Cheat Meals And Cheat Days

Over the past week, nutritionist and fitness expert Josh Bezoni has shared with us a few tips and guidelines on how to lose weight and to get lean.

A common stumbling block that we all share are food cravings. So, if you jump back to part 7, you will see some suggestions from the expert on how to overcome these cravings.

As we end this expert interview series with the author of the “7 Day Belly Blast Diet,” he leaves us with another nutritional tip that will help us to achieve a flat belly.

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Craig: The final topic that I want to cover before we finish up, here is, “What are your thoughts on cheat meals and/or cheat days?” Can these be good, is there a specific way to do a cheat meal that you recommend, do you have any particular suggestions on making these work? They’re quite popular, the whole thought of the cheat meal and even the cheat day.

Josh: Well, I think Joel Marion, who talks about cheat meals all the time is completely wrong. I’m joking of course, Joel is a good friend. He is right on. Bill Phillips used to talk about a cheat day all the time, even back in the 1990’s.

There are a lot of reasons for a cheat meal or a cheat day. I tend to recommend cheat meals nowadays for a balanced approach rather than a whole cheat day, because I think it works well for people who have a busy schedule, like me. I’ll have two to three cheat meals a week. So, if I’m traveling, which I do a lot, or I’m out socializing, or I go to a business dinner I know that I can have a meal and not feel guilty about it.

In addition, it’s just a psychological trick to allow myself not to think I’m dieting. A lot of times I use cheat meals as a reward system as well if I follow my program and do everything I’m supposed to do for two or three days I reward myself, so it’s nice.

Even so, from a metabolic standpoint there’s a lot of science that shows that cheat meals or cheat days literally help. Because when you are dieting your metabolism will actually begin to decrease due to hormonal changes, you’ll start to naturally BURN FEWER calories. It’s your body’s response thinking that is it’s starving is the very simplest way to say it.

Then when you sneak in a cheat meal or a cheat day every once in awhile your metabolism will respond and increase again, so if you do it strategically you can keep your metabolism humming along nicely without hitting those weight loss plateaus.

Now, in my new program called The 7 Day Belly Blast Diet, I’m changing the calories every seven days, and it goes through a cycle. It’s not just a seven day diet, and you’re done, but every SEVEN DAYS WE CHANGE THE CALORIC STRUCTURE of what you’re eating in an attempt to tricking your body into not hitting a weight loss plateau, so you keep releasing those calories so to speak. You don’t really release them for no reason, but it’s used for metabolic functions and produced heat and various other things, but to trick your body into not holding onto this fat.

So, yes, there’s a lot of great science, and it’s really where diets should be going. If you’re going on one severe calorie restriction if you’re eating 3,000 calories a day now, and you drop down to 1,000, after about a week your body is going to make all kinds of adjustments, and it’s going to become even harder  to lose weight in the future, plus you’ll be burning muscles, which is a bad idea because muscle is very metabolic.

So, long answer to a short question, cheat meals and cheat days are a great thing for losing weight.

Craig: Very cool, appreciate that. Sometimes the short questions do require longer answers. It’s been really cool, a lot of really practical stuff, eye opening stuff, especially about the obesity additives. Very sensible also, you got a lot of good judgments in there, and I can certainly appreciate that this is going to help a lot of people. Thank you!

Josh: Yeah. I want to thank you, Craig. Thank you for coming down. And just mention again that my 7 Day Belly Blast program, my diet, is going to be launched soon and might already be launched. It comes with food journals and it comes with cookbooks, and it comes with a step by step program where a lot of the things we talk about today might be really confusing to someone, but it lays it out in a way where it’s basically “step one, step two, step three.”

We get into a lot of supplements, which ones are bad, which ones are good and the science shows they’re good. We get into a lot of weight loss scams out there, what you should avoid, what you shouldn’t waste your money on. It just gives you a very balanced program that you can get very fast results.

As I mentioned before, some of my clients LOST UP TO 10 pounds in the first seven days. 10 pounds of excess water, 10 pounds of this toxic waste that’s in their system because they’re not eating enough fiber, and also fat. So, those three things are combined in the 10 pounds and if somebody is overweight and hasn’t been active and they’re eating very poorly it’s not a stretch for them to be able to lose a significant amount of weight in seven days following like this.

Anyway, Craig, thanks so much for your time.

Craig: Absolutely. We really appreciate that I can’t thank you enough.

Josh: Cool. Take care.

Craig: All right, I appreciate it. Bye