According to nutritionists, there’s one extremely bad thing about cheat meals: the name. “I’m Catholic, so it’s a guilt thing,” says Jim White, a trainer and spokesman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “If you call it a cheat meal, people feel bad about it. We call it a treat meal.”
A cheat/treat meal, of course, is the idea that if you stick to your diet for, say, six days, you are thus entitled to go HAM with something on the seventh—possibly with ham itself, or with sweets. (“And lo, on the seventh day, he ateth brownie batter with a mixing spoon.”) It’s a policy adapted by such cardio all-stars as Kenny Chesney, who adheres to a brutally low-cal and 100-percent bread-free diet, until he allows himself an Italian or Mexican detour the night after a show. “It helps you mentally,” says Chesney, who’s basically sprinted around stadiums for two hours every summer Saturday night for the last 15 years. “You have to allow yourself time to get away. I do anyway. I grew up in an area where everything revolves around food.” (It was Tennessee, so this makes sense.)
Carissa Bealert, a registered dietitian/nutritionist in Orlando, says she too support treat meals—with limits, again harping on the whole name thing. “I’d never recommend a cheat day—you get a visual of like Henry VIII at a buffet table that never stops. That’s not good for anybody’s diet or GI system,” she laughs, by way of minimizing the horror of that visual. “But psychologically, they can do a lot of help.”
Some argue that treat meals offer not only psychological rest stops (“They’re a light to go toward,” Bealert says) but also health benefits. In his 2007 book The Cheat to Lose Diet, Joel Marion wrote that treat meals actually help you drop pounds, which obviously sounds like sorcery. But there’s science behind it: Treat meals make your body produce leptin, the hormone that tells you when you’ve stored up enough energy and can stop eating. Appropriate leptin levels make your body release fat (and weight). Low leptin levels—which can occur as a result of militant calorie restriction—make you you get hangry and order burritos.
Bottom line: Treat meals are good and you should have them. If you’re looking for serious results, go with a 90/10 ratio: 90 percent eating healthy, 10 percent treating your self. Four meals a day X seven days a week = 28 meals a week. Do the math: Three of those can be treats. Just keep the notion of “treat” in moderation. “It’s not supposed to be an all-you-can-eat binge meal,” White says. “If you’re gonna do pizza, do three pieces of thin-crust veggie pizza and a beer, instead of a huge pepperoni/sausage thing with five beers. You can really affect your waistline with one meal.”
Related Stories for GQFood