Is It Ever OK To Cheat On My Diet?

This is a question I get quite often from my weight loss clients. Not only is it OK to splurge now and again, I actually insist on it!

There are lots of reasons why it is perfectly fine to go off your diet a few times each week:

1) You don’t need to be perfect on your diet to attain your weight loss and health improvement goals. If you are good 90% of the time, you will do awesome. If you eat 21 meals a week, being good 90% of the time leaves 2 meals a week to have some fun.

2) There are times in your life where eating junk food is just fun and appropriate. When I am at a Jets or Islanders game, I am not eating a can of black beans with nuts and a piece of fruit. It is just not going to happen.

3) It is not realistic to be perfect on your diet, so why set yourself up for failure? A big part of my weight loss program is strictly limiting refined carbohydrates like bread, white rice, pasta and desserts. If I told a client that they could never, ever eat any of these foods again, even the most motivated of them would last a few weeks or at most a few months. However, knowing you can have these foods a few times a week makes it much easier to stay on the program long term, which is necessary if you want to hit your goals. At the end of the day, being able to go off your diet twice a week significantly improves long-term adherence.

4) Having the ability to go off your diet gives you options when you are not in control of your food choices. For example, being invited to a wedding or a dinner party can be a big problem if you are trying to be tight with your diet. You don’t really know what you are going to be served. Using one of your splurge meals at the event will allow you to eat whatever is there and not worry about going off your plan.

5) It may even help you to lose weight to overeat a bit twice a week. While I have seen no hard research data on this at all, I feel that overeating a few times a week may relax your body’s natural defense mechanism to a chronic decrease in calories.

I do have just a couple of rules for my clients when it comes to splurging:

1) These are splurge meals, not splurge days. In other words, these are not 10 hour affairs, just 1 meal.

2) No back to back splurges. Keeping a stable blood sugar is the key to long-term calorie reduction. Splurging two days in a row can really throw off your blood sugar and kick start hunger and cravings. I have my clients have a splurge meal midweek on Wednesday and another on Saturday.

3) I have my clients avoid sugar even on splurge meals. It is just too addictive for most people who are trying to lose weight. However, sugar free desserts are permitted on splurge meals for those who have a sweet tooth.