is no good reason to incorporate them into your diet, unless you really cannot handle eating healthy consistently without it, which we feel is very unlikely if we are being totally honest. If you really want to ensure results on your weight loss goals, and just as importantly get them as fast as possible, incorporating cheat days should be the last thing on your mind.