How Cheat Day Is Sabotaging Your Fitness Goals

Your body needs a certain number of calories every day just to stay alive (your basal metabolic rate or BMR). For most females age 25–45 this number is approximately 1600 – 2000 and for most males it is approximately 1800 – 2200. Most of us perform a lot more daily activities than just living (such walking, working, chasing kids, etc.), and therefore burn more calories than just our BMR. As an example, let’s take a 30-year-old female who has a BMR of 1700 who, on average, burns an extra 300 cal per day working out and performing other activities. This woman requires:

Remember that 3500 calorie number that I told you about earlier? In order to lose 1 pound you must somehow create a 3500 cal deficit in your body. Let’s say that the woman in our example decides to work out a little harder and watch her diet a little more closely. With her new diet and consistent exercise she is now burning 2100 calories daily and consuming only 1800. According to my calculations:

You can see from this example that losing weight is hard work! It takes dedication, patience and consistency, but it is totally possible!

Let’s take our same girl from our same example. Consuming 1800 cal a day and expanding approximately 2100 cal per day results in this 300 cal deficit. Let’s multiply that by six days and she’s down 1800 cal or approximately half a pound. However now on the seventh day let’s make it a cheating free-for-all! Our friend had a soda with lunch, a sugar cookie as a mid afternoon snack, seconds at dinner,  and a piece of double chocolate cake with a small scoop of ice cream for dessert (A completely realistic “cheat day”). Should we assess the damage?

If you are losing 300 cal per day for seven days you are losing 2100 cal per week. However, now let’s add to this 2100 cal deficit our one cheat day of 1268 cal. A 2100 cal deficit + 1268 bonus calories from our cheat day = 832 cal burned for that week.