What are cheat meals and are they good for you?

Cheat meals are universal. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson enjoys pineapple and coconut pancakes; Chris Pratt tackles fried chicken and ice cream; Ryan Reynolds attends a specific NYC pizza restaurant – celebrities known for their commitment to fitness love to share their cheat meals on social media. Their glistening mounds of sugary delight are a quick way to signal how relatable they are, how they too succumb to temptation, just like the rest of us. But what really is a cheat meal, and what science lies behind it?

What is a cheat meal?

Sam Quinn, personal training lead at Nuffield Health, says the term originated in the bodybuilding community. They would follow very calorie-restricted diets to obtain that ripped flesh-clinging-to-the-muscle aesthetic but needed days on which they would allow themselves more carbohydrates for general health and to make their regime sustainable.

“On a very restricted diet, over a period of time, hormones will drop – psychologically you’ll be wavering,” says Quinn. “Fat loss also slows down as your body tries to hang onto its fat stores while the regime progresses. So increased carbohydrates can then kick start the fat loss process and psychologically you have better buy-in.” Bodybuilders and athletes use this method and the technical term is refeed. Cheat days and cheat meals are, in a sense, a mistranslation of the refeed.

Refeed vs cheat meal

Matt Jones is head of Nutrition at West Ham United and co-founder of Baller Performance. He says refeeds and the sudden lurch into eating as you please are quite different. “Refeeds are an intentional increase in energy intake, particularly from carbohydrates for a short period after being in an extended calorie deficit – consuming less than you use,” says Jones. “Cheat meals are typically made up of high-fat, hyper-palatable fast foods, while refeed days utilise specific quantities of carbohydrates. These two are not to be confused and are two very different things.”

A lot of the meals we see on social media are almost certainly carefully managed themselves and not the spontaneous calorific orgy they appear. What we do not see when a famously muscular man displays a triple-decker cheeseburger balanced on a mound of vanilla ice cream is the rest of his food intake and his exercise programme.

“If you look at someone like The Rock: he’s an enormous man and his exercise outputs will be huge, so what he’s eating the rest of the week is going to be controlled,” adds Quinn. “For a celebrity to have a break from that and to have this cheat meal is very appealing and it would be controlled. He’s not just doing this willy-nilly.” Quinn emphasises that for someone with a tough workout regime, a cheat meal can help them stay on track long-term.

Are there benefits to cheat meals and cheat days?

Jones is sceptical about the benefits for those of us not working towards an athlete’s goals with an athlete’s exercise regime. “The urge to ‘cheat’ on a diet is typically a result of being too rigid or restrictive with the foods and fluids you are ordinarily consuming. This unnecessary restriction is reliant upon willpower, a finite resource, which by the end of the week is gone,” says Jones. “As an example, eating a single cookie every day is frowned upon during the week but eating a full pack of cookies, justified as a cheat meal, is accepted. Unsurprisingly, cheat meals have been linked to eating disorders.”

And here lies the danger with the cheat meal cult. Unlike a planned carb ‘refeed’, it implies a world of good and bad foods, which brings with it a whole psychology of guilt, indulgence, reward and punishment – and can allow us to develop a very unhealthy relationship with the way we eat.

Abigail Green works alongside Sam Quinn at Nuffield as a health and wellbeing physiologist. Many of her clients are busy finance sector workers who might not exercise but are looking to manage their weight or their cholesterol, or achieve better sleep.

She tends not to recommend cheat days. “I think food is psychological and social, not just nutritional, so having something you enjoy in every meal is something I’d recommend. Otherwise, you will not feel emotionally satiated and that can end up with binges later.”

All in moderation

She advises thinking of your food within a 24-hour time frame rather than a week, and enhancing less healthy foods when you crave them rather than flipping between extremes – no need for very careful midweek dining and a last-days-of-the-Roman-Empire approach to weekends. “If you want an Oreo, have an Oreo – but maybe add yoghurt, fruit and nuts so there are healthy fats, fibre, and vitamins,” recommends Green.

Like much on social media, cheat meals arrive on your feed without context or explanation. For the right people, they can help keep on track for a wedding or holiday goal, if carefully planned and sown into an exercise plan. For others, they can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food, swinging between unsustainable purity and guilty plunges into self-indulgence. As Jones says, “Eating more at the weekend is absolutely fine if properly accounted for, but cheat culture can be damaging to your long-term relationship with food.”