Due to the restrictions that some nutritional plans include, some techniques such as cheatmeal emerged, to facilitate the monitoring of this plan. However, cheatmeal, is it an effective technique? Is it beneficial?
Next, we will expose the benefits and harms of cheatmeal, as well as an alternative.
What is cheatmeal?
Cheatmeal or cheat meal is a meal within our nutritional plan in which we allow to introduce foods that are not allowed in our daily nutritional plan.
What is it for?
Cheat or cheat food mainly has a psychological benefit , since it will allow us to disconnect from our nutritional regime and be able to eat with some freedom.
Another possible use would be when a possible social event occurs, which keeps us from being able to maintain our nutritional regimen .
It's profitable?
Trap food, although it has more psychological benefits, also has physiological benefits, since it allows us to replenish glycogen reserves and will allow us to have more energy during that day and the day after, being able to perform better in subsequent workouts .
Although we have seen that this food has benefits, it also has disadvantages, since, in case of an excess, we could end up ruining part of our results. It should be noted that this food has almost no hormonal repercussion. In addition, at the metabolic level it also has no impact. On the other hand, in this metabolic aspect, other alternatives that we will offer below if they will have an impact.
Another possible detriment of this cheat meal would be the heaviness when digesting this food, as well as a possible abdominal dilation.
A Cheatmeal won't ruin all your work as long as we use logic and don't do crazy things. Without doing crazy things, it can be the psychological relief you need.
Alternatives
A much more effective alternative to cheatmeal would be refeed or carbohydrate loading .
The carbohydrate or refeed load, in addition to the psychological benefits of free food, also has physiological benefits . This is because eating large amounts of carbohydrates in certain periods helps to normalize certain hormones (such as leptin) thus facilitating fat loss in periods of definition, or fill muscle reserves in low carbohydrate diets and thus be able to perform at 100 % .
A final clarification would be that, if you decide to recharge carbohydrates, this would replace cheat food , the two would not complement each other.
Another effective alternative would be the cessation of the diet , which, as its name says, would be "stopping" from dieting. It is necessary to clarify that this has its nuances, since to be optimal the correct thing would be to establish a period of normocaloric controlling what we ingest , but with a little more margin than the hypocaloric diet.
