Cheat meals?

Dont waste your time. Eat at maintenance or under

I do, and I make sure to make it a single meal, rather than a "cheat day" as it's waaaay to easy to go over calories and totally screw over your weekly deficit. It will effect a little, potential water weight, and if you exercise or if your meal makes you a little lazier.

Cheat meal? Cheat who, or what?

I log everything, including days when I eat over calorie goal, as well as days when I eat way, way over calorie goal. If necessary, I estimate - and err on the high side, if I can't be accurate. Gotta know the impact.

I don't regularly schedule days for eating over goal. Typically, I do it on days when friends are in from out of town, or it's someone's birthday, or something along those lines. I don't do it very often - if it's more than rare/occasional, it will delay my ultimate goal more than I want it delayed. That said, once in a very, very rare while, I eat over goal just because I feel like it, and I haven't done so in a long time.

And I've learned to do the "weight management arithmetic" in my head (roughly) so I can think about whether a particular opportunity for over-goal eating is worth the delay, or not. 3500 calories = roughly one pound. If I have a 0.5 pound/week loss rate, that's a 250 calorie daily deficit. If I eat 1000 over maintenance calories 1 day, I've delayed my goal by 5 days: the day of the over-eat, plus 4 more. Worth it? Depends. If I do it once a week, though, I've delayed my ultimate goal for a really, really long time.

Personally, I'd rather set a more reasonable daily deficit, and learn how to live happily within it, than do some dutiful regularly-scheduled blow-out once a week (and then maybe not even record it so not have a way to evaluate whether it was worth it or not). But that's just me.