Is It Necessary To Take A Cheat Day on Keto?

Is It Necessary To Take A Cheat Day on Keto?

IS IT NECESSARY TO TAKE A CHEAT DAY ON KETO? GIVEN IT CAN BE HARD TO BOUNCE BACK ONCE YOU HAVE TAKEN ONE?

After being done with a cheat day, it can take anywhere between three to seven days to get back into ketosis. On paper that does sound unfair. How dare a cheat day slow us down by not one or two but fifteen whole days? Now before you cancel cheat days altogether, hear me out!

A properly executed cheat day is a way to shock your body. While the pre-cheat day fast prepares your body for the influx of carbohydrates, the post-cheat day fast depletes glycogen. This reshuffling takes over three days and is a great way of jolting your body with 440-volt spark.

To understand the biochemistry behind this, the generation of energy on a ketogenic diet depends on certain molecules that need to be refueled with glucose at certain intervals of time. If you do keto for a very long time without the healthy interval of a cheat day, your risk of developing problems such as lethargy, weakness and in some extreme cases, pancreatic dysfunction, increases.

However, the more pressing issue at hand is that there is still much we don’t know what happens when one does uninterrupted keto for a very long time. If you have never dreamt of being remembered as someone who discovered a new medical condition, I would advise you to take a cheat day.

Speaking from my own personal experience, having done keto continuously for four-five months, I have realized that my progress was more fruitful when I, no points for guessing, took a cheat day. I mean I do not know about you, but I look forward to that one perfect day where I can gorge on everything from chole bhature to gajar ka halwa.

So, you might think that 15 days are a lot to lose over one cheat but when compared to the bigger picture, 15 days are too less for all that can be achieved by taking a cheat day. The risks of doing uninterrupted keto are shrouded with too much mystery for my liking so by all means walk that road, but at your own risk. But if I were to put my two cents in, I would not recommend it.

(mentally calculating the days till my next cheat day)

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