We’ve all heard about cheat meals. Eat healthy and clean most of the time and have a cheat meal – McDonalds, sweets, double chocolate caramel peanut butter cookies – every once in a while, which will actually help you to lose weight. With Jessica Alba and Miranda Kerr leading the way, Hollywood has developed the latest spin to the cheat meal. It’s simply called 80/20 cheat meal rule or the easiest way how to get to 36-24-36 body figure all women dream of.
The best thing about the rule is that it’s not actually a diet – it’s a self-rewarding healthy life routine that will help you lose excess weight while at the same time enable you to enjoy the sweet side of eating. 80/20 dictates that 80% of the meals are clean and you can treat them as a normal diet, eating lots of vegetables and fruits. However, the 20% of the meals are cheat meals; the ones you can indulge on yourself in with anything you want. In perspective, this is fairly simple to achieve – if you eat 5 meals a day, technically one of them can be a cheat meal, or to look at it another way, taking 1 day of the week to really indulge while being strict on yourself during the other days. In such a way, you are actually dictated by your diet to eat cake or hamburger. Pretty awesome, right?
This is how it works. If we always eat clean food and start to lose weight, our body will fight against the weight loss and will retain more as it goes into ‘starvation mode’. With 80/20 cheat meal you trick the body by giving it necessary caloric meal telling it ‘No, you don’t have to retain fat because you’re getting enough energy, so carry on burning calories as normal’.
All this means for you is that you take one day a week to indulge in all the foods you would normally be forbidden to eat. As long as you eat only healthy and low GI food the other days, you should find that you not only stick to the lifestyle change (as you always have a nice day to look forward to), but you also start to lose weight.
The trend is already conquering Hollywood, so what are you waiting for!