Here’s the good news from the bodybuilding nutrition trenches: You can eat any food you want without blowing your diet. Here’s the bad news: You can’t eat every food you want, and it’s crucial that you limit how much you consume when you do decide to cheat. Cheating, as you know, can really derail your nutrition program. An all-day binge on pizza, hamburgers, ice cream, cakes and pastries can practically ruin months of hard work and soften up a rock-hard bod. Not to mention one cheat day can lead to another, and so on. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was your physique, but it sure can be destroyed just that fast.
There’s plenty of bad news for the bodybuilders, but there’s also an upside to cheating: Sometimes it can actually enhance your gains. For instance, you can consume fats and sugar at certain times of day to provide benefits to your body during most of your bodybuilding season. The key is to know what types of cheat foods are beneficial, what types are neutral and what types are detrimental to your physique goals.

CHEAT RULE #1
Build your core bodybuilding diet around foods you like that serve you well.
One of the ways to reduce your desire to cheat is to satisfy yourself with foods that are in your diet regimen. When you’re on a well-regimented plan, slow-digesting carb foods such as yams can taste quite sweet, helping to satisfy your cravings for sugary foods. Salmon and other fatty fish have an oily texture, which helps decrease your desire for unhealthy, deep fried foods.

Do you love chicken breast? Great — eat it as many days a week as you want in the offseason or when you’re preparing for a show. Or do you find it dry and flavorless? If so, you’re probably not inclined to consume as much of it as you should at any given meal in the offseason to provide sustained muscle growth. A better strategy for you may be to eat cuts of beef that are slightly fattier than chicken breast. You’ll consume more protein as well as a few more calories, but gravitating toward beef will probably help you add more muscle mass in the long run.

Toronto bodybuilder Mike Van Wyck offers this example: “I don’t like sweet potatoes so I don’t eat them in the offseason. I eat them only when I’m getting ready for a show because they’re such a great bodybuilding food. But I love rice, so I pound it in the offseason.” To keep growing, you should emphasize the foods you like best that’ll help you reach your goals.

CHEAT RULE #2
Cheat to help get in all the nutrients you need to maximize growth.
Too many bodybuilders over-regiment their nutrition program. Guess what happens in many cases? These bodybuilders end up depleting their muscles, providing too few calories and nutrition to support growth. “I train a lot of hardgainers who are trying to put on weight,” Mike says. “I tell them to order double the food they think they want. The problem these guys have is that they’re just not getting in enough calories to grow.”

You see, bodybuilders must surpass a threshold of many different nutrients to maximize muscle gains. You need a certain amount of protein and a certain amount of vitamins and minerals (supplied through nutrient-dense foods from categories such as fruits, vegetables and numerous others). But bodybuilders also need a minimal threshold of calories. Without the appropriate total calories, you simply won’t grow.

Once you’ve included all the protein your body can use for growth (at least 1 gram per pound each day), consuming more protein won’t really help boost muscle growth any further if you’re still coming up short on the total daily calories you need to sustain or add bodyweight. In fact, a bodybuilder who follows an extremely high-protein diet that’s low in calories will begin to lose weight. At this point, you need to bump up total calorie consumption — not protein consumption — to keep adding muscular bodyweight. Satisfying, easy-to-consume foods can be valuable for growth at this point.

Those who over-regiment their nutrition programs often end up under-eating total calories, reducing the amount of gains they can make. As Mike explains, some “cheating” may be necessary for you to boost your necessary calorie intake for maximal growth.

The flipside to over-dieting is to over-consume cheat foods in the offseason, believing the more bodyweight you add the more muscle mass you’ll gain. Beyond a certain threshold, this is false. Once you’ve reached a point at which you’re slowly adding bodyfat, you’ve almost guaranteed that you’re taking in enough calories to maximize muscle gains.

Excess calories will only make you fatter, making it harder to lose bodyfat when you do want to get in shape to show off all your hard work in the gym. When you adopt this over-eating offseason strategy, you’re much more likely to win the title of Biggest Loser rather than Mr. Olympia. “Remember, you have to burn those extra calories off to get in shape for a competition or for the summer season, which means extra cardio,” former British champion Troy Brown says. “Be wise in your choice of cheat meals, and don’t go overboard with the eating, even in the offseason.”

Mike agrees that moderation with cheating is one of the keys to success. “I don’t go over the top and eat everything I want, but I don’t follow the strictest plan in the offseason because I need a lot of calories to keep growing. I also do cardio year round, and I work out pretty damn hard.”

NEXT: More cheats continued.

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