90% Is Perfect, 75% Is Good Enough

 

Do you feel deprived on your diet?
Like you’re always hungry and craving foods you “can’t” eat?

In our culture, we like to do things 100%… and beat ourselves up when we fall short of the mark.

When it comes to the food we put in our mouths, it’s no different.

We try to stick with strict diets (No animal fat! No plant starches! No salt!) and wonder why we can’t keep with it for longer than a month or two.

The secret to creating healthy habits you can follow for life is allowing yourself a little bit of wiggle room for debauchery.

Going 100% is outdated. From now on, 90% is perfect, and 75% is good enough.

You will get essentially identical results following a strict diet 90% of the time as you would by following it to a T.

Even following it 75% of the time will get you in better shape and health than most people.

Not only does “cheating” strategically on your diet not affect your results to a degree that any sane person would notice, but it makes your life INFINITELY easier and more enjoyable.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Every farmer knows that adding fertilizer to his field increases its productivity.

But as he adds more and more fertilizer, the gains slowly decrease until he is spending more on it than he is getting back by selling the produce.

The law of diminishing returns is the decreasing amount of output increases that often occurs when factors of production are increased, and it as relevant to health and fitness at it is in economics.

The more blood, sweat, and tears you put into following a rigid diet, the less bang for your buck you are going to get.

Very few “normal” people have the time, energy, and money that the “experts” do in order to get into superhuman shape.

So leave the uber-strict diets for the professional athletes, bodybuilders, and models.

Cheating Redefined

In most diets, “cheat days” are when you overeat. They are your one day of total debauchery after days of going to bed hungry.

It’s a good idea to balance feasting and fasting in your life, but let’s look at cheating from a different perspective.

I’ve gone into this in more depth elsewhere, but you should consider “cheating” to be eating ultra-processed food (think pizza, burgers, fries, etc.) instead of Real Food (minimally-processed meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs, etc.).

In this model, cheat days and meals are necessary not to boost your metabolism, but to give you just enough of the instant gratification you crave from food while still eating a diet of primarily Real Food.

By cheating strategically like this, you can get all the benefits of a healthy diet (fat loss, muscle gain, longer life, etc.) without the pain in the ass of trying to resist all the temptations in your life.

The Psychology of Cheating

Does gorging on burgers, pizza, fries, donuts, and candy bars once per week increase your metabolism, as some have claimed, priming your body to burn more calories naturally?

Possibly, but that’s beside the point.

The point of cheating, as I have defined it, is to give you a way to become healthy and fit without turning into a hermit.

Yes, you can go out to dinner and order a big plate of pasta (with dessert!) without beating yourself up about it.

You can go out to happy hour and grab a beer or two without calculating how long of a run you need to go for the next day to burn off all those calories.

A little bit of debauchery isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference. But it just might make mastering kitchen hacking and eating Real Food a breeze.

We all have a limited amount of willpower to expend, and trying to eat a pure diet when unhealthy choices everywhere is a prescription for burnout.

Good luck on that one.

Real Food should be the basis of your diet, but you should still cheat strategically. Just enough to make your life easy, but not enough to derail your health and fitness goals.

My favorite cheat day meal? Double-double animal style, well-done fries, and a vanilla shake from In-N-Out. 1645 Calories, none of which I give a damn about.

What’s your favorite “cheat day” meal?

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