cheat meals...or should i say CHEAT MEALS!!!!! what an amazing part of the bodbybuilding diet haha. there is nothing like depriving yourself from something to make you really want it. in the

 off season, when i can eat more freely, i think far less about junk food, but once the reins are pulled in, there are times i'd pick a delicious burger over a beatiful woman. well maybe not. i guess it depends on how good the burger is. the "what" and the "how often" are going to depend on personal factors. are you ahead of schedule or behind? how easily do you store fat and how fast is your metabolism? if you are competing, how close are you to your show and how low is your body fat. 

cheat meals can be a necessary break from the grueling mental work of hard dieting, but they are more than that. they also serve as a way to spike your thyroid hormones and speed up your metabolism. the more depleted you get, the more important they become and the more often most people will use them. some people with a freakishly fast metabolism may be prescribed cheat days. juan morel comes to mind. dave has him eating whatever he wants, for an entire day, once a wk. guys like this are very few and far between though and most everyone else in the world would derail the work they put into their diet for the wk.

a more strandard approach is to have one meal of your choice, one time a wk. keep the eating within a 2 hr period. i make sure that my meal contains a good amount of protein, but outside of that, i do what i want. cheese, bread, pasta, whatever i feel like eating. there is no ifs ands or buts about it, i can put away some serious junk food, but i dont go crazy and eat an entire large pizza washed down with a large coke and icecream. its one good meal, once a wk. i dont over eat. i find that its best to eat this meal closer to the end of the day, as once i've gone off diet, its a lot harder to get back to eating bland brown rice and baked fish. usually, i have my cheat meal after training my weakest body part or the night before working a serious muscle group like back or legs. 

the best way to figure out if you are eating too much is to watch the scale, often, after a cheat meal, my weight will go up for a day or two, mostly due to the spike in sodium, but if you find it's taking several days to get back to the weight you were before the cheat meal, you're probably over doing it. BTW, thank you for the reminder. today is my cheat meal. i haven't decided what its going to be yet, but i know one thing for sure, it is going to be AMAZING! it always is :)