Strategy for Offsetting a Cheat Meal

[atomicspacebunny]

Oh I see… thank you for educating me on this video!

[Screenack]

If you ate something you shouldn’t have …

1. Don’t call it a cheat meal. Try to avoid that situation in the future, or mitigate it.
2. Don’t perform some CICO-based penance, like “hitting the gym hard." That’s a back-slide into trouble.
3. Carry on as you have. You will heal, and reduce your stress.

I just saved you the length of the youtube video. You’re welcome.

She wasn’t advocating anything major–just doing things in a slightly different way, since you’re going to the gym anyway. Very sensible actually.

Thanks, @islandlight, I’ll take you at your word.

[UncaToddly]

I’d just try to return to normal keto eating, normal exercising, etc.

This, a thousand times. The 3 or 4 times I completely cheated and gained back up to 6 pounds on the scale (that were gone 6 days later) simply slowed things down. The difference being that instead of being 223 today, maybe I would have crossed the BMI scale from Obese to Overweight a few weeks earlier.

[PaulL]

If you carb up and fill you muscles with glycogen, doing heavy compound lifts is an effective way to:

1. Burn off and deplete glycogen stores to get you back to ketosis
2. Leverage the glycogen to fuel muscle growth

The advice in this video is one way to optimize a very un keto behavior into something that can benefit your health.

I’m a little confused by the notion that glycogen fuels muscle growth. I thought was merely stored sugar to fuel performance. As I understand it, building muscle requires amino acids, which come from dietary protein, not dietary carbohydrate.

As for the topic of this thread, I suppose the whole issue of a “cheat” depends on one’s reason for adopting a well-formulated ketogenic diet in the first place. If simply for weight loss and no other reason, then I don’t suppose a cheat even matters.

But if one is eating keto to recover metabolic health, the idea is to maintain as low an insulin level as possible for as much of the day as possible, and eating excessive carbohydrate works directly against that goal. For myself, the need for long-term metabolic health is an important reason not to cheat in the first place. Yes, one can deal with the presence of the extra glucose in the system, but the cost of the insulin spike it causes is too high, where metabolic health is concerned. I personally can’t afford to reverse course and head back into diabetes again.