Anyone do cheat days?

Every other week, I go out for fried catfish, grits with cheese and greens soaked in bacon grease. I then eat movie popcorn and sno caps with dh. I sort of feel like I'm in shock afterwards, but the mental crap, of "I can't ever have it again", messes with me worse than the calories. OP probably knows that as much as fifty percent of the population carries general inflammation from foods like gluten, dairy, soy, corn, etc, and is choosing to give her body a rest. I applaud her. :flowerforyou: If you're someone who can eat inflammatory foods and be good with it, you should appreciate it, and not cast stones. If you however, always have inflamed muscles, sinusitis, reflux, gas, constipation, or brain fog: try going off or reducing gluten and dairy. Restricting dairy to once a week can do fabulous things for about half of us.

I have a cheat evening once a week, either a Friday or a Saturday, when I have a takeout curry or kebab and a bottle of red, but I behave myself and eat good in the day

I never plan for one! But they happen. When friends want to cook, I eat what they make. That's a cheat meal to me.

I think a cheat day means something different to everyone. Some eat "unhealthy" foods, sometimes even keeping a calorie deficit. Others eat at a maintenance calorie level rather than a deficit. Personally, I don't really consider either of those to be "cheat days." My idea of a cheat day is to eat whatever I want and as much as I want.

I started at 201 lbs., and have had to lose very slowly because of health issues that I experienced when losing more quickly (it's complicated, and I won't try to explain here). So I ended up taking a break from trying to lose weight for about 6 weeks. When I started up again, at the beginning of June, I told myself that I would let myself have a cheat day at 185 lbs. (which was about 7-8 lbs. away). I had hoped to eat 2 lbs. of spaghetti, 2 cakes, a pan of brownies, 2 pizzas, and 2 packages of Oreos. The cheat day was on Aug. 3. Turns out my eyes were bigger than my stomach, and I didn't get to eat that much but ended up with 8k calories anyway.

I will do another cheat day when I reach 175 lbs., and will forego the spaghetti in favor of pizzas. When I make these milestones, it is after a long time of careful dieting (2 months in the first case), so I do not feel bad pigging out. In the nearly 3 weeks since my cheat day, I've surprisingly lost all all of what I gained cheating and then some (5 lbs., which is a fast loss for me).

My cheat days are infrequent, but extreme. Some have frequent mild cheat days. Neither is necessarily wrong, so just keep doing it if it works. The point of a cheat day is to keep yourself happy mentally, right? If you need to have a small cheat every week to do that, and you are still losing weight... then by all means, keep doing it.

I don't schedule cheat days because real life provides enough opportunities to indulge. Birthdays, celebrations, days when I get home too late from work and grab whatever is easiest, etc. I have to make sure that I eat healthy the rest of the time to accommodate for the expected and unexpected deviations. I do enjoy the times I cheat though.