Ep. #175: Do You Make These 5 Cheat Meal Mistakes?

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series where I answer one common question quickly and simply, because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less.

And that’s what I do in these episodes. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Muscleful Life and Legion Athletics. And if you want to know the five most common cheat meal mistakes that people make that make it a lot harder to get in, stay lean than it should be, as well as a few simple rules you can follow so you can cheat on your diet without significantly slowing down fat loss or gaining significant amounts of fat.

Then you want to listen to this podcast. So let’s start with a quick definition of [00:01:00] terms. What is a cheat meal? And when I say cheat meal, I don’t mean what many other people mean, which is, if you eat a meal that contains one forbidden food or another, you have to consider it a cheat meal. So for example, if you eat a little bit of sugar with a meal, Oh, that’s not a cheat meal.

Or if you have some gluten, Oh, it’s a cheat meal or dairy. It’s a cheat meal. No. What I mean by a cheat meal is simply. Eating more calories than you plan to eat or completely disregarding the nutrition in a meal. So for example, if you are eating according to plan throughout the day, and then instead of your normal dinner of let’s say meat, vegetables, and a starchy carb, you go to your favorite restaurant and have a blowout, then that is a cheat meal.

And that of course is what most people think of when they think of cheat meals, just going and eating too much food. But another form of cheating is It’s sticking to your calories and macros, but completely disregarding the nutritional side of the equation. So for [00:02:00] example, if you replace all of the calories of the fruits and vegetables in your meal plan one day so you can fit in some fast food, that also is cheating.

And the reason why is if you do that, it won’t impact your body composition. Of course, even if you do that for long periods of time, if your diet is nutritionally speaking shit, if you keep your calories and macros where they need to be, you can still look good, but over time you are going to develop micronutrient deficiencies that will.

Catch up with you. It will negatively impact your health. And as a quick note, I know some people try to avoid the term cheat meal because it has a negative connotation. Generally speaking, if you are cheating, you’re doing something dishonest, you’re doing something that you shouldn’t be doing, and therefore you should feel bad about it.

And that, of course, does not apply to cheating on your diet necessarily. And so sometimes cheat meals are also called free meals. So they have a more positive connotation. Now the [00:03:00] phrasing never really mattered to me and I don’t think it’s going to matter to you by the end of this video because as you’ll see, once you understand what you’re doing, once you understand how to properly deviate from your meal plan, there’s nothing to feel bad about.

And in fact, cheating properly or having free meals properly, however you want to Call it can actually help improve your longterm results. Okay, so now let’s talk mistakes. The five most common mistakes are one, cheating too frequently, two, eating too much in those cheat meals, three, indulging in cheat days, not cheat meals, four, having too much dietary fat in your cheat meals, and five, having too much alcohol with your cheat meals.

And let’s break each one of them down starting at the top. So the first one, which is just having too many cheat meals is pretty obvious because cheating involves overeating and therefore if you overeat too many times throughout a week, you are progressively [00:04:00] whittling your calorie deficit down and you can easily erase it.

So let’s say you are in a moderately aggressive deficit of 20 to 25 percent that could be anywhere from three to maybe 600 calories in terms of how large that deficit is depending on your body weight. And that can be pretty easy to eat back in just a few meals if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And on the nutritional side of things, if you are replacing your nutritious calories with non nutritious calories too frequently, then of course over time the nutritional quality of your diet on the whole becomes compromised. Okay. So the second mistake is eating too much in a cheat meal. And the problem here is that many people don’t realize how many calories are in the foods that they like to eat in their cheat meals and they are pretty shocked when they look it up.

Now, one of the big problems here is restaurants. Many of us, we want to have a good cheat meal. We want to go to a restaurant that we like and eat a bunch of food, right? And the problem here is that restaurants are [00:05:00] in the business of producing a delicious food and not diet friendly food. And that means using copious amounts of butter, oil, cream, sugar, things that make food very tasty, but also can add tremendous amounts of calories.

For example, one study conducted by scientists at Tufts University involved the analysis of about 360 different entrees in 123 different non chain restaurants. And what they found is that the average entree on those menus contained about 1200 calories. And the worst offenders were American, Italian and Chinese restaurants where the average entrees were around 1500 calories.

And that agrees with research that came out of the University of Illinois that found that calorically speaking, there’s really not much of a difference between eating fast food or eating at a full service restaurant. And if you want to [00:06:00] see just how bad it can get, according to a 2014 analysis of restaurant foods, the Cheesecake Factory has a couple of dishes that are very notable.

Their bruleed French toast with a side of bacon. Comes in at 2, 780 calories with fucking 93 Grams of saturated fat and eight tablespoons of sugar. They also had a creamy pasta dish that weighed in at about 2,400 calories and 63 grams of saturated fat. And remember, those are just entrees. And when many people go out to restaurants that have cheat meals, they’re usually not just having an entree.

There’s usually an appetizer or two, then an entree and usually some dessert as well. And when you add all that together, as you can imagine, it can get pretty bad. You can quickly and easily eat three, four, 5, 000 calories in one meal without realizing it. [00:07:00] And that’s one of the reasons why eating out frequently can make it very hard to lose weight because you just don’t realize how many calories are in even seemingly innocuous meals.

Okay, so the next mistake is indulging in cheat days and not meals. And I think you know where this one is going after talking about how easy it is to eat way too much in just one meal in a restaurant. I’ve worked with many people and I have had them break down many cheat days for me. And when we run the numbers, you’re looking at anywhere from five to 8, 000 calories in one day, I’d say is the most common range.

And it usually also includes alcohol, which we will talk about in a minute. That alone is enough to completely undo a week’s progress or maybe even more.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or. [00:08:00] Advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth so if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. Okay, so let’s move on to the next mistake and that is eating too much dietary fat in your cheat meal.

And this one’s a bit counterintuitive because these days, most people think that eating too many carbs in a cheat meal is the mistake. And that is simply not the case. The reality is when you are overeating, if you want to gain as much fat as possible, when you’re overeating, then you want to eat as much dietary fat as possible.

And you want to also include some alcohol, which we’re going to talk about next. And to understand why we have to talk [00:09:00] a little physiology. So chemically speaking, carbohydrates are very different than the molecules that are stored in your body fat, which are called Lipids. Your body has to turn the carbohydrates that you eat, which ultimately break down into glucose into lipids.

And the process whereby it does that is called de novo lipogenesis. Now, research shows that de novo lipogenesis rarely occurs under normal dietary circumstances. When you look at the studies on overfeeding, you’ll find that carbohydrate intake has to be sky high for DNL. To significantly contribute to total body fat mass.

700 to 900 grams of carbs per day. Now, you can find some exceptions to that in the literature, of course. For example, in one study, people were given pure glucose infusions. They were given a shitload, like 150% of their total daily energy expenditure. And yes, DNL ramped up. You can also [00:10:00] find that DNL will be higher than normal in people that have certain types of metabolic disorders like hyperinsulinemia.

But for the rest of us, just normal healthy people, the reality is that DNL will not significantly contribute to total fat mass. Now, this isn’t to say that we can just eat as many carbs as we want, and we won’t gain fat. Of course. We all know that’s not true. Energy balance alone says that if we too many calories, regardless of where they come from, we will gain fat.

But when you look at the mechanisms in play with both fat burning and fat gaining, You find that while carbs, again, they do not directly impact your fat storage in the way that many people think, because most people think that you eat carbs, this get turned into fat. That does not happen. What does happen is that fat oxidation levels go down.

So your body actually stops burning fat and starts burning carbs instead. So the dietary fat that you’re eating when it’s combined with [00:11:00] carbs gets directly stored as body fat as opposed to at least partially getting burned for energy. And so what that means then is when you were eating a lot of carbs, whether in an individual meal or just in your diet as a whole, you are also going to be storing a lot of the dietary fat that you’re eating as body fat.

And while that may sound bad, it’s not because remember one energy balance dictates ultimately what’s going to happen with your total. fat mass. If you are in a calorie surplus, your fat mass will go up over time. If you’re in deficit, it’ll go down. If you have it more or less balanced, it’s going to stay the same.

So you don’t have to worry about it. From that perspective, and also remember that dietary fat, one of the primary reasons we need to eat dietary fat is so we can replenish our fat stores and make sure that our fat stores don’t get too low, because when they get too low, ultimately we die. Now if a little light bulb has gone off in your head, and if you’re thinking.

Hey [00:12:00] according to that, then if I eat a very high carb and very low fat diet, then theoretically I should be able to eat a shitload of carbs and not really see any change in my body fat percentage. While one that just wouldn’t be healthy. Two, it wouldn’t work because research shows that when dietary fat intake is too low, DNL actually ramps up to make sure that your body is getting sufficient fatty acids.

So you can’t hack your metabolism that easily, unfortunately. And last then to bring this full circle back to the context of cheat meals. Then the reason why it’s better to have a very high carb and moderately ideally lower fat cheat meal than the other way around a very high fat and maybe lower carb cheat meal is when you look at an individual meal.

And there’s a research on this. Again, you can find it down in the references section below that shows when you’re looking at acute overeating, you will see [00:13:00] more immediate fat gain from a very high fat meal than a very high carb meal. And that is for the reasons that I just explained. Okay. So the final mistake here is mixing alcohol with your cheat meals.

And this is a problem, not for the reason that many people think. So many people think that if you have alcohol with any frequency whatsoever, you are just always going to struggle to lose weight. And that is not true. In fact, research has shown that moderate alcohol consumption is actually associated with lower body weights, not higher body weights.

And the reason for that is the calories contained. In alcohol, in ethanol, they are not converted into body fat whatsoever. There actually is no metabolic pathway for your body to turn ethanol into body fat. And that’s why research has shown that an increase in caloric intake from alcohol doesn’t produce the weight gain that you would expect or that you would see from an equivalent increase [00:14:00] in caloric intake from food.

And why you will find studies like one conducted with obese women were in one group got about 10 percent of their daily calories from grape juice and the other group got about 10 percent of their daily calories from white wine and the white wine drinkers lost on average about two pounds more by the end of the study.

And there are a few factors involved here. Alcohol is known to reduce appetite, which of course helps with weight loss. It also improves insulin sensitivity, which can have some positive trickle down effects in terms of fat burning. But the major factor is the one I mentioned earlier, which is that alcohol itself just does not get converted into body fat.

Period. Now, the one problem with alcohol in terms of body composition and eating is research shows that it impairs both carbohydrate and fat burning. So basically when you’re drinking [00:15:00] alcohol, you’re just going to store more of the food that you eat as body fat. And especially If the foods are fatty, which in many cases when you’re mixing an alcohol, you are talking fatty foods, you’re talking pizza, you’re talking fried foods, you’re talking the delicious tasty stuff.

Okay, so those are the mistakes. Let’s not talk about how to do it right and I’m going to give you a few simple rules to follow. So the first rule is I recommend when you’re cutting to cheat just once per week and on that day don’t exceed 150 percent of your normal caloric intake. Okay. And notice that I said 150 percent of your current daily caloric intake, not your TDE.

And when you’re maintaining and bulking, I recommend that you keep your cheats to just twice per week. I personally keep it to just once and some weeks I just don’t even really feel like going off my meal plan. So I don’t. Now, in all of these cases, meal frequency is up to you. If you would like to have one larger cheat meal and just use some smaller meals to fill in [00:16:00] mainly just your protein, you can do that.

Or if you’d like to have a few larger than normal meals, that’s fine as well. Again, just make sure that you are keeping your total caloric intake for that day to about 150 percent of your normal daily intake. So the next rule is try to keep your total fat intake on the days that you are cheating to under 100 grams.

So don’t go crazy with fatty foods for reasons that we discussed earlier. Keep in mind that a pound weighs about 453 grams. So theoretically, I’m not sure. How much fat you can gain in one day, obviously your body has to synthesize body fat has to create it. So there is going to be a limit, but if you were to eat five or 600 grams of fat in a day and don’t think you can’t do that, people trust me, I’ve worked a lot of people and it absolutely can be done.

I think it probably is possible, probably is by the upper limit, but you can gain a pound of fat in a day if you eat enough calories [00:17:00] and if you eat enough dietary fat in particular. Now if you’re keeping your fats in a moderate range and your protein should also be in a moderate range as well. Of course, let’s say somewhere around 0.

8 grams per pound of body weight, even on your cheat days, that leaves you a lot of room for carbs, which is good for the reasons we already discussed. But there’s another benefit. And that is it positively can influence your metabolism by raising the levels of a hormone called leptin. In simple terms, when there is an abundance of leptin in the body, it tells your brain that there is an abundance of energy available.

And so it can continue to expend energy at normal rates. It can continue to just eat normal amounts of food. It can continue to engage in normal levels of physical activity and even expend energy on metabolically expensive processes like muscle growth. And on the flip side, when leptin levels are low, we’re Which inevitably happens when you restrict your calories to lose weight [00:18:00] for a longer period of time.

And also your leptin levels are just naturally lower when you have less body fat because body fat produces leptin. And when that’s the case, it tells your brain that your body is in an energy deficient state and that it should increase energy intake. And decrease energy output. And it accomplishes this through a number of metabolic adaptations that are collectively known as adaptive thermogenesis.

And if you wanna learn more about that, just head over to muscle for life.com and search for metabolic damage. And you will find an article that I wrote on the subject of metabolic damage and also adaptive thermogenesis. Anyways, getting back on track here, research shows that high carb meals spike leptin levels more so than high protein or high fat meals.

So by using your cheat meals to eat a bunch of carbs, you are not only going to minimize the immediate fat gain that will come from that short bout of overfeeding. You will also reap the benefits related to fat. Leptin production. [00:19:00] Okay. So the next tip here is to save up calories when you want to eat a lot.

So let’s say you want to go to eat dinner at your favorite restaurant for your cheat meal. And to really enjoy yourself, you’re going to have to eat a couple thousand calories. So the best way to do this then is to come into that dinner. With a large caloric buffer, so to speak. So practically speaking, what you do is you would come into the dinner having eaten, let’s say about 70 percent of your protein for the day and really as little of your carbs and fats as you can.

And what that means then is you have a lot of eating to do actually, just to get to your baseline intake for the day, just to get to your normal caloric intake. Okay. So the next tip is to assume the worst when you’re eating out, that’s really just the long and short of it. For example, a palm sized cut of meat usually has another [00:20:00] 120 to 150 calories of fat that have absorbed.

while cooking. A cup of pasta or potatoes is usually going to be around 200 calories and it can be much higher depending on what type of sauce is coming with it. And for desserts, a good rule of thumb is about 25 to 50 calories per tablespoon. Now, what I really recommend you do is head over to calorie king and start to familiarize yourself with the types of foods that you like to eat when you’re going out to restaurants.

And in some cases, you might be able to find the exact dishes. at the exact restaurants that you like to eat at, especially if they’re chain restaurants. And you should also know that restaurants do tend to underreport their calories. So I like to take whatever I find online and increase it by about 20 percent to account for that.

And if you can’t find your restaurant’s version of the dish that you like, then on calorie King, you can just use their average for all brands to get an idea. And again, just take that increase it by about 20 percent and you’re going to be in the [00:21:00] ballpark. And the last tip here has to do with alcohol. So if you want to be able to drink alcohol, at least semi frequently without impairing your fat loss at all, then I recommend that you restrict your drinking to just one day per week.

I recommend that you restrict at least your fat intake for the day, but ideally you’d also keep your carbs in the lower end. So you would go higher protein and maybe even a slightly larger deficit than normal for that day. And that’s it. And you would also stay away from carbier drinks like beer and fruity stuff and just stick to dry wines and spirits instead.

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