Cheat Dinner and/or Day - Thoughts?

Sailorwind

I have cheat weekends. I usually eat most weekend meals with my boyfriend and as we are usually by his place and he's not got the most functional kitchen, so we end up eating out most meals (works better for us since I'm on a low cal diet and he's on a no-carb diet). I used to stress so much about staying under 1400 cal on the weekends it was driving me crazy and then I hit a plateau. I decided to just be more lax on the weekends, as long as I don't break 1800 on the weekends I don't care. I don't use it as an excuse to go crazy and eat massive pieces of chocolate cake instead of dinner or anything like that, I still try to make wise choices and stay away from too much sugar or mass amounts of carbs, but I'm more likely to choose what sounds good off the menu as opposed to what I know is the healthiest option. And I still log EVERYTHING. As soon as I started doing that I broke my plateau. My hugest weight loss drops are now almost always when I get on the scale Monday morning. Apparently my body needed the high calorie spikes to jump start it. Either that or it needed the protein, I mainly only eat meat on the weekends as I'm too lazy to plan ahead to prepare it myself during the week. I also discovered that I don't go over by as many as I'd think I would with this method. I usually hit closer to 1600 than 1800.

macnotes

So what I'm learning about "cheat days" for me are that they tend to set me back about 2 - 3 lbs after the weekend. Usually I can drop this by the end of the week since it's usually because of just volume of food and sodium/water retention.

Slowly, week after week I find it less and less urgent to eat a ton of "bad" foods and just look for high quality "treats" I can have on that day or perhaps integrated into my week. I usually have to "hide" bad foods in the freezer but its better if I don't have them in the house at all since I think about them.

If I am REALLY good all week, I find that I go WAY overboard with the "cheat" day and feel like junk. Sugar makes me feel like I'm having an out of body experience (almost like being drunk) and my stomach hurts so bad. I find that I eat ANYTHING just because it's my only allowed day to "cheat" and therefore I eat things I'm not really craving possibly don't even want.

So, for me, I think high quality, small volumes of good "treats" eg. Dark Chocolate, 1-2 specialtiy cookies or some honey on some bread (whatever I'm craving) is the best. I keep it within my daily intake, + or - perhaps a couple 100 calories. I make sure I eat good food first too! Treats aren't allowed until I make sure I have a proper dinner.

I'm still experimenting with my "cheat" days but I think it puts me back to how I used to eat and I'm no longer that person. Also, sometimes on "cheat days" I find that I log generally what I eat, but maybe not everything because that makes me a little obsessive.