It’s that fun time of the year where you have one big fat excuse to munch on some sweets and goodies as a little treat. If you have kids then you have no getting away from the house filling up with naughty foods, even in work places, stuffed with the stuff. We dress our kids in all kinds of different outfit and say “ahh look how cute you look” – kids “NOW GIVE ME SWEETIES”
Seems there’s no escaping from the naughty treat season.
Have no fear because you can use Halloween as an advantage 
In my boot camp program I always get my members to structure their week so they have a planned cheat day, mainly once a week. The cheat could be a day, or a cheat meal. I tend to mix up my weeks where I cheat in the week then the other on the weekend so I can work around my social life and still maintain my weight. I do this for 2 reasons - psychological and physiological.
Psychological Benefit of Cheating:
Firstly it keeps us sane! It will also help you maintain consistency to the program. You know that dieting is HARD, very hard if you know you cannot enjoy your favourite foods from time to time, have someone or a diet program telling you that you cannot eat the foods you like and enjoy! This can be very daunting for most and very depressing. So I want you to pick a day where you can actually say ‘sod it’, to your diet and eat whatever you want, so Go ahead and have 2 mars bars that day.
Sound good?
This is to help improve your consistency to a program so you can actually stick to your healthy eating plan for good!
The Physiological Benefit of Cheating:
Your body is a very complicated machine and your body is in a constant state of breaking down and re-building cells. Like any machine it needs energy to run. so the demand for this energy would be the sugar in your blood and stored fat. You have specific hormones that play a role in either making you gain weight or lose it and the hormones are controlled directly by the foods we put in our bodies. With the constant battle between the two, it can be very difficult when you don’t know how to control them.
Your body’s basic purpose is to survive e.g harsh winter weathers where food is limited so your body adapts, survives and stores body fat when calorie intake is low.
To lose weight you need to have calorie deficit which means you need eat less calories than your metabolism burns. This does not mean eating less than 500 calories per day everyday, it does not work like that. Your body is smart and if you carry on eating low numbers of calories every day, you might lose a few pounds but your body will do what is needed to slow down your metabolism down to survive on only 500 calories per day. This will slow down your fat loss dramatically and then you will hit a brick wall. That is not the goal. This is why traditional low calorie diets fail one after the other.
The key hormone is Leptin - Leptin is awesome. However, get on its ‘bad side’ and you’re pretty much doomed to be overweight. In the simplest terms, leptin is a hormone that communicates your nutritional status to the rest of your body. From there, your body then makes decisions on what to do with things like fat burning and metabolism, based on the messages it’s receiving from our foods. I’m not going to go into it too much detail because it gets a bit confusing. Basically…
High leptin levels = heightened fat burning and metabolism
Low leptin levels = decreased fat burning and metabolism
This is where your sneaky little treat comes into play!
When your bodies leptin levels drop, to re-spike it you want foods with high carbs. So creating a calorie spike will help your leptin to rise and allow your body to continue to lose fat.
Using this approach you can have steady weight loss and it’s sustainable too.
So use Halloween to your advantage and have a few of your favourite treats on the day. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not fall off the wagon and stuff your self because that completely defeats the purpose of what you have just read.
So don’t gain fat this Halloween, lose it instead!
Peace!
Jango
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