Cheat meal or cheat day?

As we said in the article “Is Cheat Meal Necessary for Weight Loss?“, increasing your calories to weight maintenance calories, for one or two days a week, can prevent your metabolism from slowing down during a diet. Low-calorie diets and long-term dieting can slow down metabolism. For this reason, cheat meal or cheat day is suggested to prevent reduction of metabolism and increase motivation.

There are three ways to increase calorie intake:

• The first method is to use healthy foods in the diet. By using this method, there is no need to use other foods and you only eat the same foods in the diet more than usual. The goal is to increase calorie intake to weight maintenance calorie. Increasing the foods in your diet is usually done by the specialist who adjusted your diet.
• The second method is to use cheat meal in weight loss diet. In this method, you are allowed to eat any food you like in one meal or snack. You can use sweets or high-calorie foods such as pizza, hot dogs, etc. The main point is that you should avoid overeating in this meal.
• The third method to increase calories is cheat day. In this way, a whole day is free for you and you can eat whatever you like on this day.

In this article, we want to discuss whether Cheat Meal is better or cheat day.

Watch the calories

As we said in the article “How to lose weight fast“, it is the number of calories that enter the body that determines whether you will lose or gain fat. If the calories you enter through food are more than you need, you will become fat. If the calorie intake through the diet is less than needed, you will lose fat.

In weight loss diets, you or the specialist who adjusted your diet, reduce your calorie intake to the point where the body uses fat stores for producing energy. Now imagine that you put a lot of calories into your body with one cheat meal. In this situation, all your efforts will be lost and you will not see any fat loss!

What is the point?

The point here is that if you don’t increase your calorie intake too much, both Cheat Meal and Cheat Day are suitable! According to the studies that have been done, if you increase your calorie intake for a day only up to close to weight maintenance calories, the fat burning process will not be disturbed.

So you can adjust the calories of a cheat meal or cheat day so that the calories consumed for the whole day are not more than weight maintenance calories. To know how many calories you need to maintain weight, it is better to use a calorie calculator.

Beware of your cravings for junk food

So far you have realized that if you control your calorie intake to cheat on your diet, you will not have any particular problem. But there is still one very important tip you should know. Some people have a lot of cravings for sweet or high-calorie foods. When faced with these foods, these people lose their control and eat a lot of calories. If you are one of these people, it is better to use cheat meal or the first method to increase calories instead of cheat day. In this situation, the possibility of losing control decreases.