Jono (00:24.514)

Hey food groupies, today we're gonna be talking about cheat meals, which to be perfectly honest, it's not a conversation I was expecting to have to have in 2024, but I think I've developed a pretty nice echo chamber, which is not always a good thing, don't get me wrong, but at least on social media, it means that a lot of the people who I interact with are pretty clever and pretty cool and understand that the phrase cheat meal might be problematic. So it's not a topic that I thought I'd to have address anymore, but I've been hearing about it a lot.

different areas lately. So I'm going to talk about it. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. no, look, if you have used the phrase or currently using the phrase cheat meal, please, I totally get it. mean, the rock, you know, bless that man. Sort of, I don't know, he's like, you know, as a gym going male, obviously, on some level, I admire the rock. And he's very big on his cheat meals.

So it's certainly still a very common terminology that is used. So I want to go through, I'll take you through very quickly what they are, how you can use them. And no, that's about it. I, something secret and special at the end. Basically a cheat meal is a meal that is not on your diet. You're having a meal that is not part of the plan. So presumably you have a plan that you're following to achieve a goal.

if you don't have a plan, you can't really cheat on it. So it's totally fine. Don't worry about it. But a cheat meal implies like it's a meal that you were eating that is not part of your plan. Now, sometimes cheat meals might be part of someone's plan. You know, you need to adhere to your macros or stick to the meals in your meal plan. But on Friday night, you can have a cheat meal. you know, and essentially what is it, it's implying is it's a free meal. It's a meal where you can do what you want before you get back to the structure and constraints of your plan. Now.

my main issue with it is the phrase cheat meal. I can't think of too many scenarios outside of like cheating death, which I suppose is good, depending on the person, then that cheating is ever really good, you know? And so that's the main thing. Now I know that this is just semantics and you probably notice that I often am quite particular with the language that we use, but that's for good reason because language is powerful. And if I'm referring to a meal as a cheat meal,

Jono (02:48.022)

that is, there's a lot of negative connotations that sit underneath that, right? Now, clearly if I'm cheating, I've done something wrong. And so I'm breaking my diet, I'm cheating on my diet. And that has a whole host of ramifications, right? How I'm gonna feel about that, I'm probably gonna feel very good during or after there's gonna be this underlying kind of like, yeah, I'm doing something bad. And then that also implies that to be

on the plan is good and to be off the plan is bad, which is too black and white and isn't really how we should be approaching this sort of thing as well. So this phrase cheat meal just really reinforces all of that. Also, it kind of reinforces the whole good food, bad food idea, right? This idea that all of the foods that you're not allowed on your diet, please hear the inverted commas clanging into place when I say that. The foods you're not allowed, the bad foods, you can have them.

only on your cheat meal. And you can see how this concept of a cheat meal, it just further reinforces this distinction between good foods and bad foods. Now, yes, there are foods that are more nutritious and foods that are less nutritious. There are foods that we want to be including more often and foods we want to be including less often. I'm not an idiot. And I don't want to argue that point. That's very true. But talking about it as foods I want to eat less often versus a bad food triggers two very different feelings in my brain, right? And those feelings are going to play out.

in my future dietary choices, my sense of self, my self -efficacy, i .e. how confident do I feel that I'm going to be able to achieve this thing? My relationship with food, like what happens when quote unquote I'm finished my diet? Are the bad foods still bad? Am I going to feel guilty when I eat them? How do I include them? Like all of these sorts of things, right? So basically how to use cheat meals is to not. That doesn't mean don't do a cheat meal, just stick perfectly to your plan. Really the main thing we need to do

is change the language. And so the phrase that I use with the people I work with all the time is a relaxed meal or a relaxed snack, right? Or you might call it unusual that sometimes a phrase that we've used as well, right? Because, you know, as much as I'd like a whole pizza is not a normal dinner for me. That's an unusual dinner for me. I would say that's me relaxing some of the parameters that I would typically use when building a nutritious, well -fueled meal. Right? And so

Jono (05:10.55)

This, I tend to default to relaxed meal. And that's also because I know if I called my wife and I said, Hey, guess what? I relaxed today. She'd be like, great. Good job you. I hope you had a good day. If I called my wife and said, Hey, I cheated today. The conversation would go slightly different. And that just, I feel like reinforces why this language is important. Right? If I've had a relaxed meal, I'm going to feel way less guilty. I'm not going to feel any guilt. I'm going to feel like, yeah, cool. I've got, I've been sticking to my plan.

having a bit of a relaxed meal, something that's a little bit different. And I'm just gonna get back to normal at my very next meal. Like big deal. It doesn't reinforce, there's no morals attached to it. There's no value attached to it. And so if you do wanna have some meals throughout your week or some snacks throughout your week that are not exactly in alignment with your plan, now how many you should be having and what they should look like is unfortunately not something I can cover in a podcast episode, because it's very context dependent. It's dependent on your goals, where you're up to in that progress.

all of your other previous relationship with food, what you're trying to build, all of those sorts of things, right? So I can't talk about the scope and the frequency of those meals, but whatever they are or whatever that is, I still strongly encourage you to use the phrase relaxed meal, not cheat meal. So if we can all agree to retire the phrase cheat meal, so I don't have to do this again in 2025, that would be awesome. So relaxed meals, relaxed snacks, unusual meals, unusual snacks, and then get back to normal.

and everything's gonna be okay. You haven't cheated on your diet. You're not in a monogamous relationship with your diet. You just ate something that wasn't a part of your everyday plan. That doesn't make you a bad person, it just makes you a person and that's all okay. So I hope this landed for a few of you. And if you are, like I said, if you're someone who's still using the phrase cheat meal, even just internally to yourself, I strongly encourage you to change that language, change that conversation, direct it away from such a negative word like cheat. And you'll probably find that you're gonna start to feel a little bit better about your progress overall, but.

Probably more importantly, your relationship with food. Catch you next time.