Staying on Your Diet with the Help of Cheat Meals

There's a very simple way to stay off the diet plateau to keep losing weight. Don't diet every day.

Professional trainers usually refer to these planned departures from a limited-calorie diet as cheat meals. Cheat meals aren't really cheating. In fact, they are essential to losing weight over the long term.

Here's how cheat meals work.

Let's say you weigh 220 pounds and you usually eat 3300 calories per day. All the physical activities in your life (even sitting in a chair while you read this article) consume calories. Let's suppose your body burns 1100 calories per day during physical activity and uses the other 2200 calories per day to generate heat, to keep your heart and lungs functioning, to power your brain, and so on.

Now let's suppose you decide you want to get down to 200 pounds. This means losing 20 pounds . You apply the old formula that equates 1 pound of fat with 3500 calories, and calculate that cutting 1000 calories out of your diet every day will take off 2 pounds of fat per week and 10 weeks of dieting will get you down to 200 pounds.

If you've ever tried this plan, you probably found that it didn't work. Here's why.

The first week you stick to your diet plan, you lose about four pounds of water weight and about 2 pounds of muscle and fat. You end the week at about 214 pounds.

The second week you stick to your diet plan, you lose about 2 pounds of muscle and fat. You end the week at about 212 pounds.

But when you weigh 212 pounds, your body doesn't need 2200 calories per day for basal metabolism. It needs about 2100. That's not a big deal. If you stick to your diet through week 3, you will still lose about 1-3/4 pounds .

But the fourth week it will be closer to 1-1/2 pounds . And the fifth week it will be closer to 1-1/4 pounds. And about the sixth week your diet will fizzle out because your cells are filled with sodium and water. You may start gaining weight while eating less than you are used to.

There's a way to avoid this problem.

Diet hard every day of the first two weeks. Then diet even harder just four days a week.

For two weeks, eat 2200 calories per day every day and never eat more than that amount. At the beginning of your third week, celebrate by eating 3300 calories one day, and then just 1650 calories per day the next two days. Repeat this pattern until you reach your desired weight goal.

You'll still be eliminating the same number of calories per week. Giving yourself extra calories two days a week (and only two days a week!) and making up for them on other days however, gives your body the energy it needs to pump accumulated sodium and water out of the cells that burn fat and sugar so they can burn more.

You are more likely to get the full range of amino acids your body needs to make proteins so your body is less likely to strip those amino acids out of muscle. Your body will waste some calories because it has not been making all of the enzymes it needs to digest larger amounts of food. And you will gain the ego boost of eating foods that you want when you want them while maintaining control over the amount .


The whole plan depends on your ability to exert willpower to eat more one day and then eat less for two days . But weight loss is really all about what you do, not what your diet does for you. You can enjoy food and enjoy your life and still lose weight. All it takes is the ability to delay gratification some days and to enjoy food fully on others.

Unfortunately, there is one group of people for whom this approach does not work, diabetics. If you have diabetes, there is never a day you can eat extra carbs. But if you choose high-potassium fruits and vegetables every day, your body will have the energy it needs to avoid the dreaded weight loss plateau.