Thoughts on Cheat Days?

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  • ITUSGirl51
    ITUSGirl51 Posts: 192 Member
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    I don’t have cheat days, but I’ve taken vacation breaks of a week or longer or I will plan to go over on calories on special occasion meals. I try to stay in a deficit for weight loss until the next special occasion or vacation.
  • CarvedTones
    CarvedTones Posts: 2,340 Member
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    tyrindor wrote: »
    Absolutely not. All they do is make me have regret which hurts my motivation. Having a pizza sounds amazing, until I eat it, and then realize it wasn't enjoyable enough to justify the calories.

    If you eat healthy long enough, those "bad foods" will actually start tasting bad. 2 slices of pizza and I get a headache from the grease, when I use to be able to down an entire pizza with ease.

    I am just into maintenance and I find some of the things I could eat again I don't choose to.

    I didn't cheat on the way down. Some days I indulged and carried forward some of my food (logged on the next day) so that the total was right. Sometimes I carried forward for three days before I made it fit. In other words, I might eat 2000 calories one day, log 1500 that day and push forward 500. The next day I might eat 1300, log 1500 and push 300 into the next day. After a few days of that, nothing was being pushed forward and I was logging and eating 1500 each day.
  • artnom
    artnom Posts: 39 Member
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    I'm not a fan of cheat days - having used this in the past, I found they were just days when I would eat everything I wanted (with no limits) and feel poorly the next day. For me they undid a lot of the good.

    Now, there are days when I just want pizza or a burger and I'll have that but try and incorporate them as part of that day's plan. I try and eat healthy but I also try not to restrict my diet so much that I find it hard to follow it on a daily basis.
  • netitheyeti
    netitheyeti Posts: 539 Member
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    depends on what you define a cheat day as.. I never do a "i'll eat whatever and as much as I want without logging" because I could easily wipe out a week's worth of work and it's just not worth it... I might take advantage of an occasional "still logging/monitoring my portions but letting myself eat around maintenance and enjoy food that doesn't usually fit into my meals" day though
  • TerranandKaylynsmommy
    TerranandKaylynsmommy Posts: 321 Member
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    I don't do cheat days. I do have a cheat meal every now and then but no more than once a week
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,897 Member
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    PowerliftingMom wrote: »
    I never do. If I want to indulge in something, I fit it into my macros. Around the holidays I discovered the best ice cream ever lol. It was Haagen Dazs Peppermint Bark. Thank God it's a seasonal flavor! Anyway, I bought a pint and ate just 2 spoonfuls whenever I was craving it. It literally took me 3 weeks to finish it.

    A pint of Haagen Dazs Peppermint Bark would have lasted about 30 minutes for me. I'm going to try to forget about this before next winter :lol:
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,897 Member
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    tyrindor wrote: »
    Absolutely not. All they do is make me have regret which hurts my motivation. Having a pizza sounds amazing, until I eat it, and then realize it wasn't enjoyable enough to justify the calories.

    If you eat healthy long enough, those "bad foods" will actually start tasting bad. 2 slices of pizza and I get a headache from the grease, when I use to be able to down an entire pizza with ease.

    I'm all for eating healthy, but if two slices of pizza gave me headaches, I'd wonder if something was wrong with me or the pizza.

    http://www.md-health.com/Headaches-After-Eating.html
  • Asheea
    Asheea Posts: 211 Member
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    I have a free meal once a week. Yesterday, my husband had the day off and the kiddos wanted Chick-Fil-A so that's what we had. I enjoyed it very much, had my treat, and was back on it by dinner. I'm not one of the people that quits craving the 'bad for you' food so I treat myself once a week to stay on track.
  • lucerorojo
    lucerorojo Posts: 790 Member
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    netitheyeti wrote: »
    depends on what you define a cheat day as.. I never do a "i'll eat whatever and as much as I want without logging" because I could easily wipe out a week's worth of work and it's just not worth it... I might take advantage of an occasional "still logging/monitoring my portions but letting myself eat around maintenance and enjoy food that doesn't usually fit into my meals" day though

    I do this every week. I log my cheat day, and usually it's an extra 500 calories, although sometimes more if I go out to eat with a friend. I find that the cheat day helps me more psychologically than anything. Just a day when I don't have to worry about going over.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
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    Asheea wrote: »
    I have a free meal once a week. Yesterday, my husband had the day off and the kiddos wanted Chick-Fil-A so that's what we had. I enjoyed it very much, had my treat, and was back on it by dinner. I'm not one of the people that quits craving the 'bad for you' food so I treat myself once a week to stay on track.


    Or you could quit thinking that any food is “bad for you” and recognize that anything can be part of an overall balanced diet in the right context and dosage...
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
    edited March 2018
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    I don't cheat, but I do plan indulgences for myself. Usually I don't go over maintenance calories, but recently I had friends come in from out of town and we went to a very expensive restaurant. I knew I didn't want to restrict myself so I ran a long run and banked about a thousand calories from the days before. Then I had a 12 ounce specially aged steak, roasted beet and goat cheese salad, asparagus in some sort of cream sauce, and lobster tails drenched in butter, adding up to about two thousand calories for one meal. No dessert because it would have put my blood sugar over. Totally worth the extra effort banking calories and I actually lost weight that week. But for ordinary stuff like fried chicken? Probably not worth it to me.

    Being diabetic and checking my blood sugar readings frequently keeps me in check most of the time, since I can't indulge in sweet stuff even if I wanted to due to being limited to 30 - 45g carbs per meal if I want to keep my numbers good.
  • dsboohead
    dsboohead Posts: 1,900 Member
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    My account gives me 1400 a day so no need to cheat....anyways don't own a charge card for cheating!
  • MelanieCN77
    MelanieCN77 Posts: 4,047 Member
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    I'm a big fat liar and had a massive free for all yesterday. Oh well, onwards and upwards. Downwards. Whatev.
  • Urbancowbarn
    Urbancowbarn Posts: 97 Member
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    DomesticKat wrote: »
    A cheat day for me consists of eating in a way that won't make me gain weight, but won't necessarily make me lose weight either. In others words, maintenance. I still count, but if I have days where I eat more, I just make sure it's not enough to matter in the long run. I just don't eat with wild abandon and without counting.

    This^^^^
  • Danp
    Danp Posts: 1,561 Member
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    I don't call them 'cheat' days because I don't feel like I'm cheating. The big difference with my weight loss this time, and I know it's cliche, is that I've started seeing it as a complete lifestyle change and not something temporary that I'm doing. This means that the decisions I make have to be ones that I'm happy to live with for the rest of my life.

    So, I do have 'relaxed' days on the weekend some times. These are days where my calorie deficit is not as large as I normally have and, on a very very rare occasion, I might even eat at or slightly over maintenance. This for me is way more sustainable than punishing myself with a regime I can't stick to forever.

    So for this lifestyle change to be permanent means that all the "bad" stuff that I'm not willing to give up forever has to be part of my plan and if it's a part of my plan then having them isn't cheating.
  • seltzermint555
    seltzermint555 Posts: 10,742 Member
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    I have never considered it a "cheat day" but I suppose Saturdays are sort of that way for me. Me and my husband cook our meals at home through the work week, even when it would be easy to grab dinner out sometimes, we make a real effort not to. So on Saturdays, we almost always go out to lunch and often, dinner too...sometimes a big lunch out, coffee & a donut or an ice cream break halfway through the afternoon and then a small dinner. Those would be my "cheat days" I suppose.

    Fortunately, during most of the year we get a LOT of extra exercise on Saturday. Bike rides, hiking, and/or lots and lots of walking...so it balances out somewhat (not totally, but that's okay). The winter months are rough because we don't get as much activity in "naturally" and don't go to a gym...there are only so many times we can walk laps at the mall. It's a challenge curbing the Saturday indulgences when the weather's rough but I make an effort to do that.

    The problem occurs when it slides into both Friday and Sunday. That's when I find the scale way up half the work week and that's a battle that I don't wish to fight. So even when cocktails and sushi on Friday night sounds pretty great, we usually save the dining out for Saturday, get a bento lunch and bottle of craft beer in the evening...then back to normal on Sunday too.

    It's also better on our budget (than when we would sometimes go out Friday, 2-3 meals on Saturday, brunch on Sunday)...extra bonus :smiley:

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