Indulged Yourself and Feeling Guilty? Realize the Importance of Cheat Meals
Have you recently given into your cravings and eaten that piece of cake that was literally calling out to you? Do you now feel excessively guilty for over-indulging like that and are worried about how it might affect your work out?
Or do you belong to the other side of the spectrum? Are you one of those staunch fitness enthusiasts that are completely against even the idea of cheat meals because it undo’s all the hard work in one evening? Or do you feel like if you take a cheat meal even once you won’t be able to stop yourself from falling off the fitness bandwagon entirely?
This blog is for the both kinds of people.
Though cheat meals can and do seem completely counterintuitive, especially when you’re on a strict fitness journey, striving towards a goal – they are in reality, a necessary part of being healthy.
According to various researches, cheat meals are actually supposed to be more beneficial for weight loss, than harmful. Here’s how:
It’s a Sweet Reward
When you work endlessly all week, watching your weight, working out regularly, managing your meals and eating just the right amount of calories, having a cheat meal is a very sweet reward for all your effort. It’s something to look forward to, something to reach for and strive for. A short-term goal, if you will. The fact is, by breaking up your fitness journey into week by week with a cheat meal as a reward at the end of it you make your fitness goals that much more achievable. It’s quite easy to make strengthen your resolve and continue going when you have a goal just looming right ahead, isn’t it?
It’s an Incentive to Get Back on the Wagon
If your cheat meal turned into a cheat day, or even a cheat week, don’t worry. It happens to the best of us. But the fact is, that you can use your cheat meal, and over-indulgence as an incentive to get back on the fitness track. When you feel guilty that you’ve overindulged and let go of your hard work, you can tell yourself okay now that I’ve had my time being lazy, I can easily go back into my fitness routine, re-charged and raring to go. When you use your cheat meals as motivators to do better the next time around, they don’t seem so bad, do they?
Helps Overcome Those Gnawing Cravings
We’re humans and we all have those deep cravings for our favorite bad foods from time to time. Sometimes, our cravings can actually get out of hand, making us lose control and eating way too much than you should. Pencil in that cheat meal and prevent those bad cravings from driving you insane during the week.
Aids in Balancing Hormones
You know the way that our body stores or loses fat has a lot to do with our metabolism and the body’s hormones, right? Well according to science, it’s been found that there are two basic hormones which regulate our appetite and food intake. Leptin suppresses our appetite while Ghrelin stimulates it. The caloric deficit that we create with a strict diet, it leads to a sharp decrease in leptin, increasing the Ghrelin levels causing us to constantly feel hungrier. The increased calories of a cheat meal give a temporary jolt to our metabolism allowing our hormone levels to balance out. This balance gives our body the opportunity to bring our appetite and cravings into check, leading to overall better fitness.
If that isn’t enough to make you feel better about your cheat meals, we really don’t know what is!
