More and more individuals are starting to understand the importance of cheat meals on their diet. Not only do cheat meals offer a great psychological break from the strictness you feel while on your diet program, but they will also serve to boost your metabolic rate, tricking your body into not thinking that you’re starving yourself.
As anyone who’s ever been on a weight loss diet for a lengthy period of time knows, fat loss gets increasingly harder as time progresses.
Therefore, if you want to prevent this metabolic slow down, one of the most important things you need to be doing is including cheat meals into your diet.
Optimizing Your Cheat Meals
When it comes to these cheat meals, you can actually optimize this process even further by timing the meal to coincide with when your body needs those additional calories the most – right after your workout.
If you have a big cheat meal planned, particularly if it’s going to be very carb heavy, try and perform a workout right before hand, so your muscles are essentially starved for high-calorie, high-carb nutrition.
When using this technique, you will stand a much greater chance of those excess calories going directly into the muscle cells, where they will replenish muscle glycogen stores as well as help to rebuild the muscle back stronger than it was before.
There will also be a much lower chance that these excess calories get turned into body fat – which is exactly your hopes at this point.
The Structure of the Before-Cheat Workout
When looking at the best structure for the workout right before a big cheat meal, try and perform slightly higher rep training, as this will deplete the muscle glycogen stores to a great extent, increasing your need for an overabundance of carbohydrates.
Focus on the main lifts for the body as well – bench press, squat, deadlift, row, and shoulder press, as these will be the ones that use the highest number of muscle fibers.
So, don’t be scared of a cheat meal every now and then. When used properly it is only going to work to your advantage and speed up the entire fat loss process.
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