Strategic Tips To Making Your Cheat Food Accelerate Fat Loss
You hear people talk about cheat meals or cheat days now like a fad diet.
Sometimes I wish I never even mentioned cheat meals or cheat days because every overweight person with a treadmill thinks they deserve a food bender after a few days of eating clean.
Sorry folks, it doesn’t work that way.
Cheat days and cheat meals should only be used to accomplish specific physical and mental functions directly related to fat loss goals.
Here are a few examples of when and why to cheat:
1. To spark a dead metabolism from constant crash or low carb dieting
2. To replenish and/or refill glycogen stores (when you’ve low carbed yourself to death)
3. To serve as a psychological reward (only when you’ve earned the right)
4. To reset low leptin levels (usually from 6 days or longer of aggressive calorie restriction or maintaining super low body fat levels for a long period of time)
Side note: Leptin is quite possibly one of the single most important hormones in terms of regulating body weight and appetite. The science behind this hormone goes way beyond the scope of this article, but leptin signals the brain about how much fat you’re carrying and how much you’re eating. In other words when you cut calories or get super lean, leptin drops fast so we have to metabolically reset it.
5. You have no energy or drive in your workouts and can’t seem to get a good “pump”. Or you just can’t find the emotional renewal you’re looking for (In other words, you’re flat. NOT because your favorite reality T.V. star just got voted off so you had a bad workout. Ha!)
6. Your body temperature is always low or you’re feeling the chills a lot (Cheating will heat you up in a healthy way by using the thermic effect of cheat food)
Reasons NOT to cheat are as follows:
1. You’re bored with bland diet foods (Newsflash, it’s a diet NOT the Food Network…if you want results, you have to make sacrifices)
2. You’re stressed out and need an emotional food “high” (I think they call it “life” and last time I checked we’re all going to deal with stress while we live it – so get used to it. Food can be like a drug, so don’t let yourself get addicted or emotionally attached to it.)
3. You lack discipline (It’s either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. In other words, it’s a reward – NOT an escape.)
When you do cheat, don’t go crazy and binge for hours on end. Keep your cheats to around 60 minutes, tops. This will be enough to get it out of your system and metabolically trigger what your body needs physically and mentally.
If you’re doing an actual “cheat day”, make sure you eat liberally throughout the day. Don’t “save-up” calories for a couple big giant cheat meals either. Eat what you want, but do it frequently throughout the day instead of stuffing of yourself in one sitting.
Other cheat day tips and guidelines that will help you.
Try to avoid a lot of alcohol when cheating. This messes up the metabolic and hormonal effect you’re trying to accomplish.
Try to avoid a lot of water intake 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after cheating. This will help with glycogen refilling. You don’t have to be anal retentive about it, but just keep this in mind. Sipping and quenching your thirst is fine.
Try to avoid deep fried foods and high fructose corn syrup. Deep fried foods are basically void of any nutritional value and therefore don’t provide any metabolic or hormonal benefits for the cheat. HFCS has been shown to block leptin levels. (Stick with starchy carbs like pasta, bread, rice, potatoes, etc. and dense sugars like cheesecake, homemade cookies, HFCS free ice cream…you get the idea here.)
Make sure to do some high volume resistance training on your cheat day and plan to train big body parts (chest, legs, back) the day after to maximize your new glycogen levels.
Plan for extra water the day after a cheat day. This will help get rid of the carb bloat from the prior day’s cheat fest.
Just remember, for every gram of carb you take in your body holds about 3 grams of water. That’s why you hear people always talking about “carb-bloat” the day after cheating. Water is great damage control to get you back on track.
Oh ya, make sure you have a bathroom near by. Your body will start spitting out water like you’re a fire hose.
Hopefully this gives you some insight to why your cheat days may OR may not be working.
If you really want to stack the deck in your favor, there are some really cool advanced macro-patterning metabolic tricks you can use the day before and the day after a cheat day.
The most powerful trick is depleting or carbing down with specific macro-nutrients (foods) the day prior and the day following your Strategic Cheat.
The KEY word here is “strategic”. Again, people will sometimes abuse a scientifically proven strategy like depleting and/or carbing down and sabotage all the benefits associated with cheating.
It’s all about the strategy.
Before cheating you can specifically create the ultimate environment for a healthy food bender. After cheating, your metabolic pump is “primed” for super fat loss. You just gotta know what to do!
If you’d like to know exactly how these tactics work, just claim your FREE audio CD and you’ll be off to the races!
Just leave a comment and hit the “like” button below and I’ll be back tomorrow with a brand new scientifically proven interval trick that drastically accelerates your body’s ability to burn fat when you exercise.
How You Can Regularly Consume These
3 Unique Breads and STILL Burn Fat…
In the last blog post, we taught you how to burn more fat and start cleaning out your kitchen by swapping out quinoa for rice.
Again, this isn’t going to magically melt fat off your body. But if you make a bunch of “little” changes like this in your kitchen, it can add up to make a big difference in your results.
Today, we’re going to continue helping you clean-up your kitchen so you can burn more fat and stay on track with your post summer fat loss plan. One of the main staples so many people turn to for convenience is bread. Let’s face it. Bread tastes good and it’s filling. It’s also a quick and easy fix when you’re in a hurry.
It’s pretty simple to pile up a bunch of lean healthy (non-processed) lunch meat and veggies between two pieces of bread and head out the door.
The problem. White bread is made from refined white flour so it spikes insulin (which leads to fat storage) and is loaded with hidden fillers. Plus, all the fiber (the good stuff) has been removed.
It doesn’t stop there. Did you know that one bagel usually contains about 4 servings of bread? One bagel. Yikes!
A quick review: White bread contains a large proportion of high GI (glycemic index) carbohydrates. These carbohydrates cause sugars to be released quickly into the bloodstream. This causes a rapid rise in blood sugar levels which triggers a similarly rapid release of the body’s own sugar regulating hormone, insulin.
Translation: You’ll store more fat and kill your energy after you consume these types of bread.
It reminds us of the saying: “The whiter your bread, the quicker your dead.”
BUT…not so fast.
It’s not just the white stuff that is bad for you. Even most wheat breads contain High Fructose Corn Syrup and other nasty ingredients just like the white stuff.
What if you could swap out white breads, wheat breads and all bread products for healthier alternatives and STILL burn fat?
Well you can. Here are three alternative ingredients to normal bread choices that you can enjoy.
1. Sprouted grain
Organic, sprouted, 100% whole grain, flourless bread is loaded with fiber and even contains complete protein. This means it’s WAY better than other bread choices.
Sprouted grains have increased vitamin and nutrient content because the seed is first sprouted, making it alive and active in its growth process. Some of these sprouted grain breads take on a very sweet taste because sprouting changes some starches in grains to sugars. Plus, the bread is moist and is made without yeast.
They even have tortillas, cereals, and even healthy English muffins made from sprouted grain.
Gotta love that.
2. Millet
Millet is tasty, with a mildly sweet, nut-like flavor and contains a variety of beneficial nutrients. It is nearly 15% protein, contains high amounts of fiber, B-complex vitamins including niacin, thiamin, and riboflavin, the essential amino acid methionine, lecithin, and some vitamin E.
It is particularly high in the minerals iron, magnesium, phosphorous, and potassium too.
The seeds are also known to be rich in phytochemicals, including Phytic acid, which is believed to lower cholesterol, and Phytate, which is associated with reduced cancer risk.
Millet is one of the oldest foods known to humans. It has been used in Africa and India as a staple food for thousands of years. It was actually grown as early as 2700 BC in China where it was the prevalent grain before rice became the dominant staple.
3. Spelt
Spelt has been grown – under the radar – in Europe for over 300 years, but it has recently regained popularity as a dietary grain due to its nutty flavor, high protein and dense nutrition content.
Spelt contains more protein than wheat, and the protein in spelt is easier to digest. This means that some people who are allergic to wheat may be able to tolerate spelt.
Important: Spelt does contain gluten, just like wheat, so spelt is not suitable for a gluten-free diet.
Spelt flour can replace whole-wheat flour or whole grain flour in recipes for breads. Spelt is becoming better known as a healthy grain, so spelt products like breads are easy to find in most health food stores.
There you have it. Three cool bread alternatives you can use right now to enjoy convenience and still stay on the fat burning track.
No more worrying about the hidden negative health effects of over-the-counter breads. This also cuts through the misleading marketing that makes you think whole wheat bread is healthy. It’s not.
Would you like to apply this cool food swapping technique in every area of your kitchen and your nutrition plan? Watch this video from our friend Isabel where she shares several more of these unique fat burning food tricks.
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