subject: How Long Should a Cheat Day Last? [print this page] How Long Should a Cheat Day Last? How Long Should a Cheat Day Last?
When you are in the throes of a diet it often pays to have a structured cheat day during which you get to break your fast, reduce your cravings and help your body deal with the horomonic nightmare that occurs each time you go on a diet. Remember, restricting the amount of calories your body gets to burn signals to your hypothalamus in your brain that you are currently undergoing a starvation period, and this sets all sorts of things into a spin. So a structured cheat day can reverse these trends and allow you to not only stop craving cookies but actually increase the amount of fat you lose instead of just burning muscle. But how often should you have a cheat day, and for how long should it last?
This really is a question of style for you. Depending on how often you feel the need to reboot your system and reverse the trend of catabolism going on in your body, you might prefer to have a cheat day that lasts for only five hours, or one that lasts for a whole day, or perhaps even two whole days! Ideally you should be eating in a moderate manner across the whole duration of your structured cheat day, not just pigging out over one meal and then sleeping through the rest of it.
A good rule of thumb is that the shorter the duration of your cheat day, the less carbs you should be eating. So if you are eating for only 5 hours, you should be trying to get about one to three grams of carbs for every pound of weight. If you are eating for a whole day, that should rise to about four to six grams, while a two day cheat day might actually require that you eat two to three grams only due to the extreme length.
As for frequency, a good rule of thumb once more is that the shorter the cheat day, the more often you can do it. So if you are doing five hour cheat days, then you might wish to try for a couple of days a week at most, while a full day cheat day should only happen once a week, while a two day refeed should happen once every ten days. These are all dependent again upon your activity level, but as a general guideline that should see you through.
