None of us are perfect. Our health and weight loss journeys aren’t linear either.
When on a health transformation journey, the goal isn’t perfection but actually to learn from the days that you “fall off the wagon.”
Having a cheat meal or a cheat day will remind you WHY you stay on track most of the time. The goal is to learn from the ‘Cheat’ and to get right back to transforming your health!
Nobody wants to live a life where they have to say no to Grandma’s apple pie or shy away from the Super Bowl Party and never partake in some of the party food.
As much as we want to eat right to live at the optimal level, we don’t want to create feelings of guilt and shame around a Cheat Day. And you don’t want to respond to a cheat day with just cutting calories and exercising more. Not only does that reinforce the guilt around the cheat, but it backfires by slowing down the metabolism, creating a negative mind and body connection, and increasing your hunger to CHEAT MORE!
Side Effects of Having a Cheat Meal
Most people say they feel like they are hungover even if a cheat meal didn’t include alcohol. The side effects of having a cheat meal are:
The excess carbs and the wrong kind of sodium cause your kidneys to retain water. When you eliminate carbs from the diet, the kidneys “let go” of excess water. Typically the body will retain an additional 2-10 pounds of water just from one day of eating processed foods, inflammatory vegetable oils, sugars, or carbs.
Bloat
The stomach and intestines may have excess inflammation due to indigestion, as the stomach may fail to break down the processed foods. From just one cheat day, the microbiome and gut bacteria can become unbalanced, with the bad bacteria outnumbering the good bacteria.
Constipation
Because of the “back up” in the liver from its inability to break down the toxins, inflammatory vegetable oils, processed foods, and excess sugar, the motility of the intestines slows down, leading to constipation. This causes the cheat meal symptoms to worsen because the toxins are staying in the body longer with the constipation and the body will start reabsorbing them; the constipation is making it as though your body ate twice as bad as it really did.
Headaches
The headaches after a cheat meal are due to the instability of blood sugar and insulin following ingesting more sugar, seed oils, and carbs than usual. Additionally the lack of proper electrolytes that come in more nutrient dense food will make the headaches worse.
Hangry
The “hangry” feeling following a cheat meal is the combination of being hungry and angry. Anger is stored in the liver.
The liver becomes over burdened and “hot” after a cheat day because it is having to work much harder than it is built to do so. The excess hunger is coming from the unstable blood sugar levels; the day after eating excess sugar, alcohol and carbs, the blood sugar will drop more than normal and trigger ghrelin, the hunger hormone, to “scream”, “FEED ME”. The body is trying to find homeostasis.
Fatigued
When you transition from low carb eating where you are producing ketones for energy and maintaining a higher level of ATP production, which is true cellular energy, into eating high sugar and carb foods, the body significantly lowers its ATP production.
Additionally, while the liver is backed up and working overtime to process the toxins, it will cause the thyroid hormones to become suboptimal and lead to fatigue in addition to causing leaky gut and malabsorption of nutrients for energy.
How to Recover from a Cheat Day
To recover from a cheat day without the following tools can take from a few days to a full week depending on your level of health, age, and insulin resistance. And with those negative feelings, guilt and shame will creep in making you feel worse!
The following tools below will get you back to feeling your best within 24 hours.
1. Berberine HCl
Take 2 Capsules with each Cheat Meal. This helps support pathogenic and bacterial balance in addition to improving blood sugar, digestion, and weight management. It helps break down proteins and fats as well.
2.Accelerated Cellular Detox Powder®
On the night of your Cheat Day, take 1 TBSP of Detox Powder in water. This organic formula coats the stomach and intestinal lining, reduces inflammation, helps with bloat and regularity, and alleviates issues like Crohn’s disease and Colitis. It also soaks up all of the toxins that you consumed during your Cheat Day that can cause Leaky Gut.
As inflammation is decreased, absorption of nutrients is improved. This will help your sleep, your bowel movements and will help soak up the toxins that wake you up in the middle of the night from a Cheat Day.
3.Acceleradine®
Wake up the next morning and take Acceleradine®. Acceleradine® increases ATP (cellular energy) by 18 TIMES, which increases physical energy, mental energy, metabolism, caloric burn, brain function, fat burning, healthy apoptosis (destruction of diseased cells), and more. By following a Cheat Day with Acceleradine®, the brain fog will subside, metabolism will increase, and energy will be reinstated.
ATP is true cellular energy; when ATP increases, energy and fat oxidation increase. Acceleradine also helps improve metabolism and physical energy by supplying the necessary iodine for thyroid hormones.
4.Accelerated Ancient Salt®
Put a pinch of Accelerated Ancient Salt® on your tongue ten minutes after your dose of Acceleradine®. A lack of sodium and potassium may actually lead to water retention. A lack of proper salt intake will cause additional issues with the sodium-potassium pump in the cells; the pump’s job is to put nutrients into the cells and take toxins out of it.
Most salts are stripped of all minerals except for sodium in addition to containing toxic microplastics. Those salts will lead to dehydration, toxicity, and bloat. Using a complete salt like Accelerated Ancient Salt®, with over 62 minerals, will help rehydrate the body, improve energy, improve bioelectrical function, and decrease bloat.
When you put a little Accelerated Ancient Salt® on your tongue, you will experience a boost of energy, lowering of blood sugar, and a decrease in appetite.
5. Accelerated Fast®
Wait 15 minutes after taking Acceleradine® and Accelerated Ancient Salt® to take 3-4 Accelerated Fast® pills with your morning coffee or tea.
Accelerated Fast® turns your body into fat burning mode within 30 minutes and it taps into its own fat stores for energy right away. When your body is burning ketones produced by the Accelerated Fast® combined with intermittent fasting and a low carb, high lean protein diet, it starts immediately using the “Cheat” calories for energy, ATP production increases significantly, and the sluggish feeling from the Cheat food is squashed.
Furthermore, the additional ingredients in the Accelerated Fast® break down saturated fats into unsaturated fats; this will help burn the dangerous visceral fat around the belly and the liver fat.
The more your liver is defatted and unclogged, the easier it is for the liver to function in all areas including breaking down fat molecules into usable energy and burning the belly fat.
The liver is also where the thyroid hormone converts from T4 to T3, and as the liver function becomes better, the thyroid works better as well, increasing metabolism, mitochondrial function, and energy. It is known when the thyroid isn’t functioning, digestion suffers and unexplained weight gain occurs.
Accelerated Fast® also has HMB which prevents muscle wasting. With more healthy muscle tissue, more mitochondria with increased ATP is sustained and more weight loss is achieved. Therefore, the effects of a Cheat Day are minimized when there’s more muscle tissue to store excess glucose from the excess carbs.
Additionally, the Organic Mukul in the Accelerated Fast® is known to break down fats in the body and provide an energy spark to burn those fats that it breaks down. It also supports joint and muscle health. In Ayurvedic Medicine, it is known to have a “Hot” or “Fire” element potency, and in this formula, it is the “match” that lights the Keto burn. It also detoxifies the body and liver.
The Organic Trikatu heats up the digestive “fire”, thus allowing for extremely high absorption of Ketones and other cofactors, as well as increasing the metabolic rate. All of these ingredients snap the metabolism back after a Cheat Day.
6. Accelerated Colloidal Silver®
Take 1 tbsp 4 times a day. Accelerated Colloidal Silver is enhancing your immune system’s ability to devitalize foreign pathogens including those that contribute to Leaky Gut. By keeping the immune system strong, the body engages in anti-inflammatory processes, leading to optimal health.
7. MegaSporeBiotic
Take 1-2 pills with food.
MegaSporeBiotic aims to recondition the gut instead of reseeding with probiotic strains that cannot survive digestion or colonize the gut.
This powerful probiotic supplement helps to control the “bad” bacteria that lead to bloat and dysbiosis, and grow the “good” bacteria. It has been shown to help with E. Coli, Salmonella, H. Pylori and more. Many of these gut pathogens will overwhelm the good bacteria in an environment fed by Cheat Day foods.
8. MegaPre
Mix the MegaPre with the MegaMucosa in water to drink anytime. It reinforces the beneficial microbial changes created by MegaSporeBiotic™ to promote a strong and diverse microbiome.
9. MegaMucosa
Mix with the MegaPre and drink throughout the day.
MegaMucosa is the first complete mucosal support supplement of its kind, formulated to support a healthy mucosal barrier and tight junctions in the intestines that can be damaged by just one Cheat Day.
The mucosal system is a very important part of the human immune system. The mucosal system in the intestines contains 150 times more surface area than the skin, which makes it an essential element of the immune system that supports healthy immune function.
10. X49 Patch
Put the X49 Patch 2 inches below the belly button.
The X49 Patch is enhancing the strength, endurance and fat burning results when recovering from a Cheat Day and incorporating exercise and a low carb diet. It is a patch that may increase energy and recovery after exercise, improve cardiovascular function and focus, increase muscle tone and strength, increase lean body mass and bone density, and reduce body fat.
11. Energy Enhancer Patches
Place the white Energy Enhance Patch on the right side of the body and the brown Energy Enhance Patch on the left. These will immediately increase fat oxidation and caloric burn to help recover from a Cheat Day.
The patches help increase ATP production in the mitochondria, increase heart rate variability, improve the bioelectrical measurement or “phase angle” or integrity of the cell walls, reduce inflammation, and increase endurance. Furthermore, it increases beta-oxidation which is the fastest way to increase cellular energy.
As a plus, it increases fat burning and muscle growth. These miracle health patches work synergistically with the Accelerated Fast® in your fat burning and tapping into an endless supply of fuel source on your body. All of these factors work synergistically to quickly recover from a Cheat Day. After just 20 minutes, the capacity of each cell increases. Additionally, it improves digestion and circulation which are essential for nutrient absorption that leads to improved energy.
12. Quintessential .9
Take 3 packets of Quintessential 0.9 throughout the day. It supports homeostasis, rehydration and normal digestion while eliminating excess water retention after a Cheat Day. This 0.9 concentration can help replenish mineral and trace element levels, gently detoxify, support sleep, relaxation, and digestion.
13. Break Your Fast with Omega 3 Fatty Acids from Wild Fish and Animal Protein
After a Cheat Day, try to fast as long as you can to stabilize your blood sugar and insulin. When you do eat, break your fast with only wild animal protein as this will increase Glucagon, the fat burning hormone, while keeping Insulin low.
As a result your fat-burning will increase even more than during the fasting window.
Furthermore, the amino acids in the protein will trigger a hormone called CCK that suppresses appetite and tells you to stop eating after an appropriate amount of food was consumed. The amino acids and Omega 3 fatty acids also trigger a dopamine release, which will curb cravings for sugar and more “Cheat” foods.
14. Put Lemon, Lime or Apple Cider Vinegar in Your Water
Consuming lemon, lime or Apple Cider Vinegar with water before or at the same time as sugar, blunt the rise in blood glucose. With a slower rise in blood glucose, the less fat storing occurs and the craving for more sugar decreases.
15. Sleep
If the body fails to get sufficient sleep, blood glucose will rise, and ghrelin, the hunger hormone, will rise, causing cravings to increase following the Cheat Day.
16. Walk for 10 Minutes After Each Meal
By taking a short walk after a meal, the rise in blood sugar is slowed and so is the craving for more sugar following a meal.
Sara Banta
Sara Banta is a Stanford University Graduate with a Degree in Economics and Psychology, and a certified Natural Supplement Expert & Graduate of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Sara is the Founder of Accelerated Health Products and host of the health & wellness podcast, Accelerated Health Radio.