When it comes to your body, there’s no such thing as “cheating.”

Please stop using this word.

You have a lifelong commitment agreement with your body, one you didn’t choose to sign and that is non-negotiable. It’s a unilateral agreement, and you aren’t the boss.

The human body was designed to absorb a relatively heavy load of variable stuff when it comes to health: tropical heat, frigidly cold weather, semi-starvation (on purpose or on accident), alcohol, non-nutritious foods, all-fat diets, all-vegetable diets, all-meat diets, heavy exercise, no exercise, and on and on.

How are you going to “cheat” on something that basically allows for anything?

To cheat is to break an agreement, and you never made an explicit agreement with your body.

But you made up the terms of this agreement in your mind when you decided that what your body needed was “x” number of calories. Or “x” number of days at the gym. Or “x” days without carbs.

Your body didn’t negotiate back—and if you “cheated”? Your body won that round of negotiations.

It overrode your brain and told you to quit the plan you had in mind.

The way to not need to “cheat” is to have more freedom, more fun, more flexibility. To not rigidly apply one-way doctrines that your body was never designed for and didn’t agree to do.

Give in to the contract of being human. Eat real foods with actual nutrition. Move around as much as you can. Process your emotions. Love and be loved.

When you respect the contract that you were given, your body won’t rebel and override you.