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Episode 16240 min

Cheat Meals vs Refeed Days: When and How to Use Them

Listen to episode 162

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In this episode

Cheat meal, treat meal, refeed day, untracked day. Whatever you call it, Nikkiey Stott explains why a planned break from your normal nutrition can be a smart strategy rather than a setback, and why she doesn't hand one out to everyone on a weekly basis. If you have a lot of weight to lose, the work right now is building discipline, habits and boundaries around food, so a cheat meal might come once a month instead of every week.

Nikkiey walks through the three reasons she uses them: replenishing the glycogen your muscles burn through during strength training, what she describes as a temporary boost to leptin and metabolism after a stretch in a deficit, and psychological relief that makes your plan easier to stick with for the long term. She then lays out two protocols. A cheat meal is one untracked meal with normal, protein-focused eating the rest of the day. A refeed day keeps your usual macros and adds roughly 70 grams of carbs and 15 grams of fat, timed around your workout.

She also covers when to schedule them (around a big muscle group like legs or back), what she actually ate, how often to have them, and the mindset that matters most: no guilt, eat until you're comfortably full, savor every bite, and never let one meal become a cheat day, week or month.

Key takeaways

  • On a cheat meal day, eat your normal meals and still hit your protein, then have one untracked meal rather than an entire day off.
  • Eat your cheat meal until you're comfortably full and satisfied, not uncomfortably stuffed, because knowing when to stop is a discipline in itself.
  • For a refeed day, keep your usual macros and add roughly 70 grams of carbs and 15 grams of fat, placing the carbs around your pre- and post-workout meals.
  • Schedule cheat meals or refeeds around a big muscle group, such as training back that day and crushing legs the next, so the fuel goes to the muscle you're trying to build.
  • If you have a lot of weight to lose, Nikkiey suggests a cheat meal closer to once a month, while women doing the work and focused on toning may have one weekly or every other week.
  • Expect to feel a little bloated or see the scale hold steady the day after, since extra carbs mean extra water weight, not fat.
  • What derails progress is turning a cheat meal into a cheat day, week or month, or taking cheat meals when you aren't doing the work.
  • Savor every bite of your cheat meal, because slowing down helps you feel satisfied, notice fullness and avoid overeating.

Questions answered

What is the difference between a cheat meal and a refeed day?

A cheat meal is one untracked meal, such as dinner out, while you eat normally and hit your protein the rest of the day. A refeed day keeps your usual macros and adds about 70 grams of carbs and 15 grams of fat that you track and spread through the day, which Nikkiey uses for women who prefer to keep tracking.

When is the best time to have a cheat meal?

Nikkiey pairs it with a big muscle group. She would train back, have her cheat meal that night, then crush legs the next day with more stamina, and on refeed days she puts the extra carbs around her pre- and post-workout meals.

How often should you have a cheat meal?

It depends on the person. For someone doing the work and focused on toning up and losing body fat, Nikkiey would give one weekly or every other week, while someone with 75 or more pounds to lose might have one about once a month.

Will one cheat meal ruin my progress?

No. Nikkiey says one day of indulgence won't derail your progress; what does is turning a cheat meal into a cheat day, week or month, or having cheat meals while not doing the work.

Why does the scale go up or stay the same after a cheat meal?

You may feel a bit bloated and hold extra water because you ate more carbs than usual. Nikkiey stresses that it's water weight, not fat.

How do cheat meals help with metabolism?

Nikkiey explains that long stretches in a calorie deficit can lower leptin, the hormone she describes as regulating hunger and metabolism, and that a cheat meal can temporarily boost it. She adds that the extra carbs replenish glycogen so you have more energy for strength training.

Full transcript

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

When you are going into this type of approach or methodology in your fitness journey, the right mindset is so important to have. It's so needed. One, you need to remember that one day of indulgence won't completely derail your progress. It's about psychologically relieving the protocols of your day-to-day with nutrition, about the balance, about the moderation, and then, what I said earlier, the long-term goal that you are going for.

Yo, yo, yo, yo. What is going on, you guys? Welcome to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. I am your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to today's episode, episode 162, where we're going to dive into a topic that has been asked a bunch in the past.

Whenever I do those little Q&A dumps on my Instagram story, asking you guys to drop topics you would want to learn about or questions, I'm able to dive in deeper here on this podcast and elaborate and explain and share all the insights and information and knowledge and science. This specific topic has been asked a lot, and I want to lend space in today's episode to dive into it. I think some of you guys will appreciate this topic. I don't know how many of you actually follow what I'm going to talk about today, if you implement them, if you do not, if you've never even heard of them, if you have heard of them but you don't know how to implement them, or if you're wondering why they're even a thing. That's what I want to talk about today.

That being, well, people call them cheat meals. Mentally, cheat meals can make a lot of people feel like they're cheating on themselves and their goals. I have forever called them a cheat meal. I don't mentally associate them like that, though. People call them cheat meals, people call them treat meals, people call them refeed days, people call them untracked days. Whatever you have, whatever is psychologically going to make you understand that it's nothing bad. It's actually a really good thing to be implementing into your strategy day to day or week to week or month to month along your fitness journey, is what I'm trying to say. It's a good strategy to implement in your fitness journey. And you can do this week by week or whenever it's deemed necessary.

Honestly, with this entire topic, I'm going to try to talk to it broadly here with you guys. How do you prepare for them? What's the right mindset around them? How should you implement them? How often? What's the science behind them? We're going to cover it all today and more in this episode, and really put a special focus on how these days can ultimately help you get the results we like to talk about on this podcast, which is building more muscle, being more toned, losing more body fat. They can really benefit you in that regard.

However, like I just said, I'm going to keep it kind of broad. But individually speaking, I wouldn't necessarily give everybody a cheat or a treat or a refeed. For the purpose of this podcast, I'm going to call it a cheat day, okay? Because that's what I've called it for my entire freaking journey. But again, for the psychological components of attaching words to it, you can call it whatever you want. They all serve the same purpose.

So, I wouldn't necessarily give everybody a cheat. Okay, if you have 100 pounds to lose or 200 pounds to lose or 75 pounds to lose, saying this with love, you have been cheating all of the days up until you decided to make a change for yourself. You need to deploy some discipline. You need to deploy following a routine that is different than the routine you have been following. Because if you've been following a certain type of routine that has led you to where you are, where you're 75 pounds or 100 pounds or 150 pounds overweight, then implementing these on a weekly basis can psychologically reinforce those habits that you've been trying to get away from.

So, that's individually speaking. Depending on where you are in your journey, I wouldn't necessarily give every single body a cheat day on a weekly basis. So, talking to that and then segueing into, let's first understand what untracked or cheat days or refeed days or treat days are. If you want to really narrow it down, I would have a different strategy for a cheat day than I would have for a refeed day. I'll talk about that in a little bit.

But essentially what these allow you to do is eat outside of your macros, if you're following macronutrients, or if you're following a daily protocol with your nutrition. It allows you to eat outside of your usual targets for the day. And this can be a great way to relieve a couple of things. Relieve the psychological pressure of tracking every single day with macronutrients or following a specific protocol every single day.

However, outside of that, this is why, when I track macronutrients, I allow myself to have the food that I enjoy on a regular basis, but I have the ability to discipline myself in that I'm not going to eat an entire bag of chocolate. I'm only going to have two to three or four pieces, what I'm allotted for the day. Others need to develop the discipline of not eating an entire bag of chocolate. So maybe fitting them into their macros doesn't allow for it. Maybe you have to eliminate that type of food for a little bit to develop a little more discipline around it.

And then on your cheat days, or on refeed days, or whatever, cheat days is what I said I was going to call it. But there are two different strategies, and I'm going to go through the two, so I'm kind of toggling back and forth between them. But maybe on those days you allow yourself to have a little bit of the foods that you're trying to create boundaries around. I wouldn't necessarily say you are restricting them or eliminating them. You are just trying to develop habits around them and discipline around them and boundaries around wanting to splurge on eating an entire bag of chocolates.

So those are a couple of the components psychologically. It allows you to deviate from your normal limits, and it allows you to bring back in, for a little bit, foods that you are putting to the side to develop discipline around. And then you're satisfied for that day. With that being said, it's also crucial to have the right mindset going into it. I want to talk about that a little later in the podcast, because when you have the right mindset going into it, you will avoid common pitfalls. A lot of people find themselves in a cheat day, and then the next day turns into a cheat day, and the next one turns into a cheat day. So I want to talk about the pitfalls to avoid when you're in those situations.

But for the majority of the next couple of minutes, I'm going to talk about the science behind these. For those of you who are focused on building more muscle, having a more toned body, wanting more strength in your workouts, these specific types of days serve a huge purpose in helping you boost your metabolism and replenish glycogen stores that you may be a bit depleted on on a regular day-to-day basis.

Maybe your carbs are limited to, I don't know, 160 grams of carbs. Maybe that's helping you see the results that you want. But then, bam, you throw in a, and this is completely different than carb cycling. I'm not a big fan of carb cycling. I'm a big fan of keeping things silly, stupid, simple to follow. Carb cycling involves you going up and down with high and low days. This day is a high day and this day is a low day and on this day I have a high day. Every single day is different. It works for some people. There are tons of tactics that work for everybody, and there are tactics that work for specific people that I'm not a big fan of, because I would normally just eat the same thing every single day.

And then, bam, what I like to do with refeeds or cheat meals is throw them in and kind of trick my body, like you guys trick your muscles when you're changing out workout programming on a six-week or eight-week block. The same kind of purpose is being served here, only you're tricking and boosting your metabolism and you're replenishing the glycogen stores that you may have already worked through on a day-to-day basis with your training and your activity and maybe being in a deficit to lose body fat.

This all serves a purpose, but so do cheat meals. They serve a purpose to replenish those stores, to give you more energy, to go in on a strong day for lifting and feel strong, and then to boost your metabolism. I can speak wholeheartedly to this methodology because for the longest time I did cheat meals. For the longest time I did refeeds. Now I just kind of intuitively eat, where I can throw that in there every now and then. But I used to be on a routine, and it's what we put our clients on when they're learning these types of strategies and implementing them into their day-to-day. It was always routine.

I even apply it with clients where we took it out for a little bit and then they felt kind of burnt out. Well, then I will implement it on a weekly basis again and lower their normal daily macronutrient goals. So there are so many ways and strategies you could implement these types of things. But for the most part, high-level thinking, I want you guys to know how it really serves a purpose. What I was trying to get to is, after I had a cheat day, the next day I would step on the scale. I'm not saying the scale is everything, but I would notice that I would either stay the same or be lower because I boosted my metabolism. And I crushed a leg day on the same day, which is part of the tactic of having a cheat day.

So a couple of things. The first thing I want to dive into is the science behind refeeds and cheat days. Actually, let's dive into the science and then I'll talk about the tactics. When we talk about building and toning and decreasing body fat, your body needs appropriate and adequate fuel. You guys know this. Some of you who have not been eating enough start to eat more and you're like, oh my God, I'm seeing results that I haven't seen in years, because you were eating less food and you were fighting an uphill battle. Your body needs adequate fuel to perform and to recover from strength training and to give you that result of building more tone and decreasing your body fat.

So what cheat meal days do, and I touched on it a little bit there for a second, comes down to three specific things. They do glycogen replenishment, they benefit your hormones, and they give you psychological relief.

Most importantly, the glycogen replenishment. Day to day, or five days a week, whatever your normal strength training protocol is, you're doing intense workouts. You're doing strength training and your muscles use glycogen for energy. I've talked about this tons of times before, about what carbs do, how they break down into glycogen, how those carbs are used to make you Super Mario Brother and turn you into a powerhouse when you're doing strength training. Your muscles are using that glycogen for energy during that strength training workout.

So what cheat days specifically do, and there are a couple of different strategies, I said I was going to talk about strategy in a little bit, I'll talk about strategy in a minute, let me just finish out the science. What those days consist of is a higher carbohydrate day and a higher fat day. Your protein is essentially around normal. Maybe it's a little bit more, because the cheat meal, maybe a burger or a steak dinner or something like that, is high in protein. But typically those days, and even refeeds, consist of higher fats and higher carbohydrates.

The higher carbohydrates are what replenish those glycogen stores, and that is what provides your muscles with the energy they need for optimal performance and optimal recovery. On a normal day-to-day, when you're going in to do strength training and you have a set allotment for carbohydrates, you are tanking your glycogen stores. Which is good, because your body is going to turn to other energy sources and burn fat. But you need carbohydrates for strength training. You need your carbohydrates to get you through the workout.

So your glycogen, I mean, we have reserves, but think about it as your glycogen level lowering. It's helping you perform and helping you get the results. And then, bam, you throw in a cheat meal day, which has tons of carbohydrates, and you're replenishing that glycogen store. So when you come out of a cheat meal, you feel like the absolute She-Hulk wanting to go crush a leg day. Or you had a leg day and then you go have a cheat meal, and maybe the next day is a back day, and you crush a back day. There are strategies to it, for sure. I'm going to talk about that.

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The second one is the hormonal benefits. Going extended periods of time in calorie restriction, right? Most of you want to be toned and want to lose fat, so you're putting yourself in specific deficits on a daily basis. When you do that consistently over extended periods of time, that restriction can lead to a decrease in your appetite. The hormone that regulates that is leptin, and it decreases. Leptin regulates your hunger and your metabolism. So it leads to a decrease in leptin, which leads to you not feeling hungry, and your metabolism slows down a little bit. What a cheat meal can do is temporarily boost that leptin level, and it helps rev up your metabolism and support muscle growth.

All in all, if you have been in an extended deficit for a period of time where you're only eating 1,100 calories, or you're not eating enough food, and you want the result of building more muscle and getting toned, you're fighting an uphill battle. What's happening is extended periods of calorie restriction are leading to a decrease in your leptin. That hormone is what regulates your hunger and your metabolism, and if it's decreased, it's not serving the purpose of the results that you want.

So when you feed yourself, and this is what a lot of people notice when they start eating more, it boosts the leptin back up and it starts revving your metabolism and you start getting the results you want. Think of a cheat meal doing that on a weekly basis. You're in a deficit, you give your body a cheat meal, and then all of the internal things with your hormones are happy. Leptin is very, very happy, and it's working for you instead of against you. It starts doing even more of what you want it to do.

I can't stress this concept enough, because again, if you're not eating enough but you want muscle, you're not doing the things you need to do in order to get that result. I know we hear you've got to eat more, you've got to eat more, but so many people worry about getting fat. You're not going to get fat. I always joke around about this. People come into WarriorBabe and work with our coaches, or anybody who has worked with me previously, and they think, I need to eat more food, Nikkiey said this, or my coach said I need to eat more food, I don't want to get fat. Dude, it is not our job to get you guys fat. It is our job to do the exact opposite. We aren't hired, we aren't in this space, we aren't the professionals in the fitness arena to get people fat. We're in the space to help you get the results you want. And these are the strategies that will help you do that.

Okay. So when people start eating more, even aside from the cheat meals, they start seeing results. It's because of exactly what I just talked about. You've been in calorie restriction for so freaking long. You're wondering why you're not getting results. You're bashing your head against the wall. Oh, it's because this hormone has decreased. The things inside have decreased. I'm storing more fat because I'm stressed and my body's not getting what it needs to function optimally. But then I actually feed it more, and all of these incredible things start happening. The hormones go up. The stress goes down. I feel much better. My mood's elevated. I'm sleeping better. And then you get the results that you want.

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Okay. The last one is that a cheat meal can be a psychological relief, as I talked about a little at the beginning of the podcast. Mentally, if you're really disciplined and you're really going at it and you're following a routine, following a protocol because you're a go-getter and you want the results, and you know that's the thing you need to be doing, then it's nice to have a little bit of relief in a week where mentally you can take a break from tracking macros or following the nutritional protocol. This reduces stress and makes it a heck of a lot easier for you to adhere to and enjoy the plan you are on for the long term.

Because somebody is following something every single day, in calorie restriction every single day, and going all out, and people do this in 12 weeks or a three-month period. You're strict, strict, strict, strict, and then people wonder why they mentally can't adhere to it afterwards. It's because they weren't giving themselves breaks along the way or enjoying it or making it easy or even focusing on a long-term concept. That's why people gain their weight back. There's no break in the three months, and then afterwards you're like, I'm done doing it, I have some type of result, but I'm going to go back to all the bad habits I had because that sucked and I missed everything I wanted to have.

You can have what you want to have along your journey. You can implement this type of strategy of cheat meals. You don't have to restrict anything. But like I said at the beginning of the podcast, you most definitely do need to develop discipline around the food. You need to develop better habits around the food. And you need to create boundaries around the food. Okay? Anyway, those are some of the scientific aspects of what cheat meals can do for you.

Now, before I get into preparing for cheat meals and having the right mindset, what I want to talk about is when to implement them. So, refeeds and cheat meals. I keep saying there are two different protocols you could do with those.

First, cheat meals. If you're following macro adherence or a nutritional protocol for the seven days of the week, what I would normally say to people with a cheat meal approach, for people who don't want to have to track anything and want to allow themselves to just go out to dinner with friends and family for the night, or with hubby for a date night, or with your kids for a kiddo night, is you're not tracking anything. However, leading up to that, and this goes into preparing for those days, you are still eating normally throughout the day. It's not a cheat day, okay? It's still controlled, because you are developing habits here. You are developing boundaries and discipline. I'm just going to keep going back to those words, because it's different than what you've been doing, which led you to a result you don't want. So you have to change your ways, and this is part of the strategy.

So, you still wake up and eat a healthy breakfast. Or, shit, if you want your cheat meal to be breakfast, then go have that. But then when you get home, keep in mind that the majority of that was all carbs and fats and a little protein. So the rest of the day, you've got to portion out your protein doses to make sure you're still hitting a protein number. Maybe the rest of the meals throughout the day are limited in carbs and fats because you had a ton at breakfast. You leave space in the middle of the day because you just had a ton, letting your digestion and your blood sugar regulate. At the end of the day, you have a little bit more carbs. So you're still routinely eating what you would normally eat.

If I was going to have a cheat meal, not a cheat day, I'd wake up and have my normal breakfast: eggs, egg whites, bagel, cream cheese. Next, lunch, like chicken and rice. Next, a Siggi's yogurt and granola. Or in place of that meal, my pre-workout meal: oatmeal and egg whites, and go crush a workout. Have my protein shake afterwards and a banana. And then from that point, at night, I would go out to dinner, have what I want, have a little bit of dessert, and that would be the end.

Here's the thing with that approach. I always say to people when I'm assigning cheat meals: do not be an asshole. I say that with love. I have done this, and I can speak to it. I would go out for a cheat meal, and I know I've had clients do this, I've seen babes in WarriorBabe do this. They will go have their cheat meal, but they will eat like an asshole. They will eat until they are uncomfortably full. That is not the right approach. You just want to eat until you're comfortably full. You are satisfied and you know when to stop. That is a discipline in and of itself. That is a habit in and of itself. That is a boundary in and of itself. You need to know when you need to stop.

I remember one of my first cheat meals was pretty much a whole pizza pie, half of a stromboli, and a Blizzard from Dairy Queen. And not a small, it was a large. And boy, when I tell you, I was sick after. I know I've had clients do this. I've had WarriorBabes do this. I've coached on coaching calls where, you ate like an asshole, now you know. But the thing is, if you can learn from that situation and not do it the next time, you're winning. Okay. So that's the approach with a cheat meal day.

A refeed day is essentially keeping the same macro numbers you would have on a regular basis, whatever you're doing the seven days of the week, and on the refeed day, increasing your carbs by about 70 grams, give or take. It depends on who I'm working with, but ballparking, 70 grams. And then your fats by about 15 grams. That allows you to disperse your macros as you want throughout the day.

There are my type A people that I work with. They've got to still track and they want to do it right, A to Z. This is what I would implement with them. There are some people who say, I just don't want to track for a day. I just don't want to think about it. I just want to have my cheat meal and let it be. I want to enjoy. I want to go out. Blah, blah, blah. Totally. Amazing. Go do that. There are also people I've worked with who say, I need to track. I'm a type A personality. I need to know everything down to plus or minus five in my day. And I'm like, cool, this is your strategy. Now they can disperse it how they want.

And MyFitnessPal is super cool. In the pro version, you can add the days of the week when you are doing a refeed. You could choose a Wednesday, you could choose a Friday, and it will automatically increase the macros you have set for that refeed day every week. It's just as simple as that. It's literally 70 grams of carbs and 15 grams of fats, and it's spread all throughout the day. Okay, those are my strategies.

But now, when to implement them. I alluded to it throughout the podcast, but for both versions, whichever one you're doing, I would pick a bigger muscle group. For example, I would go crush legs or I would crush back, and then I would have my cheat meal at night, and then the following day I would go crush back or legs. Typically, I'd probably do back on a day when I was a little bit depleted and needing a cheat meal, and then the next day I would go crush legs, because I have way more stamina to get through the workout, and that food is going right to a muscle that I'm trying to build. So there's my strategy there.

Same thing with refeeds. On the refeed day, when I know I'm getting the food and it's all dispersed throughout the day, I would put those carbs around my workout, my pre-workout and my post-workout, and I'd go crush legs that day. And then the next day, I'd go crush back. Or whatever muscle group you guys are trying to build, honestly, to the point I made a couple of seconds ago. I was always trying to build up my legs and my glutes, so I would make sure I would eat, and then the next day I would go crush that muscle group, because basically I'm feeding my muscles that fuel. So those are some of the tactics and strategies I would implement.

Now, my brain just went somewhere there. I was like, okay, cool, that's the next thing I want to talk about, and then it completely slipped. When you are preparing for these days, and I talked about this a little, you still want to make sure you're somewhat around or on your protein target for the day. You're going to go over on your carbs and your fats no matter what, but protein is still super essential.

Okay, that's what I was going to bring up: what to eat. What is an ideal cheat meal? I have had probably every single cheat meal under the sun, and I can tell you that after eating pizza or anything heavy in dairy, I would feel sick or actually get sick. I got sick after eating a ton of pizza. Dairy just did not sit well with me afterward. I'm fine eating it, but in big amounts like that, not good.

What I would aim for is a burger and fries. A burger and sweet potato fries was my favorite. Five Guys, for weeks on end, was my go-to cheat meal, with the Cajun fries. Or a steak and sweet potato. That was my cheat meal for a long time as I got closer to show day when I competed. I would always have dessert afterwards, no matter what, even if I was a couple of weeks out from a show, or during normal lifestyle training. I would always have Maggie Moo's from right across the street, or pastries were one of my things. York Peppermint Patties were one of my things. I would always fit that in where I wanted to.

And I'd keep it still somewhat clean. But again, like I said earlier, just don't eat like an asshole. You don't want to eat until you're uncomfortably full. You just want to eat until you're satisfied, and then you will feel satisfied for the next couple of days. You're like, okay, I'm good, I don't need that, I can go without that food again for a little bit, until the following week when you're ready to have it again.

A good question, actually, thinking about that, is the frequency of these, which I talked about a little at the beginning. It depends on the individual I'm working with. Typically, for the majority of people I work with, outside of the ones who have discipline things to work on, habits to work on, and weight to lose, if you're in a stable area of looking to tone up and lose body fat, and we need to fuel your body to make those things happen, it's more along the lines of someone who needs to lose 20 or 30 pounds or less.

Actually, it totally depends. Now that I'm saying it out loud, it totally depends. If someone was 75 pounds overweight, like I said at the beginning, I wouldn't necessarily eliminate this concept, but maybe I would plug it in once a month to relieve things for them, and so they know this is a long-term solution. Okay, go have a cheat meal. You're doing the work. I'm proud of you. And you can only get a cheat meal if you're doing the freaking work. Let me just slide that in there right now, because I don't want anybody, especially WarriorBabes, running to their coaches saying, I want a cheat meal. If you ain't doing the work, you don't deserve a cheat meal. Point blank. Okay.

And then normally, if you are doing the work, I would give you a cheat meal on a weekly basis or a biweekly basis. It depends on the psychological aspect of the client I'm working with. Maybe cheat meals throw people off, which they have with people I've worked with. So we need to address that, but still implement them so we can work on it. So the frequency totally comes down to the individual.

Mindset. I dispersed mindset all throughout the podcast, but I really want to close it out on this concept. When you are going into this type of approach or methodology in your fitness journey, the right mindset is so important to have. It's so needed. One, you need to remember that one day of indulgence won't completely derail your progress. It's about psychologically relieving the protocols of your day-to-day with nutrition, about the balance, about the moderation. And then, what I said earlier, the long-term goal that you're going for. You can't implement strict things for three months straight without some type of consequence coming out of that.

How can we stop that, though? Okay, cool. We implement these weekly, biweekly, or monthly, depending on where you're at, and you learn how you feel from them. At the beginning, do you feel like this is going to derail your progress? Cool, let's talk about that. Let's get a little bit deeper. Why do you feel that way? Is there some kind of story or limitation or belief going on that is getting in the way of you accepting this type of methodology in your journey?

But most of all, just no guilt. Don't have any guilt. It's a lot easier said than done. You will notice you have some in the beginning. It's totally normal to feel those feelings, but it's important to address them so that you can become more in alignment with the concept of a treat day, cheat day, refeed day. It's all about balance. It's not going to derail your progress at all.

I will say, maybe the next day you will wake up and feel a little more bloated because you had more carbs than normal. That is normal. If you're one of those who gets on the scale and the scale doesn't move, for me, some weeks it did, some weeks it didn't. It's okay. It's just because you had a little more carbs than normal, so you're holding on to a little more water weight. It's not fat. I talked about this in previous podcasts.

So, no guilt. One day of indulgence during the week is not going to derail your progress. What will derail your progress is if you turn a cheat meal into a cheat day, and then the next day turns into a cheat week, which then turns into a cheat month. What will derail your progress is if you're not doing the work and you're implementing a cheat meal and wondering why you're not getting results. That will derail your progress. It's strategy at this point, you guys. There's a place and a time for these protocols to be implemented into your routine, but you have to deserve them. And by deserving them, I mean you do the work that's necessary for you to have and deploy these things. Anyway, what will derail your progress is all those things I just said. But aside from that, it's not going to derail your progress if you're strategically implementing them.

Another mindset to have is to enjoy every single bite. Enjoy every single flavor. I still do this when I have one here and there, but even at the beginning of my journey, when I was really in it with the cheat meals, I would sit down and be like, oh God, this is so good. I would really enjoy and be grateful for the meal I was having, because day to day, my discipline calls for me to stay head down and focus on the normal protocols I'm doing. I can't always indulge in two burgers or a couple of pieces of pizza. It's all about balance. And when you enjoy every single bite, it really helps you feel grateful, one, but also feel satisfied and be less likely to overeat. You will notice that if you savor every single bite, you can feel yourself getting fuller and fuller, and you know when to stop.

Those are honestly a few of the specific mindset pieces I would share, outside of the ones I've trickled in throughout the podcast. But all in all, that's everything in terms of cheat meals and refeeds: the science behind them, how to implement them, the strategies to implement them, when to implement them, how to prepare for them, and the mindset to have around them. That's the whole concept of cheat days and refeed days, and when they are implemented and done right, man, can they serve a huge strategic focus for you, helping you build more muscle, look more toned, boost your metabolism, and replenish your glycogen stores, which then helps you recover better and perform better.

Overarching, if you apply these the right way, this could be a huge asset to your fitness journey moving forward and the results you get. And most importantly, it makes your journey so freaking enjoyable, where it doesn't have to be restriction after restriction after restriction for months on end. You can have this on a weekly basis if you do the work and deserve to have one. And it will make you appreciate your journey so much more.

I can say that firsthand, because they were part of my journey for a long time. I implemented them for a lot of my clients, and a lot of the coaches still implement them for their clients. It's just a nice psychological refresher, one. Two, it also gets you really good results. Because like I said at the beginning, just like you confuse your muscles on a six- to eight-week block, you confuse your metabolism on a weekly basis to rev it up, boost it, and get you the results you want. So anyway, forever, cheat meals, they rock. Refeed days, they rock. The concepts are one and the same, just deployed in a little bit different way.

Anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you guys so, so, so freaking much, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.

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