How often have you heard a conversation like the following? Thursday:
Person A: “Want to get some ice cream?”
Person B: “No, sorry, I’m on a diet!”
Person A: “Oh okay…”
Saturday:
Person B: “Want to get some ice cream?”
Person A: “I thought you said you were on a diet?” Person B: “Yes, I am, but today is my cheat day.”
I have been that person before. I have tried different diets and some of them allowed or even called for cheat days. One diet I tried did not allow sugar, high carb or dairy products during six days of the week and then once a week I was allowed to eat whatever I want. The fact that I had that one day to go wild with my food choices was supposed to help me stick to my diet better throughout the week. Several issues came up that were definitely not beneficial to my mental health.
Cheat days brought up several issues for me. First of all, the entire week I would be looking forward to that one day where I could eat what I want that I did not fully enjoy the meals I was eating during the week, even though the meals I had were all delicious, filling and satisfying.
Second of all, I sometimes ran into the issue of my friends wanting to get dessert on a day that was not my cheat day. I would then have to tell them I did not want dessert to then indulge in a tub of ice cream the following day at home – just because it was my cheat day. It takes away from enjoying the food with friends, which did not make me feel good about myself at all.
The biggest issue of all in my eyes is that the mentality of cheat day can easily lead to binge eating. Since I was not allowed to eat anything sweet for six days out of seven, once the cheat day came around, I sometimes found myself eating a lot more food than the suggested serving size. That also seems to be counterproductive to losing weight because losing weight is all about having a caloric deficit. Even if I stayed under my calorie limit during the 6 days, I could easily push over my calorie limit for the week.
Lastly, this thinking leads to labeling food as “bad foods” or “good foods”. As I said, I believe in a good balance in my diet. Just because we believe that brown rice is “healthy”, we still should not eat a bag of it. It won’t give us all the nutrients we need and has a lot of calories.
What I want to get across in this article is to be less harsh on yourself. Eating a healthy diet is not easy – especially in college when there are so many things we have to balance in our lives. I now strongly believe in the 80-20 “diet”. 80% of the time, I watch what I eat and make very healthy choices. 20% of the time, I indulge in what I might be craving. It is important to keep it balanced to get all the nutrients and vitamins you need. Food can be such a fun, social, and delicious experience and we should not take away from that by constantly restricting ourselves.