I occasionally see this on social media where bodybuilders will gorge on giant meals of desserts and junk food and somehow dont end up with diabetes, become ill in general, or just wreck their physique. I understand they probably eat healthy on other days that we dont see, but still it seems odd to not have any negative effects from these wild cheat day binges.
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They probably just lift weight a ton. I know a competitive bodybuilder that eats like trash and shreds a pint of ice cream every night, but has like 5% bodyfat or less at a time. He basically lives in the gym. Also I’m not sure how much one cheat day meal can really affect phisique. Pretty sure your body can only absorb so much – so even on a 10k Cal meal you probably just shit most of that out?
I would bet its just a matter of calories in and calories out. I met some olympic athletes who would eat McDonlds everyday but it didn’t matter because they trained for 4-5 hours almost every single day. They were still ripped (they were also late teens early twenties).
Bodybuilders can handle cheat days due to their intense workouts, which burn many calories, and their bodies’ ability to burn calories more efficiently due to regular dieting and exercise.
The true answer here is steroids. And they don’t.
Sure you can absolutely eat 10k calories in a day but working that off? Look up YouTubers trying to burn 10k in a day. It’s barely possible. Those social media posts are for clout. Why any bodybuilder would train to be 5% body fat and eat these “cheat meals” doesn’t make sense. The cake is a lie.
Ever see The Rock actually eat the bs he posts?
Muscle burns more calories than fat. This is why you’ll see bodybuilders regularly consume 5000 calories without getting fat.
People usually count calories by the day, but you can also go by the week, or even month. Say a bodybuilder needs about 3,500 calories a day.
3,500 calories a day
24,500 calories a week
105,000 calories a month
Bodybuilders are accustomed to lowering caloric intake to cut down bodyfat before competitions, so if they really want to be strict, they can make up for having nearly 3x a daily intake in a day by lowering intake for the rest of the week.
10,000 on day one leaves you 14,500 for the week, or a little over 2,400 a day. Still respectable, still enough to get the protein you need, but you may have to be a little more clever with making foods to keep yourself full.
Alternatively, you can go by the month. 10,000 in a day will leave you 95,000 for the month, or 3,275 per day – not a big difference.
That monthly explanation is why many personal trainers will state to just forgive yourself if you slip up on a diet and eat a bunch of garbage one day. If you go back to your routine and get back on course the next day, then in the long run you’ll still be fine. If you punish yourself by being restrictive, as in the weekly variant – or even worse, by trying to fast to zero calories for a few days or exercise half to death as punishment – then you might lose willpower and fall off your path entirely.
All of that is also how competitive eaters do what they do. They usually follow something closer to a weekly thing – tons of calories on one day, then almost nothing by comparison for the other 6 or so days.
Big muscles don’t mean top condition. Most of them have high blood pressure and their lab work is all jacked up. There is a reason so many of them have heart attacks and die in their 40s
In the same way as someone who eats 10,000 calories a day but has one day where they only eat lettuce isn’t going to suddenly become skinny.
You can’t ruin everything you gained on one cheat day. 10k for a big man isn’t horrendous. You can get water retention from a lot of sodium in one day. A continuous bad diet and no exercise are causes of type 2 diabetes.
Edit: a cheat day isn’t the same as a gorge day.
If you have a massive cheat day, chances are you’ll not see a single difference on the following day. Consistency is obviously key.
Besides that, more muscles means more calories used to keep you alive, even when you are asleep. If 10 years ago I ate the same amount of calories I do nowadays, I’d become overweight in no time.
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