How to Master Cheat Days | Tim Ferriss

hi guys Tim Ferris here I wanted to talk about cheat days so after riding the 4our body get a lot of questions about cheat days do I still do them what are the components of a successful cheat day why do a cheat day and how do people make mistakes what are the most common mistakes people make with cheat days let me lay it all out so do I still do cheat days yes I do I love cheet days I love bear Claus I love ice cream I love chocolate croissant the list goes on these are all things that I really enjoy and the purpose of cheat day is multifold number one let's just say 90 out of 100 people at least will cheat on a diet so if you know you're are going to cheat you can limit the damage by scheduling it in advance and this is the purpose of a cheat day when you have a cheat day this digs into one of the mistakes that people make that is one wake cycle it is not 24 hours so what some people like to do is they'll start at say 8 or 900 p. m. one day and go until 9 10 p.

m. the next day uh that is going to increase the amount of fat you store and the Damage that you do so you want to limit the consumption period in other words from when you wake up to when you go to sleep it is one sleep cycle all right so there's the psychological benefit and the adherence Improvement what does this mean if you're looking at a diet or you're looking at any type of Behavioral change you're looking at say a method for quitting smoking it doesn't matter any type of Behavioral change there are really three I would say legs to the stool and in order of importance in my mind they are adherence are you actually going to follow the program it doesn't matter how good the program is if you don't follow it so the good program that you follow is better than the perfect program that you don't this is where for instance strict paleo and strict veganism often fail and uh I get a lot of Flack from experts on the internet experts very often uh who will say well you should just have people go strict paleo I can't believe you have beans people's intestines are going to explode you can't have them eat legumes and then the vegans go crazy in their own way they say everybody should be vegan and the issue there is uh strict people on either side that I'm doing you a favor because it is a trojan horse the Slow Carb Diet as described in the for our body gets more people to say strict paleo than probably any direct approach why because when I surveyed more than and tracked more than 2,000 people I think it was more than 2 200 who followed the silow carb diet more than 50% said that it was the first diet they were able to stick with consistently this is the key so it doesn't matter if you're strict paleo for a week and then go back to eating hoos and and drinking double gulps all right and same for any diet but if you are say even 80% or 90% to the letter with slow carb you will see tremendous benefits and fat loss and this is uh where if you look how to lose if you look up on search uh Z Google how to lose 100 pounds on the Slow Carb Diet you will see a number of case studies and I've met dozens of people who' have lost 100 20000 lb all right and that is why even though I experiment a lot with ketosis all right so people ask me do you follow slow carb or ketogenic diet I generally recommend slow carb I generally follow slow carb because if you get it primarily right you still see benefits with ketosis if you are slightly off you eat too many almonds you eat slightly too much of carbohydrate load and you knock yourself out of ketosis all of a sudden you're just eating an a say 70% fat diet with a high glucose level and you're screwed okay so it's very binary uh now so we have it here are you going to follow the program number one I want to have the highest compliance rate the highest conversion rate in terms of Behavioral change for say every hundred people I look at the percentage of people who are going to follow it number one adherence number two is it effective does it produce the the goals that you want or the the results that you want and then efficient is it making use of resources and your time in an efficient manner all right cheat day limits the damage of cheating uh which is inevitable for most people I'm not talking about uh somebody who's won the CrossFit Games five times those are mutants sure they can they can eat say sweet potatoes and chicken breasts and uh lentils all day every day forever because they're freak shows uh for the majority of people not true all right biochemically uh it is also very helpful at least based on the data I have seen to spike your cic load so you have one big bolus of carbohydrate and calorie overload for a short period of time to for instance prevent your thyroid production from downregulating uh which if just by virtue of selecting different food on the slow carb diet if you are say uh sub maintenance calories is very very helpful for ensuring that uh you don't decrease your rate of cellular metabolism and also negatively affect uh hormone imbalance like testosterone production okay uh this is also why for instance if you're a ketogenic diet nerd and you're trying to gain muscle mass it's very helpful to have a carbohydrate loading day and this could be the anabolic diet from Maro de pasquali uh or Dan Shan had a similar diet there a number of different variations wherein you are provoking an insulin response once a week because it is an anabolic hormone now overdosing on insulin obviously has own issues but there are ways that you can say be ketogenic for 5 days Monday to Friday do a glycogen depletion workout on Saturday and then start Force feeding yourself with carbohydrates that will be preferentially stored as glycogen this would mean uh very simple sugars I mean glucose and so on you're not going to want to go for say fructose uh and things that slow down that uptake but you can read more about that some other time but cheat days also biochemically the point I'm making are beneficial uh and the third Point okay putting aside the containing the damage putting aside the biochemical reason if we're just looking at adherence how do I get someone to follow a slow carb diet for 6 months I do it by giving them a cheat day so they don't follow a strict strict strict diet for two weeks quit and then have a cheap month this is why people who have never lost weight before lose 100 200 lounds or can and it's not uncommon at all all right what are some common mistes so the first one I already touched on one way you can screw up a cheat day and make it harder to recover from because very typically let's just say if you're choosing Saturday as your cheat day which a lot of people call fatter day then uh you will retain a lot of water for the next few days and generally be back to your Friday weight on say Tuesday and then you will see the scale and a scale is a blunt instrument I encourage you to use say a uh Dex scan or at least a seveno skin caliper for tracking fat loss and body composition not just a scale it's a very blood instrument but if we're looking at the total your weight cheat on on Saturday you retain a bunch of water okay you get to about Tuesday you get back to your Friday weight and then for a few days you continue to see a decrease which is a decrease in body fat uh sometimes that is mask because you're gaining muscle at the same time this is very prevalent with women who get frustrated is they not tracking body fat or body composition they're tracking the scale so this is a a meta problem that is particularly an issue with women who have been unfortunately brainwashed and uh led to really focus on the scale but uh you're going to be gaining muscle because generally you'll be consuming more protein than uh with prior diets okay so number one is uh we talked about limiting it to a wake cycle right number one number two are you doing anything to blunt your insulin or glucose response and trust me it's going to spike anyway but are you doing anything to mitigate the damage so the damage control chapter in for our body very important one of the things that I will very frequently do is I will have a small healthy breakfast it could be primarily vegetables it will almost always have a decent amount of fiber so it could be a small amount of spinach saying with a little bit of lentils you can just eat some lentils straight out of the can or doll uh and chili doesn't really matter but something that is going to blunt your cortisol uh not cortisol glucose and insulin response uh then throughout the day okay on top of that let's just say you have caffeine plus a little bit of grapefruit juice all right so I'm not going to get into naringenin and how that interacts as a component or a compound within uh grapefruit juice and how it interacts with coffee but suffice to say you will be expelling let's say more calories if you combine those two and uh you also can use fructose as the sugar in fruit in small doses to help blunt your again glucose and Insulin spikes right this this will decrease the amount of fat that you store and my pre my preferred method here is freshly squeezed grapefruit juice because it's delicious a little bit of that say a half cup or a cup is cheet so go crazy if you want and then have coffee very shortly thereafter and then that's when I'm going to go nuts all right so we have small meal which is going to be fiber uh fiber heavy then you're going to have caffeine it's it's an optional but say caffeine plus a little bit of fructose uh if you're following the 4-Hour Body prescription you would also take pag during this period so that is uh for the for the meals before bed you're looking at alal pooke Acid garlic garlic which I believe is alisin extract and then green tea extract right you're not going to want to take that before bed but you're going to take those prior to meals to minimize the damage other things that can be helpful so we talked about the basics are berberine and I'll let you guys look that up b r b r i n e berberine very very interesting uh and if you have uh if you are talking to your medical doctor this is only for uh use in consult with a medical doctor uh you can sometimes get something called acuros uh which can also minimize your glucose response to uh foods of this type all right the the I would say most common mistake uh that people make aside from going splitting it over two days is restraint okay what does this mean this means you say okay I'm going to cheat but I'm only going to have a cheat I'm going to have one cheat sandwich or I'm going to cheat but I'm going to cheat with rice uh and cheating clean can be done and again there are mutants for whom this is enough of a release valve that that can keep them on the stricter diet during the week for most folks if you don't have a real cheat day meaning eat whatever the hell you want drink whatever the hell you want uh if you don't do that you're going to cheat later in the week why because you didn't scratch that itch and in fact and I'm not saying we're not aiming for bulimia or anything like that here but I will deliberately try to eat to the point where it makes me a little uncomfortable a little sick okay and I've gotten a lot of flak for this too but trust me it works after tracking and watching thousands and thousands of people do this if you half-ass cheat day you're going to cheat again and that defeats the whole purpose all right so really go for the gold and uh what you'll find is very often at the end of cheat day you will be dying to get back to your regular slow carb diet your Clean Diet and over time very often naturally you will start to cut back on cheat day uh but in the beginning phases particularly when you're establishing this habit this routine you want to go for the gold on cheat day right you don't have you shouldn't actually vomit you're not going for that okay so there's a there's a Goldilocks point but it's like okay if I'm still hungry I'm still jonesing for junk food hey man have another Kit Kat you know have another croissant have another whatever the hell it is that you're jonesing for have some more ice cream and uh I really don't have asset so if you see me on cheat day uh every girl I've ever dated has been disgusted by the display of gluttony uh that is witnessed on cheat day and I love it so there we go uh the next mistake that people make is thinking to themselves well if one sleep cycle is or one sleep cycle and then one wake cycle is where I'm going to focus uh my cheat day on why don't I just do that twice a week so instead of doing say 8:00 a. m.

to 8:00 p. m. I'm going to do 8:00 a.

m. to noon one day and then I'm going to do maybe half a day some other day during the week this will almost always from what I've observed lead to more fat gain less progress uh than otherwise all right so if it's cheat day cheat day then you want to focus it within one wake cycle I recommend Saturday for social reasons because very often if you make it say a Wednesday could be a Friday for some people then they'll go out they'll have a bunch of booze on the weekend and they'll end up eating pizza or some other crap anyway all right don't get two cheat days you get one cheat day that is it now if your goal is not primarily fat loss and is mass gain instead there are approaches and this is more advanced so you want to get a couple of months of slow carb under your belt first where you could follow say a erogenic diet or a slow carb diet and then Spike uh say for one meal on a Wednesday with something like brown rice and then again on Saturday okay but unless you have say less than 10% body fat not allowed to do that generally Charles poin would say if you don't have penis skin on your abs you're not allowed to eat carbs after your workout and you're certainly not allowed to have two cheat days so as crass as that is pretty good guideline all right so that's one and uh those are I would say the most common mistakes that I've observed in cheat days and there are those people out there who say no cheat day is crazy you should have a cheap meal well is a cheat meal going to scratch the itch for you in your heart of hearts well enough so that you are not going to cheat at all later in the week yes or no the answer for most people is no all right and when ever I get some Diet Guru or self-proclaimed leader of some cult who comes out to attack me because of slow carb legumes oh my God lentils are going to make your head explode you're going to give yourself autoimmune disorder look there's some people yes if you've already already have a diagnosed issue with these things probably shouldn't eat them for the vast majority you're fine okay and uh whenever someone gives you a very strong opinion you should ask them where are your data what evidence do you have and at this point 4 our body came out 7 years ago 7 years of watching hundreds of thousands of readers go through this and I would encourage everybody to check out the basics of the slow carb diet if you haven't checked it out before I'm not going to get into it right now you can find it for free just look up how to lose 100 lb on the slow carb diet and it'll pop right up with all the basic guidelines and then if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty two chapters in the 4-Hour Body that I would recommend everybody check out are uh slow carb diet chapter two which really gets into some of the nitty-gritty details and little things you can tweak that make a big difference and then damage control which is basically an expanded version of how to minimize the fat gain even if in some cases I kid you not you could consume and I have consumed say 10,000 plus calories in a day and then clocked in with lower body fat a few days later than prior to the cheat day so how does that work well I already give you some of the tools but for the 15 or 20 pages that really really get into this I think it's around that could be shorter uh you can go to the 4our body and check it out so that's 4our body.