Will A Cheat Day Ruin Your Diet Progress?

With all the temptations of delicious food shoved in your face every day, it takes a fair bit of willpower to stick to your diet.

There’s no denying that.

And humans have been known to give into temptations since the beginning of time.

Does that make it okay?

No, not really.

But it does happen, so it’s worth asking the question:

Will a cheat day ruin your diet progress?

And the answer is…

No, but there’s a giant catch.

That said, there are 2 main ways of thinking about this.

The classic (yet wrong) way to think about handling a cheat day is to “make up for it” with extra cardio, eating less the next day, or working out harder paired with unnecessary guilt.

That’s a generally unproductive way to handle something like this, because it can take a literal marathon or two to burn off the extra calories you had at Cheesecake Factory that one time.

The much better approach is to continue your diet and training like nothing happened, and just don’t let it happen twice.

Here’s a weird example that fits quite well: