Cheat week

ane1027

Hello everyone. I would like to share my experience with having a cheat week (yes a week, not a meal or a day), since we always read about this topic.
I eat predominantly healthy meals, and stick to my maintenance calorie requirement which is 1800. Or around 1500 calories somedays. I workout 4-5 days a week. Lately is has become very hard to stay away from sugar and sweets which is a sign that by body felt deprived. This would often turn into late night binge. So insted, I decided to have one whole week where I could eat what I want. I ate around 2500-2600 calories 5 out of 7 days, without feeling guilty, just letting my hunger control my eating choises and also said yes to my cravings. I ate a lot of sweets, muffins, granola bars, drink a lot of milk (I have never noticed craving so much milk) in addition to my healthy meals. I didn't switched to junk food all day, but stickied to foods like oats for breakfast, chicken and vegetables for lunch and protein soup for dinner and ate sugary foods through out the day and especially at night. I would eat muffins and chocolate bars in 11pm and go straight to bed. This results?! First of all I felt not as obsessed with planing every meal, insted just ate whenever or whatever I felt like eating. It was liberating. Second, concerning my weight, I didn't weigh everyday, but only after this week and surprisingly the scale hasn't gone up. Everyone is different, maybe for some people cheat days would be much more than 2600 calories, but I wanted to share my experience. Now I'm back to my maintenance calories 1800 and feel so much better. I've also noticed that somedays I felt like not working out, and I didn't, so now I'm much more excited to workout. I was a good week for me, I hope you can share if you have similar experience.

SuzySunshine99

It just proves why people should not freak out when they go on vacation and have a "free for all" week. One week of eating above maintenance is not likely to make a significant difference. I, and probably most of us, gained weight from YEARS of eating this way. So, as long as one "break week" is not going to make you fall back into old habits, then there's nothing wrong with it.

But, if you feel the need to have weeks like this more often, then maybe you need to examine if you are depriving yourself or over-restricting in your everyday diet.

AnnPT77

You might find this thread interesting, too:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks