- Joined
- Jun 15, 2006
- Messages
- 2,864
My definition of a cheat day is when I don't give a shit what the food I'm eating is "doing for me." I'm eating because I want to and it tastes good and I work too damn hard to stress about exactly how every morsel of food is affecting my physique. What you are describing I would call a "refeed" or just a super high carb day. Of course that will be more beneficial generally than an all out cheat day but again it comes down to whether or not you're dieting or trying to grow or maintain or what have you. For me what works best when dieting is a moderate to high carb day with a cheat meal as my last meal. I also go pretty low on calories the rest of the week so my body uses those days. Not dieting I either do two cheat meals per week or one day, sometimes its more or less depending on life and/or if I want to eat lol. I have no idea what you look like so I'm not directing this at you but some people that really don't have much muscle worry far too much about "overeating" or not eating anything "bad for you" when in reality thats really not making a very big difference in the grand scheme of things with all the work you put in.
As an aside I used to have the mentality that everything needs to be perfect all the time, can barely have a cheat meal, have to keep everything clean even when growing. Then I trained with a good pro and he came into the gym with a mcdonalds frappe and said "what do you want to train today?" I was astounded that he didn't have a plan or a giant cooler with him with 10 meals in it. Instead that was his pre workout and we went to the diner as a post workout meal. Really opened my eyes to stop focusing on nonsense like being perfect 100% of the time because it really doesn't matter lol
Again DIETING is a different story, I'm talking about "offseason" or whatever you want to call it.
My old training partner of years would tell me.......dude.....if you want to gain some size you are going to have to eat "dirty" sometimes. Stop with the extra chicken breasts and go eat you a pizza or a couple of Big macs every once in awhile.
He was a beast. Honestly if I would have listened to him all those years ago instead of being caught up in trying to grow while keeping lean...I would probably be 30lbs heavier than what I currently am.
It's just such a mind fu@k to see your abs start to disappear, and basically all I have done is "spin my wheels" for the last few years.
But that time is wasted now. At my age...I can't afford to get too heavy as I don't want the health issues that could come along with it now that I'm older.