Video transcript of my YouTube Video: How To Limit Fat Storage from Cheat Meals:
What’s up, guys? Dan Garner, strength coach and nutrition specialist, here. I’m going to talk a little bit about cheating your cheating meals. It’s not something I advocate to do all the time because I’m a nutrition specialist, but there’s ways to have damage control when you cheat. So, to decrease the susceptibility of storing a lot of fat if you go on a binge or anything like this.
Cheat meals are, they keep you on track, they keep you sane and they’re delicious, but ways to cheat your cheat meal is really by managing insulin and something called nutrient partitioning. So, ensuring certain nutrients go to where they should be going, that your breaking them down properly, and that you’re absorbing them into the muscle tissue as opposed to the fat cells.
Cinnamon Before The Meal
A couple of ways that you can go about doing this is cinnamon. Cinnamon is a really underrated spice. Insulin’s a fat-storing hormone and what insulin does, like the totally basic, you’re going to open up, insulin is anabolic so, it helps build muscle tissue, but it also adds nutrients to the fat cells as well. So, when you have a cheat meal, you’re spiking the insulin to store the fat cells, okay, and having cinnamon before that meal or with it can decrease the insulin secretion up to 29%. So, just cinnamon can decrease that fat-storing hormone 29%.
Lots of Water With Meal
If you’re having a cheat meal, it’s good to drink large amounts of water with it for a lot of reasons. Number one is carbohydrates. People’s main cheats are pretty heavy carbohydrate-filled so candies, chocolates, pastas, breads, desserts, whatever it is, usually cheat meals are decently high in carbohydrates, which spikes insulin by the way. But every carbohydrate, it needs to be stored into the muscle cell also requires 4 parts- 3 to 4 parts- water. So, for every 1 part carbohydrate, you’re going to need 3 to 4 parts water in order to store that carbohydrate as glycogen in the muscle cell as opposed to it going in the fat cells. So if you’re dehydrated, you’re not going to be storing it as glycogen cause you’re not going to have the water volume and hydration in order to allow that carbohydrate to be properly stored as fuel instead of fat. So, water’s good to ensure or help ensure carbohydrate is stored as glycogen, but water can also quicken gastric clearance. So, it can actually quicken the rate at which the food is moving through your GI tract and cause less of to be absorbed and more to be excreted. So if you have tons of water with it, you can kind of- in layman’s terms- push all that food through so that you’re not absorbing a lot of it with that meal.
Caffeine During Meal
Having caffeine with the meal does quicken gastric clearance pretty effectively as well. So something like 16 ounces of tea is going to really increase your fluid intake plus your caffeine intake. Green tea is another phenomenal one to have with a cheat meal, especially green tea, and really in supplement form because supplement form is more effective. It’s just stronger. You can have green tea. I mean it has tons of health benefits, but green tea taken with carbohydrates decreases the amount of carbohydrates you can absorb from the meal. So, if you’re having green tea with the meal, you’re going to decrease the amount of carbohydrates that you can absorb with that meal. If you’re drinking lots of water with it, hopefully those are getting stored into glycogen as opposed to fat and getting excreted through gastric clearance. You’re having cinnamon to blunt that insulin response anyways.
Intense Exercise For 60 -120 Seconds Before Meal
And another one, it sounds kind of funny, you’re going to look kind of funny but it’s extremely effective so, to effective something called the GLUT4 response pathway, this is what really drives nutrients into the muscle cell for fuel and into the mitochondria as opposed to being stored into the fat cell. It’s a physiology term, but research has shown just 60 to 120 seconds of pretty intense activity can activate your GLUT4 response pathway and so, doing 60 to 120 seconds of air squats or wall presses prior to a cheat meal is going to really help activate this glut4 response pathway and allow you to, just a higher percentage, a higher susceptibly for those nutrients to go into the muscle cell as opposed to the fat cell.
So, 60 seconds of air squats or 2 minutes of air squats in the bathroom stall of the restaurant or if you ordered pizza at home, no worries. You can just have, do 60 second to a 120 seconds of activity at home before you eat that meal and it sounds silly but it works. So, that is effective in it of itself.
Recap
That’s 3 or 4, 5 ways to help really cheat your cheat meal. Staying active also really helps cheat the cheat meal. So, if you workout that day, preferably beforehand, you’re going to be more insulin sensitive, so you’re going to be more effective at storing into the muscle cell and also if it was a tough workout, your body’s going to want to use some of those calories to build muscle tissue and use some of those calories to top off your energy stores because you had a tough workout.
So, if you can stay active, have some cinnamon before or after the meal, have some caffeine during the meal, lots of water during the meal, hit 60 to 120 seconds of decently high intensity activity immediately before the meal, and have some green tea with the meal, you’re doing yourself a ton of favors for damage control and cheating you cheat meal.
I don’t advocate to do this all the time because it, I mean come on – cheats are cheats for a reason, okay? So, if you can work it into your macronutrients, then you can work it into your macronutrients, but if it’s something that’s totally off track, doing this is going to lessen the damage that you’re doing to yourself.
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