Can a “Cheat Day” Help You Attain Weight Loss Goals?

More and more diet plans and weight loss programs are calling for the infamous “one day cheat” allowance, which allows the dieter to have one single day where they can cheat and eat whatever they want. Many people choose to make this day a Saturday or Sunday, simply because that may have been their worst eating day to begin with.

I know that the Body for Life plan calls for a cheat day, and I’ve been hearing more and more of the diet plans that are out there allowing this as well, most notably in my recent diet book history being the Fat Smash Diet, where you eat a lot of whole grains and a little bit of protein during the week with lots of veggies and fiber, and then you get your one cheat day on the weekend.

I remember how much my then boyfriend, now husband, and I used to look forward to those once a week luxuries. We reveled in it actually. The funny thing is, you’d think we would stuff ourselves to the gills and sabotage our weight loss goals, but we really didn’t over do it, we just made sure we got to eat what we really felt like eating.

So say if I had a nasty craving for pizza with the works, or maybe for a big greasy cheeseburger and french fries or onion rings, I would make sure I had that on my one cheat day, and that made me feel like I could always go for one week – heck, what’s one week – before I got to eat what my heart’s desire was for that previous week. When you think about it that way, dieting feels less like deprivation and more like something that mere mortals are not only perfectly capable of, but that in the end, we actually may enjoy our bad food even more.

As long as you don’t totally go overboard and consume five thousand calories or something like that, and you make sure you don’t let the bad eating spill over into the next day, or that nex and the next and so on and so forth, then you are perfectly ok to do one cheat day a week when following a diet. I think it actually helps you stick to the diet more readily, and it definitely makes life a little more interesting on the weekends.

The really cool part is that you almost forget how good really tasty, fattening or sugar foods taste, and when you do finally taste them again, it’s like a flavor explosion in your mouth, it’s like tasting food for the first time again, and that gives you a whole new appreciation for good food.