The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Marksissons and is narrated by Brock Armstrong.

Should you eat periodic cheat meals?

I get a lot of questions about cheat meals. Are they allowed on the primal blueprint?

Is there a reason someone should actively seek to eat unhealthy food from time to time?

The allure of the cheat meal is obvious. You get to eat stuff that's otherwise off limits and extremely delicious.

You get to throw caution to the wind for a night. It's like a vacation and

you're a food tourist, but are there actual benefits? Today we'll take a look. As I see it,

there are three arguments to be made for including periodic, that is scheduled or preordained,

cheat meals in your otherwise solid primal eating plan

number one the psychological delode some people can stick to their strict diets with

metronomic regularity they have no issues avoiding those foods and feel zero compulsion to cheat. That's me for the most

part. I'll pick at an odd crusty piece of bread with butter in a restaurant or birthday cake

offered to me, but I'll just as often decline to partake. But not everyone is like that.

For some folks, hewing to a primal eating plan takes willpower.

It's not so much that you're constantly fighting off temptation. It's that sometimes a burger

sounds awesome. Sometimes your buddies want to go out for beer and wings or Cosmos and Gyoza,

and you'd like to join them. And yeah, those are my gender-based happy-hour

corollaries, and I'm sticking to them. It can ensure dietary compliance, and there's even

recent evidence, that it may make your diet more effective. Women were placed on a cyclic diet

consisting of three phases. For each phase, they reduced the calories

for 11 days, followed by three days of ad libidum, i.e. at one's pleasure, eating. After the three

phases, they'd lost an average of 8 kilograms, about 17 pounds of pure body fat. This surpassed

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