Cheating on your diet is incredibly popular in fitness and nutrition. I’ve used cheat days and cheat meals both personally and with countless people I’ve coached. For reasons that we’ll dive into in a bit, they work. Eating—even strategically overeating—can actually help you shed more fat.
I know, it sounds counterintuitive that cheating on your diet will help you get better results. But trust me, it’s not.
Honestly, these indulgences aren’t even cheating. At all. Our frame of mind surrounding cheat meals and cheat days is completely skewed. Occasionally having a burger with fries, greasy pizza, or ice cream by the pint shouldn’t be considered cheating on your diet—it should be part of the plan itself.
If your nutrition plan doesn’t include wiggle room, your diet’s broken.
A well-designed fitness program needs built-in flexibility. Because when life happens, the freedom to deal with it makes all the difference. Like when a stupid busy week means dinner from the drive-through. Or when you find yourself buying pints of Cherry Garcia, Half Baked, and Salted Caramel Core after that nasty breakup.
It’s important to have a great plan. But it’s even more important to remember that nothing goes perfectly according to the plan. Ever. When it comes to your nutrition, flexibility and freedom must be part of the plan if you want long-term results.
It’s not cheating on your diet, it’s crucial to your success.
Psychology That Supports Cheating on Your Diet
The room wasn’t much bigger than a closet. It had a table, wooden chair, and two-way mirror. On the table sat a couple of bowls. One bowl was full of freshly baked cookies—warm, gooey goodness. The other? A bowl of radishes.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University were testing taste perceptions. That’s at least what they told the subjects of the experiment. But that wasn’t true. Their real goal was to test willpower…with cookies and radishes.
Half of the test subjects were told to eat the cookies and ignore the radishes. They were the lucky ones because the other half received the opposite instruction: Eat the radishes. Ignore the cookies.
The theory was that ignoring the cookies would be difficult. Because obviously. It would take willpower. Ignoring the radishes, on the other hand, would be a piece of cake (or cookie). It wouldn’t require willpower or effort at all.
A researcher would remind the subject to eat only their assigned food and leave them alone in the room. For 15 minutes. More than enough time to thoroughly test the willpower of the radish eaters.
Still operating under the guise of testing taste perception, they said that 15 minutes was needed for the sensory memory of the food they ate to fade. To pass the time, they gave the participants a seemingly simple puzzle to solve, implied it was easy, and told them to ring a bell if they gave up.
The puzzle was actually impossible.
It wasn’t to pass the time, it was actually the key to the entire experiment. Would the test subjects that spent willpower ignoring the cookies give up sooner? Is willpower a finite resource? This is what researchers paid close attention to through the two-way mirror. Here’s what they found:
On average, cookie eaters spent about 19 minutes trying to solve the puzzle before giving up. Radish eaters? Only eight. Not even half as long.
Cheating on Your Diet to Solve Your Fitness Puzzle
Habit change is hard. Fitness is even harder. For a lot of people, getting fit may even feel like that puzzle in the study—impossible.
Fitness isn’t impossible. But if you’re a radish eater, you’re making it much harder on yourself than it needs to be. Instead, you need to be a cookie eater—figuratively and literally. Here’s what I mean:
With nutrition, radish eaters walk a razor’s edge of strict discipline. They eat cleaner than Clorox. And they’re the person driving the wait staff crazy with endless healthy substitutions at restaurants.
Cookie eaters, on the other hand, have flexibility and freedom worked into their plan. They’ve got wiggle room. They eat things like leafy greens and lean proteins most of the time. But they’re also happy to enjoy occasional treats. Like cookies. Or Snickers pancakes.
While radish eaters may see success in the short term, an overly restrictive plan will ultimately end in failure. It’s impossible to follow. And giving up is inevitable—not just on the eating program, but often times on fitness altogether. Radish eaters are so busy spending their willpower ignoring cookies that they give up on their fitness puzzle far too early.
Fitness is a long game. And when you can stick to your plan over the long term, you win.
The cookie eaters won’t simply see progress in the short term, but also lasting results the long run. Instead of a broken plan that’s too strict and destined to fail, they’ve made sustainable changes. They’re don’t waste willpower ignoring their favorite foods, they’re saving it for the long haul. They’re saving it for success.
The study shows that cookie eaters spent more than twice as much time on the puzzle. In fitness, twice as much time can be the difference between mediocre results and a jaw-dropping transformation. The difference between losing a couple pounds and dropping 20. And the difference between disappointment and loving what you see in the mirror.
Do yourself a favor. Eat the cookies.
Physiology That Supports Cheating on Your Diet
Real talk, I think the best benefits of cheating on your diet are psychological. By far. But here’s the thing—cheating on your diet can literally help you burn more fat too. As a food-loving fitness professional, this is a big deal for me. This means that when I go full fat kid, it can actually help me get better results.
Pretty awesome, right? Maybe even too good to be true. That’s at least what I thought when I first heard about cheating.
Usually, when things sound too good to be true, they are. If there’s one thing that life’s taught me, it’s that. As such, I approached the concept of cheat days and cheat meals with a heaping helping of incredulity.
Before I ever tried cheating on my diet, I looked into how it works. Good news, guys: The science is sound.
What Cheating on Your Diet Does for Your Metabolism
Homeostasis is your body’s constant drive to reach equilibrium. It’s a driving force behind a lot of physiological processes—including your metabolic rate.
Let’s say you’re working on losing fat and following the simple steps to fitness success. That’d mean you’re in a caloric deficit (consuming fewer calories than you burn each day). Well done, you’ll get results. Yay science.
However, thanks to our old friend homeostasis, those results can only last so long. Why? Metabolic adaptation.
As you diet down, your body works to reach a new equilibrium by down-regulating your metabolic rate to match your caloric deficit. The more your metabolism slows, the slower your results will come. Eventually, homeostasis (the new equilibrium) is reached and your progress flatlines.
Metabolic down-regulation is inevitable when you restrict calories. But you can slow that process down, keep your metabolic rate high, and burn more fat by cheating on your diet.
The key? Hormone optimization.
The Master Hormone Leptin and Cheating on Your Diet
A master hormone is one hormone that controls several others. They’re important—key players in your body’s internal environment. Leptin, specifically, is the master hormone that regulates metabolism.
When leptin levels are high, your metabolic rate is high. When leptin levels decrease, your metabolism slows down.
In fact, leptin plays a major role in your body’s slowing metabolic rate during a caloric deficit. In other words, leptin levels drop when you’re dieting down. And that means your metabolism slows down as well.
But you can manipulate leptin secretion.
Keeping leptin levels as high as possible during caloric restriction means you’ll have a higher metabolic rate. A higher metabolic rate means you’re burning more calories. And burning more calories means you’re shedding more fat.
How? By cheating on your diet.
Strategically overeating causes a surge of leptin, effectively breathing new life into your metabolism and slowing down the negative metabolic adaptation that comes with restricted calories.
I recommend starting with a single “cheat” meal every one or two weeks (I like Friday nights). The leaner you get, the more often you can (and probably should) manipulate leptin. But one meal every couple of weeks is a good jumping off point.
Eat more food. Lose more fat.
Final Thoughts and Free Stuff
Cheating on your diet works. Plain and simple.
But it really shouldn’t be considered cheating at all. An integral part of well-designed programs is reality. Sure, the plan should look good on paper and in theory. But more important than that is the real-world application.
Simply put, an over-restrictive eating program isn’t applicable in the real world.
It’s a broken diet because it’s a diet that’ll eventually break you. Eventually, the day will come where you need the flexibility and freedom to eat a burger, some pizza, or a pint of ice cream. Rest assured, that won’t derail your progress.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it wasn’t destroyed in one either.
Long-term results are what really matter. You can make lasting progress, lose more fat, and enjoy the process by cheating on your diet. In fact, you probably should.
Because honestly, it really isn’t cheating at all.
Bt-dubs, I’ve made a lil somethin’ somethin’ you’re going to like. I want you to know if enjoying more of your favorite foods is going to help you get better results. That’s why I made this nifty downloadable checklist for you: