How Many Cheat Days Should I Have?

If you are seeking the truth of the various answers to “How can I lose my belly fat?” chances are you find it all a little overwhelming. Sure you could follow the exercise and diet routine, but can’t you ever have a day off?

Or, to put it a little more optimistically, how many cheat days should you have? Let’s look at this from the perspective of both exercise and diet. First of all, you need to know that muscles don’t grow when you exercise them. Muscles grow when you rest them. If you work a muscle group each and every day, it won’t get larger and stronger. It will get smaller and weaker. Muscles need a rest period of about 48 hours to rebuild the fibers that are stretched and strained by exercise, remodeling the muscle into a stronger, larger, more powerful form.

When it comes to exercise, resting muscles is not cheating. But what about your diet? Should you stay on it seven days a week, 365 days a year, 366 on leap year? The fact is, no one should try to follow any diet-unless it’s a diet to prevent life-threatening allergies-100 per cent of the time. Making 100 per cent adherence to your diet plan your weight loss goal not only is a recipe for failure, it’s not even the best way to lose weight.

That’s because your body can get used to your eating fewer calories. If you eat the same number of calories each and every day, your body goes into a kind of starvation mode. It burns fewer calories to power the same amount of activity-unless you “trick” your metabolism into staying in a calorie burning mode. How do you do that?

Here’s an example. Suppose you lose weight when you eat 2,000 calories a day. Instead of eating 2,000 calories on Monday, 2,000 calories on Tuesday, 2,000 calories on Wednesday, and so forth, why not try eating 1,500 calories on Monday, 1,500 calories on Tuesday, and then enjoying 3,000 calories on Wednesday.

“Cheating” gives you a chance to enjoy some of the foods you love, and it also keeps your metabolism from adjusting to lower calorie intake. In the scenario above, you will still lose weight, but you will keep on losing weight longer because your metabolism is never completely sure you aren’t eating 3,000 calories a day. Generally speaking, going off your diet every tenth meal, or thereabouts, or every third day, or thereabouts, will help you lose weight faster and avoid plateaus. Once in a while, enjoy yourself!