If you’ve included a fat-loss diet in your quest to get fit at last, you know that staying on your diet is likely to be hard. It’s going to take plenty of will power to stick with it 100% of the time, and you’re probably already mourning the loss of some of your favorite foods. So this may come as a shock to you, but cheating (on your diet) is sometimes good. At least, it can be when you do it right.

When you’re trying to get your body fat down quickly, you need to work out more, but you also need to control the amount of food you devour. To get really lean, you will have to start eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight. This is where things get tricky.

A key reason that any kind of diet doesn’t work well is because your body adapts. When you consistently cut back on the number of calories you consume, your body takes this as a sign that there isn’t enough food. In short, it acts as if you are in the midst of a famine.

When your body is in starvation mode, it behaves differently. It starts storing every calorie it can as fat, since it thinks there is a famine in progress and it doesn’t know when you’ll get enough food again. It dials down your metabolic rate, leaving you with less energy. Your body puts less effort into maintaining and repairing your joints and muscles, since it is trying to keep you alive until there’s more food. If necessary, it starts burning your muscle tissue as fuel while preserving the fat for an even more dire emergency.

The outcome of this adaptation isn’t pleasant. Because your body is conserving energy, you have little energy to exercise. If you do get up the energy to exercise, your workout will be low quality. You tend to get hurt quickly, and it takes a long time to recover. Any food you do eat seems to instantly turn into blubber around your waist. Your muscles start to fade away. Starvation mode clearly isn’t conducive to working out really hard and building a muscular body. This is where cheating comes in.

Fortunately, your body doesn’t switch into starvation mode quickly. It needs to experience a significant shortage of calories for a number of days straight before it switches over. If you don’t experience that significant shortage of calories for that number of days, your body won’t make the switch to starvation mode. You’ll get the benefits of reduced calories, without the unpleasant side effects of starvation mode.

So, to ensure that your serious fat-loss diet remains effective, you need to break it once in a while. At regular intervals, you need to eat significantly more than you otherwise would, to keep your body from going into starvation mode. That makes life easier, and it gets even better. If you eat your favorite junk food on these cheating days, it becomes that much easier to stick with the plan the other days. There’s a big psychological difference between giving up your favorite foods altogether, and still having them, say, once a week on your cheating days.

The easiest way to do this is to just pig out once a week. But this approach isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to go. If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, without the negative effects of starvation mode, you should get expert advice on all aspects of your diet, including whether and how to go about cheating based on your specific diet, body type and so on.

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