Cheat Days

It's important to have cheat days.

What's a cheat day? It's a day you decide to eat out or eat what you feel like eating. Eat what you've been craving for weeks. It's the day you can look forward to when you really want a peanut buster parfait from Dairy Queen. You say to yourself "Self, I can have a peanut buster parfait. But not today. My cheat day is next week and that's when I'll have a big, yummy, peanut buster parfait." It helps you mentally maintain your diet for the long term. When you're trying to really make diet a lifestyle instead of just a crash diet to loose weight and loose it now.

I've been learning that cheat days are quite important for your body too. It needs time to adjust and you will find that you will have legitimate cravings of the food your body has been used to for a long time but that you don't eat anymore because of your diet. You need to satisfy them to a certain degree to keep yourself steady on that path of loosing weight instead of your body holding onto it and going into 'survival' mode that you always hear about. You know, when you crash diet to loose a lot of weight but when the diet is over it just comes back and is worse than before because your body is preparing for the next time you'll starve it? Yeah, having cheat days helps you prevent that. Over time, your body will lose the craving for that peanut buster parfait and the food you eat on a regular basis will be quite enough for you. In fact, that parfait might but just a too much sugar once you've weaned your body off of eating those kinds of things regularly.