Geschatte leestijd: 3 minutenCheat meals. Who doesn’t know them? If you’ve been on a diet for a while, you’re likely familiar with this concept. Cheat meals are the meals that deviate from a diet aimed at losing weight and/or achieving goals. Meals that contain more calories due to a higher carbohydrate content.
In theory, such a cheat meal can offer benefits that ultimately contribute to your goals. In practice, however, they are also often used as an excuse to ignore the diet and indulge in tasty food.
What are cheat meals?
All treats are either sweet or fatty and contain a lot of calories compared to the size of the treat. With a few bites, you consume many more calories than you would have eaten if you had consumed unprocessed food. This makes it such a killer for your physique, especially if you want to lose weight or tone up. In addition, the sweet taste often comes from unhealthy sweeteners such as sugar or fructose. Sugar and fructose cause an insulin spike after eating. This insulin spike is very disadvantageous for a toned physique. High insulin levels trigger an enzyme (the HSD enzyme) responsible for fat storage.
In addition to sugars and fructose, the other culprit is the fat that often occurs in these cheat meals. Fats are not inherently bad; it depends on the type of fatty acids they are. Unfortunately, the fats in treats are often trans fats, which are the fats we all want to avoid. With much junk food, both the amount of sugar is very high, and the amount of fats as well. Eating a lot of fats while your insulin level is high causes your body to handle the nutrients very inefficiently and to store them as fat much more quickly.
You can resist cheat meals with supplements. When you are satiated from a protein shake, with the right nutrients, the chance that you still crave an unhealthy meal is not very high.
Why are cheat meals unhealthy?
Now that we know what’s in them, it’s also important why this type of food should not determine the majority of your diet. This food generally contains few essential nutrients. You can think of little protein (building blocks of your muscle mass) and little or no essential fatty acids (which are important for, among other things, your hormone balance).
The main reason why many people have a lot of trouble resisting the temptations of these treats has to do with our primal instincts. Our primal instinct is made to survive. Where in the past there was often a scarcity of food, there is now a scarcity in surplus. Where we used to have to seize every opportunity when there was food available, that is no longer necessary now, but that’s how our system still works. This system is also very driven by stress. Stress meant survival in the past; a stressful period often went hand in hand with food scarcity. Our daily lives contain a lot of stress with the system’s response being to immediately seek food. What kind of food? Exactly, food that contains as many calories as possible, because many calories means more energy to survive.
Advice on cheat meals
Often, despite knowing that all those treats are not a very smart choice, we still keep eating them. Either because they are just very tasty, it’s convenient, or we don’t want to say no when we’re with others. Does this immediately mean that your physique will suffer? Is that really true? Not if you handle it smartly, and that’s where the following method comes in:
“If it fits your macros.”
So, count calories. This means that if you stay within the predetermined amounts of macronutrients your body needs, there will be no problem. So, you need to consider the amount of calories you consume. Furthermore, you should not feel guilty after eating 1 or 2 cheat meals. The reason behind this is that cheat meals often still contain nutrients that your body can use. It’s just not intended for unhealthy meals to dominate.
