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Cheat Days Can Enhance Weight Loss

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Why Is This Important?

Because typically when one is dieting, life is a tasteless hell and the Pringles man is not allowed in the house.

Long Story Short

New research indicates that intermittent cheat days help to reignite the fat-burning process following a plateau of weight loss.

Long Story

When is a diet not a diet? The answer is generally when you find yourself going from one post-dinner strawberry Oreo to demolishing an entire packet before lunch. Literally ripping the end open and tipping the fucking things into the open bin of your face like a delicious ladder of unsustainable palm oil. It’s a slippery slope of self-sabotage not unlike smoking on the weekend, and then finding yourself smoking throughout the week. The process of failure is so gradual and then so devastating that it tends to go unnoticed, and so many a would-be dieter abstains from cheat days altogether.

However, a new study from the University of Tasmania insists that cheat days are integral to an effective diet plan. In fact, failing to treat the weekend like a sugar ‘n salt wonderland might actually be counteractive after a certain point of weight loss. Previous studies have hinted at the benefits of some leniency when starving yourself slim is concerned, but until right now, the virtue of Being A Shit Dieter seemed relatively unproven.

51 obese men were split up into two groups: ‘Continuous’ dieters and ‘intermittent’ dieters. The former were fed two-thirds of the energy intake needed to maintain their weight, adjusted over a 16-week period as weight loss invariably took place. The latter were fed the same ratio of food, but were allowed a ‘rest week’ every two weeks where they could gorge themselves on whatever culinary filth they so desired. Seemingly weirdly, the intermittent dieters lost more weight and overall body fat than their continuously dieting compatriots by the end of the study. Even more interestingly, they managed to sustain 8kgs more of lost weight than those other guys who killed themselves with strict dieting.

“It seems that the 'breaks' from dieting we have used in this study may be critical to the success of this approach,” stated lead study author Nuala Byrne. “While further investigations are needed around this intermittent dieting approach, findings from this study provide preliminary support for the model as a superior alternative to continuous dieting for weight loss.”

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But how many extra junky kilojoules can I stuff up my ass on Saturday?

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Alright, I’ll bite: Why?

Drop This Fact

Because dieting involves eating at a sustained caloric deficit, which lowers the body’s supply of the hormone leptin over time. Leptin regulates our energy levels under duress of hunger. When it gets low enough, it effectively puts the body into starvation mode, resulting in ‘adaptive thermogenesis’ and prompting our metabolisms to slow down and store kilojoules instead of expend them. The thinking goes, then, that you can ‘reset’ this survival mechanism by swamping it with bullshit food every now and again.

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