To Succeed At Your Diet, You Need To Learn The Right Way To Cheat On It.

You would have to be a saint or a supermodel to be able to completely deny yourself every delicious fat-filled food that you love, just to lose weight. If you are neither, you need to learn to artfully dodge those calories even as you allow yourself a few tasty morsels every now and then.

The problem with traditional weight-loss diets is that they don’t allow for human weakness. The diet experts who design weight-loss diets should know that their target audience absolutely will cheat from time to time. Diet experts still leave people to their own devices when it comes to diet cheating – they don’t help them with an actual cheating plan. If you are on a weight loss diet and you don’t know how exactly to plan your cheating, you’ll end up losing control. What follows is information that can help you understand better what foods you should pick when you decide to sneak a little something in on the side.

If your problem is that you love chocolate…

Undeniably, chocolate is too rich for anyone on a diet. If staying away from chocolate makes life unbearable, though, you need to find a way to get the taste without actually eating chocolate. Hot chocolate made out of reduced-fat milk and only a little sugar can be a meaningful alternative. Taking this route, you can save more than 100 calories over picking a chocolate bar. What’s more, hot chocolate can satisfy your cravings much better than real chocolate can. If you get a chocolate bar, you’ll gobble it up quickly. You can sip on a cup of hot chocolate, though, and make it last longer. Your brain will have much more time to let it register that you’re actually getting to taste chocolate.

Many people trying to get a quick chocolate fix in the middle of a weight loss diet believe that they can’t possibly hope for chocolate cake or Oreos. They think they’re too rich. Instead, they snack on Mallomars and brownies. These are exactly the wrong choices. A frosted chocolate cake has about half the calorie content of a brownie. An Oreo has between 10% and 20% less calorie content than a Mallomar.

If you have to cheat with chips and cheeseburgers…

If you can’t help but dream of crispy potato chips and juicy hamburgers, you may find yourself weakening from time to time and sneaking a bite or six. If you learn how to cheat with hamburgers, though, you’ll be able to minimize the damage that you do to your weight loss plan.

If you have to have chips, you should choose something other than potato. Every potato chip comes with a gram of fat or about 20 calories. If you like a little dip with your chips, your calorie burden goes up 50%. You can choose the alternative, instead – pita chips. Section up a 4-inch piece of pita bread, brush on a bit of olive oil, sprinkle some salt on and put the pieces in the oven to crisp. You’ll have crispy, salty goodies to crunch down on and add no more than 100 calories to your diet in the process.

When it comes to your hamburger fantasies, if you have to indulge in a huge one sometimes, choose a Big Mac instead of a Whopper. As unhealthy as Big Macs are, they have 20% fewer calories than Whoppers.

Cheating at breakfast

Having nothing but healthy salads, fruit and cereal for breakfast each day can make you consider taking a day off your diet sometimes and digging into French toast or pancakes. If you do have to indulge yourself, though, you should probably do it with pancakes, instead of French toast. A slice of French toast is worth 150 calories. A pancake, on the other hand, only has 80 calories.

A pancake isn’t a pancake without a quarter-cup of syrup on top. This indulgence, though can easily double your calorie intake. Instead, you can try simply topping your pancake with frozen fruit that you’ve thawed out. It can have a thick, syrup-like feel and little calorie content.

The bottom line

Cheating occasionally is ok. You must understand that our brain is DESIGNED TO CRAVE fats and sweets and that the battle between your will and your desires is always going to end in a 1-0 favoring desire. To make it easy I always tell people have a little bit of what you love. You can even have it every day as long as it is not in excess. For instance, I love bread, I feel like I am addicted to it. What I do to stop that craving is I buy bread sticks they are about 10 inches long and thin. There is about 30 calories in one of them. I eat 2 or 3 and I am under 100 calories to satisfy that craving.

Remember the goal of eating healthy is not eliminating everything you love 100% but to be conscious of what you eat and making sure you are consuming smaller portions.