Crohn’s Disease Mind and Body

If you need to lose weight, you’re likely to be working out more. And it is a near certainty that you’re following some kind of fat-loss eating plan. While you know that this diet is good for you, I bet the thought of going without your favorite foods anymore stinks. Luckily, there’s hope. It turns out that occasionally cheating on your diet can be a good thing. It could actually be key to succeeding on your diet. That probably sounds strange, but it’s true. Keep reading to find out why cheating can be good when you’re trying to get fit.

To lose weight (or more precisely to reduce your body fat percentage), you need to eat better and eat less. That’s hard because you like your favorite foods a lot, and they’re probably not the healthiest ones. Giving them up isn’t easy on your mind. But eating less isn’t easy on your body. Let’s talk about why.

Your body adapts to changes. You know that when you eat too much, your body stores the excess as fat. Your body will also adapt to a significant and sustained reduction in the amount of food you eat. If the number of calories you eat drops a lot, your body eventually adapts. It adapts by going into starvation mode, as if you were in the midst of a famine.

When your body is in starvation mode, it behaves differently. It starts storing every calorie it can as fat, since it thinks there is a famine in progress and it doesn’t know when you’ll get enough food again. It dials down your metabolic rate, leaving you with less energy. It puts less effort into maintaining and repairing your joints and muscles, since it is trying to keep you alive until there’s more food. If the “famine” last too long, it starts consuming your muscles as fuel so it can hang onto fat for an even more dire emergency.

As you can imagine, the outcome of this adaptation isn’t pleasant. Because your body is conserving energy, you have little energy to exercise. If you do manage to work out, your workout suffers. You are more likely to get injured, and it takes a long time to recover. Everything you eat seems to instantly turn into belly fat. Your muscles start to wither away. Starvation mode clearly isn’t conducive to working out and building a muscular body. This is where cheating helps you succeed.

Missing a few meals, or even going without food for a few days won’t cause your body to go into starvation mode. It takes a sustained calorie shortfall for that to happen. If you don’t have that sustained shortfall, your body stays in its non-starvation mode and your diet will remain effective. You’ll get the positive aspects of your diet program without the counterproductive side effects of your body switching to starvation mode.

So, to get the best results if you go on a strict diet, you need to cheat once in a while. At regular intervals, you need to eat significantly more than the plan calls for, to prevent your body from thinking you are starving. That makes life easier, and it gets even better. If you eat your favorite junk food on thedays when you break the diet, it becomes that much easier to stick with the plan the rest of the time. There’s a big psychological difference between giving up your favorite foods altogether, and still having them, say, once a week on your cheating days.

A simple way to cheat is to just pig out about once a week. But this approach isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to go. If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, without the negative effects of starvation mode, you should get expert advice on all aspects of the way you eat, including whether and how to go about cheating based on your specific diet, body type and so on.