I just don't think it's realistic to spend the next 50 years never eating a piece of birthday cake or a slice of pizza at a party, so I "cheat" about three times per month. When I do it, I do a cheat meal, not a whole day. In the past month, two of my cheats have been pizza and one has been dinner at a steakhouse. I also try to stay as close to my calorie limit as possible even when I am eating a cheat meal. The last time I had pizza, I only went over by 66 calories. I went over by 167 at the steakhouse, but I didn't do so intentionally. I looked up nutrition info on FatSecret, made my selections based on that, and then found out when I got home that it was off by 200 calories. I actually would have been under my limit if I had accurate info when I was ordering.

My WOE has been a modified intermittent fasting and I believe it is something I can maintain for life. "Cheat days" are basically built into the WOE. I track my weekly calorie intake, rather than daily. I am trying to lose weight right now, so 1200 cal x 7 days = 8400 calories per week. Some days I have 500 calories, some days 1500, some days I have 2000, etc. My low cal days are packed with high protein low fat choices. I have found this method is working for me. When I hit my goal, I will up my low cal days and see how it goes.

I must acknowledge that I am lucky in that I don't generally crave snack foods like chips or sugary things. My weakness is wine and good cheese though...an expensive habit that my waist and my wallet are happy to see less of.

I don't do a cheat day. If I'm craving something, I eat it, and just incorporate it into my day. That being said, I don't do it all the time. It's also about portion control. Sometimes, I'm fine with two bites of ice cream. I don't need the whole pint. Or, a happy meal instead of a huge adult meal. That seems to work for me....

I don't believe in cheat days. Once a month I allow myself to have one cookie from Timmies, a slice of cake and some ice cream on my birthday and Christmas Day is a free for all. Anything else I incorporate it into my calories. For instance, if I want fries I will make some from a real potato and I avoid eating anything that will make me feel ill after eating it (like potato chips or too many sugary foods) and I don't eat anything nutritionally void.

I don't do "cheat days" the way I always thought of them - where you go off your diet, whatever that diet may be, and then get back on the next day. I never could just get back on the wagon the next day, and cheat days turned into week, and I failed. A lot of times.

Since this is the calorie counting section, and calorie counting is how I succeeded, I just focus on that. I do think that eating at maintenance occasionally is a good idea, and that can serve as a "cheat day" in the sense that you can fit in party food or a restaurant meal that you probably cannot fit in to your 1400 calories (or whatever.) This serves as a safeguard on days that you screw up, too - I target 1400, my maintenance is 1800, so if I eat 4 extra cookies one day for 300 extra calories over my planned meals, I'm still only at 1700. I can now call it a maintenance day and know with absolute certainty that I haven't undone any progress. Just paused for a single day.

It is all about the mental games, and finding a pattern that we can repeat without going off track. No substitute for trying stuff out for ourselves, since while our bodies are more similar than people think, our minds and our baggage around food surely isn't!

I really don't like using terms like "cheat", they foster an unhealthy attitude towards eating and food, and in particular encourage a binge/starve cycle. When people say, "Every now and then I have a day where I eat at maintenance calories," that sounds like a much healthier mindset.

I dieted for ten months five years ago and peaceably lost 1lb/week without difficulty. I don't think I had issues with this, partly because my then-partner almost never cooked with me so I was doing it all independently, and I wasn't getting enough of a social life for it to make a difference to my eating habits.

I'm now at a slightly different place in my life, and in a different (and much happier) relationship. My health is worse so that I'm no longer able to cook and rarely able to help, and my partner's health means that he's not always up for cooking either. So we get a takeaway every week or so, and it makes a big difference to being able to manage our lives and in particular mental health. We also have friends round most weekends for board games, and traditionally I make a batch of biscuits (cookies) for that.

I've only restarted dieting a few days ago, and I am pondering how to incorporate these things. The biscuits are easy, weigh everything and figure out the calories per biscuit, and limit myself sensibly - which I need to do anyway, as I can't handle much sugar. The takeaway is usually rice noodles with veg and tofu from a local Chinese place, and I tend to go for just soy sauce on top, so I don't think it's likely to be more than a hundred calories or so more than one of our usual meals, though I will try to figure it out. We get pizza less often, and I get a smaller one and don't eat all of it anyway. It's vegan, which will reduce calories a lot, although they now know my favourite veg so well that even if I ask for different ones, the oilier foods like the aubergine and the olives faithfully appear! Probably more calories for that one, but hey, it's about once a month, I don't think it's going to be a big deal. I'll log it all faithfully and see what happens.

Unfortunately in my life every week is a cheat week . I have my boyfriend I eat out with 2 times a week at least, cooks me dinner another 2 nights a week, my mom who cooks me fabulous dinners monday night, and my rampant social life where people have birthday parties like every 2 weeks it seems. It's a good life, but I don't have a lot of control.

I just can't do cheat days on top of that because realistically I'm lucky if I can lose weight at all with my current lifestyle!

If I spent a lot more time at home and made my own meals, you bet I'd have a cheat meal every once in a while.