Regulation of Your Metabolic Rate
Your metabolic rate adjusts overtime with the amount of food you consume. If you undereat or calorie deficit your metabolism will slow down over time.
If you overeat for a long period of time your metabolic Rate will increase. That doesn't mean that we should over eat over time but for the purposes of bodybuilding this means that over the course of time you will need to slowly eat more food.
Cheat Meals
I have as a trainer asked my clients to have a cheat meal or high calorie meal believing that it would increase their metabolic rate.
Fortunately science changes with testing theories over the years. It has been shown that any change increase is transient and that long term weight loss is reliant on calorie deficit over time. The most important factor is the amount of calories over a period of time rather than deficits and then cheat meals.
In other words cheat meals only work as much as your calorie deficits work.
Should we have a cheat Meal
This is really an individual choice. If you would prefer to eat less during the week and enjoy more calories on the weekend because it suits your lifestyle. Great.
If you would prefer to stay on diet for the whole week and over a long period then that will work fine as well.
Should it be called a cheat meal. I prefer to call it a relaxed meal or high calorie meal.
How do we recover our metabolism
I think weight loss should always be done in stages with periods of weight loss and periods of maintenance. During the weight loss period your metabolic rate will slowly reduce.
The maintenance period means eating more food as it takes calories to maintain weight than to lose weight. You can have a diet break for a couple of weeks and then reduce calories and lose more weight.
Rather than having cheat meals you should diet for periods of 1 to 2 months and then have diet breaks.
This also gives you mental breaks from constantly dieting.
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