Do a cheat day is helpful after 7 days strict diet plan ?

Yes i agree. Diets are too hard!! Portion control and responsible eating is the best thing

I kind of tend to eat that way in general. I have been at Maintenance weight for 15 years. I have my calories set at my maintenance amount, and I walk daily. One or two days a week I have a high calorie treat or a bigger regular dinner.

The thing you want to watch is calories. How you work them out during a week is up to you, but like the people posting above are saying, if you're restricting too much during the week that cheat day may wipe out your entire week's worth of lower calorie eating. Just track the numbers over TIME and figure out how to make it work.

Binge/restrict cycles are hard to break. If you're someone who likes to eat 4000 or 6000 calories a day, that's a whole different problem and that will take a different strategy.

If you find it hard to stick with your calorie goal and food choices, cheat days are not the solution. The solution is choosing a slower rate of loss and making food choices you actually enjoy instead of banning your favorite foods.

I eat foods I like all the time, I am just mindful of quantities and proportions of those foods. Some days a higher calorie intake, some days lower, as long as the average is within my goal it's all good.

Think of calorie counting like finances. You have say 10,500 (7x 1500 ) calories to spend a week. Stay inside that goal and at the end of the week you’ll be fine, inside your deficit and losing weight.

Now like with your job, your budget can vary. Stay over? Get paid more. Those are you exercise calories, extra calories you can use to spend on treats or higher calorie foods. For example if you have a big expense coming up, maybe you would do some overtime. If you have a big night out coming up, cut back a little bit or be a little more active to make your budget work to still be in a deficit.

It’s easy to get in a binge/restrict cycle so be kind to yourself and listen to your body. If you are feeling ravenous and ready to eat the house, fatigued and have a headache, maybe you’re doing a too aggressive calorie cut. You have to keep on this forever so do something maintainable.

You can absolutely do this! Just keep paying attention to what you eat and how your body is responding.

I personally don't engage in cheat days. I allow myself to eat pretty much anything in moderation. I went to a birthday party for my daughter's friend today. I had pizza and cake and felt no guilt and didn't feel like I was cheating. I was able to work it into my calories by having a lighter dinner. I think cheat days just undo all the progress you made if you treat it as a free for all.

I love junk food, too. That’s how I found myself obese.

Sorry this turned out to be a very long -and probably boring- post.

The benefits of losing the weight far “outweigh” (ha!) the joy of eating junk food. I won’t lie. It took me a while to get to the point I didn’t miss it and crave it.

I do build some room in my calorie budget for “junk”, otherwise I’d go nuts.

I am two or three years into maintenance. Tastes change, and I’m always adjusting what I eat.

Sunday mornings we always take the dog for a ride in the convertible to go get a giant Apple fritter doughnut. It’s a big event for the dog. Lately, even the fritter has been too much. This morning I found myself choosing a smaller doughnut, and had some cottage cheese with a crumbled protein bar to go with it.

Obese me would have gone buck wild and had the apple fritter plus several other gourmet doughnuts, too. Maintenance Me looked madly forward to that single fritter, until all of a sudden, something that big is just gross.


I guess what I’m saying is, be honest and put everything in your diary. Can you make changes? Substitutions? A little here and a little is what made us overweight, but shaving a little here and a little there can also help us lose weight.

It sounds silly, but I missed ice cream. Early on, I accidentally figured out how to make a nutritious smoothie that tasted just like a Frosty, a chocolate ice cream shake from a popular fast food restaurant. I ate my smoothie twice a day. Creating a nutritious, low cal substitute that tasted like a treat was life changing.

I realized I was drinking a gallon of milk every three days. I gave up drinking milk for eating cottage cheese and yogurt. More satisfying to eat than drink. (If only I could figure out how to make a low cal paneer!!!)

I love chocolate passionately. I can’t keep milk chocolate in the house. I get the darkest, bitterest chocolate I can find. Usually, an ounce or two is plenty to satisfy me. Much less risky than milk chocolate.

I keep few treats in the house, and those are based on calories. Meringues, lower calorie ginger and lemon thin cookies, low calorie crackers and sardine spread.

“Treats” nowadays are fruit with cottage cheese, jerkies, protein bars, low calorie yogurt mousse, air popped popcorn, and homemade low cal ice creams. Because I trained my tastes to change-slowly- I’d rather have these than junk food.

Last night we experimented making shawarma. I cut and changed ingredients wherever I could to cut calories. It wasn’t perfect, but it was still pretty darn good. My husband, who is also on MFP, was staggered that he had a giant filling meal with ten ounces of chicken for well under 500 calories.

I learned I can brown meats and vegetables perfectly well in a super hot skillet. When baking, applesauce is a low cal substitute for oil. We don’t miss the oil. I got a new bottle of oil yesterday because my old bottle is going rancid from lack of use.

Recognize your weaknesses, and be willing to experiment. Yes, it may feel like you’re giving up tastes and “mouth feel” (foods cooked in oil”, for example) but on the other hand, your taste buds, beaten down by years of junk food will revive. Foods will start tasting so much better.

Strawberrries, cherries and oranges are revelations now. For years I could barely taste them and never bothered to eat them as a result. Now, they are so sweet, it’s almost painful to eat them.

And finally, your goal of ten pounds a month is very very ambitious unless you are well into obese range, as I was, and you mind your calories strictly, and work out a lot. I actually increased my calories quite a bit during this period and kept losing weight. But I stuck like glue to the calorie budget.

It’s possible, but the rate of loss will slow about month four or five. It will feel like you were galloping along and then hit a brick wall and everything stopped. It didn’t. It just slows. The lower your weight, the harder it is to lose more.

Be patient and be kind to yourself.

A friend once told me that there is no such thing as a "cheat" day. Cheating is breaking the rules to give yourself an advantage or a benefit. You dont benefit from breaking rules on your diet. It just sets you back. They are "sabotage" days. Not cheat days.