Help me settle something.

I think you are correct. When you start out to lose weight it isn't just for bikini season or an event, its to make a lifestyle change. You don't want to diet your entire life so a cheat day or meal every so often is okay, but not an entire weekend.

no! everyone needs to make this a long-term life time committment. She will get nowhere fast with that kind of attitude. She truly does DIET during the week and binge on the weekend. She needs to come up with a livable plan that is not cosidered a diet but merely a way of life.

There are many authorities which claim that high calorie days are important to weight loss. It supposedly keeps the body guessing just like the idea of muscle confusion in P90x. I have also heard that the biggest loser contestants have one high calorie day in their week. Now, high is a relative idea. A person may eat a few hundred more calories and call that a high day, while another may believe that they can "binge" and take in 1000 more calories. I would lean more towards a couple hundred more calories as my high day. It will still keep the body from getting into a pattern and keep it guessing while it is still a manageable amount of calories to burn off.

Ok just to clarify this isn't a weekly thing. We are both doing calorie counting and have both been successful. I have lost almost 30lbs and her just over 45lbs. Just in talking today she said she has found this weekend to be a hard on ( she has had some extra stress so maybe that is why) and really wants to snack. I said she should really watch that it doesn't get out of hand and that is when she said if she has a bad 2 days it won't matter because she will go hard and fast all week and will still see a loss. Well she can do what she wants I guess but I didn't see how she can lose with all the extra calories cosumed over 2 days.

Thats a slippery slope she is treading. This is a lifestyle change meaning she is going to have to learn how to deal with bad situations and not revert back to old habits because of them. Now if you would have said oh she just feels like pizza this weekend then I would have wavered just a little, but emotional eating is a definite no, no. Food is not a band-aid for problems.

I've read in several articles by nutrition and weight-loss experts that you will seriously screw up your metabolism in the long-run if you pull the binge all weekend-diet all week thing. There's nothing wrong with having an evening snack (we're talking a 100-200 calories more) on a Saturday night or having one meal out on a Friday where you've eaten reasonably all day and worked out and you have a "treat" but if you truly *binge* all weekend, then your body's not going to know whether it's coming or going and in the long run, it will catch up with her.

Ultimately everyone has to do what works for them. I have a free day on Fridays. I commit to a good breakfast, an extra hard workout and then I don't worry about it. Over time I've found that my free days aren't as wild as they used to be. My stomach has shrunk so I don't eat nearly as much. There's certain foods I can't tolerate anymore - like anything deep fried, pasta kills me, and I have watch sugar cause that can me queasy. So my free day might be a good breakfast, usually bring the same healthy after workout snack that I do during the rest of the week, I'll have a deli sandwich of some type that I wont eat usually like roast beef with MAYO on a croissant with butter pretzels. Dinner will might be a slice of pepperoni, and I'll have reeses peanut butter cups later in the evening for snack. So I'm not necessarily binging but I don't eat any of that on the other days.

I think if I binged all weekend I would be sick as a dog and I would struggle even more to lose the weight, and trust me the last 10 lbs is not giving up easily. Actually I had increased my exercise in effort to get it off, but not eating what I burned so was not eating enough and hit a huge plateau.

Consistency, and overall good diet are the key.