What Is A Reasonable Cheat?

I often get asked for cheat/free meal guidelines; or what a “reasonable cheat/free meal” is.

This is hard to pin down into guidelines, which is why you’ll see me NOT offering caloric guidelines for a cheat meal, or rather free meal. There is no “fitting it in your macros” recommendation from me.

It is important over time to learn moderation with free meals or planned off-plan eating. This is a key aspect in moving from the DIET mentality into the LIFESTYLE mentality. Free meals are not green lights to eat yourself sick. They are simply an opportunity to enjoy a normally-sized off plan meal – key point there is ‘normally sized’; that is, portions should still be responsible.

One little trick I often use is to guage it based on the ability to eat the next scheduled on plan meal (assuming your free meal isn’t the final meal of the day); if you can’t eat it, etc., because you’re still too full, chances are your free meal may have been too big. A few slices of pizza may be reasonable; a whole pizza washed down with some ice cream probably isn’t in the context of fat loss for most people.

Simply be responsible about it. Most people know when they overdid it – so by default they’d also know what it means to scale back to the point where they don’t feel they overdid it.