interesting info on "cheat days/meals"

stephe1987

Well, holidays are just a few days out of the year, while weekends are 104 days a year. Even just one cheat day a week is 52 days a year. I can understand why some people fall off the wagon with so many chances to mess up!

As for holidays, I don't think you need to bring your food scale especially if you've been weighing your food for a while and/or understand that a portion is a handful of food and not a plateful or a big bowl of food. Limit yourself to 1-2 plates for the day and you'll do fine. Even if you go slightly over it's just one day and you'll have weeks to make up for it before the next holiday. I also think if you're not used to having cheat days during the year, your appetite won't be as big and you won't want to eat so much anyway.

I like the 80/20 rule. 80% healthy, 20% indulgent. This allows you to still eat the things you enjoy, but in small amounts. Stay under your calorie goal. Your appetite will get smaller and you won't be tempted to binge because you can still get your chocolate/pizza/whatever else you enjoy fix. It's something maintainable that you will be able to continue even after you reach your goal.

Another thought about cheat days... how much are you allowed to go over by? Because MFP overestimates calories burned (and people generally underestimate how much they eat) so the green numbers will be artificially high. If you add up the previous six days' green points as the number you're allowed to go into the red by, the red number will be maybe twice as high as it should be. You can still lose weight but it will be slower and won't be shocking if you get stuck at the same number for a while.

lemurcat12

Building up self-control is SO important and I'd think, that by the end of the weight loss (if done in a healthy manner), that self-control should be pretty strong. We spend all this time learning to control ourselves, but what happens once we hit maintenance? This is why people put all the weight back on. They have this minset of, "I'm on a diet. I can't eat this or that. Oh, look, I'm at my goal weight. I look awesome. I don't need to pay attention to what I eat anymore. Yay! Let's to go Krispy Kreme for breakfast every day this week to celebrate!"

I'm skeptical that this is so common.

I think it's less a matter of self-control and more a matter of awareness. For me logging forces me to be aware of what I'm eating, and it's pretty easy not to be. When I lost weight before I never decided "whee, I'm off the diet, I'll go nuts." That's obviously stupid. But I stopped keeping track so carefully and made up for it by the fact that my exercise at the time was pretty intense. And then for various reasons I stopped exercising and didn't realize that I was continuing to eat more than my reduced maintenance. And then I gained back some and figured it didn't matter if I was more indulgent since I already needed to lose some and gained more and so on. Much more gradual, and at no time really an issue of self-control or its absence or some prior perceived lack of donuts or whatever that led to a craving. Just carelessness.

lemurcat12

Not very surprising to me. Honestly it just comes down to maintaining your focus on your health in the long term. It's not very surprising to me that the more you make excuses for why it's okay to divert your focus (e.g., it's the weekend so it's okay), the more likely you are to deviate more and more. Not saying you can't or even shouldn't deviate from your plan from time to time, but just that I'm not surprised that people that strictly adhere to their routine have an increased chance of long-term success than people who are less strict.

This seems right to me, but the way it's phrased in the write-up it's not at all clear whether it's "people who pay attention to what they eat only on the weekdays maintain less well than those who pay attention always," which seems completely obvious, or "people who have a plan that allows them to eat more on the weekend (within limits) maintain less well than those who eat the same number of calories, or close to it, every day." If the latter I would be surprised, but the write up seems to conflate the two.

But this is similar to the whole "cheat meal" thing, which is a term I hate, but also which seems completely unclear as to what is meant by it. I used to do a "treat meal" (which I assumed was the same thing, without the perception of "cheating" when you set the rules so it can't be if planned). But that meant flexing my calories so that I'd eat a bit less on other days to have some extra on the weekend when I'd go out to dinner, so I could have a more indulgent option or dessert. It didn't mean ignoring my plan at all. Now I mostly don't do that, but I still tend to schedule my longer workouts on days when I go out to dinner (which I do at least once a week), so as to have more flexibility. The study write up seems to suggest that's a bad practice, but it does not at all mean that I'm less aware of what I'm eating throughout the week than if I was eating the same number of calories each day.