“Cheat Day” is a dieter’s term that refers to the one meal or day a week when all restrictions are lifted and it’s okay to indulge in forbidden food items. Search for #cheatday on Instagram, and you’ll discover a menagerie of the greasiest, most sugar-laden plates imaginable, a decadent picture parade of all that is “bad food.”

The logic that underlies a cheat day is that if we can contain temptation to a designated time, we’re less likely to give up on calorie restrictions altogether. It’s a reward for a week’s worth of dietary willpower.

Is this a sane strategy for self-motivation, or does it fuel and perpetuate a self-destructive relationship with food?

The problem with cheat days begins with the name itself: “cheat day.” Already we’re assigning moral value to foodstuff, neatly arranging choices into the “good foods” we’re allowed to eat all week and the “bad foods” we must save for our isolated free-for-all.

Morality and dieting are constantly conflated in our culture, especially by women. Years ago I worked as a server in an upscale restaurant, and I watched table after table of women titter over their desserts, “We’re being so bad right now!” “OMG, I’m gonna be bad and get the cheesecake.”

This kind of attitude makes our sense of control and moral goodness contingent on the perceived value of our food choices—when we’re eating healthy, we’re good, and when we’re eating something unhealthy, we’re bad. Feelings of guilt and shame naturally follow, and they poison our relationship with food.

Upon deciding a food is bad, that particular food becomes charged with a special energy, an emotional glow that exaggerates our desire for it. Once we decide that something is forbidden, we become more vulnerable to obsession over it, and if we enforce cheat day ethics, we become enslaved by our calendars and our desires. We hold on tight for three days until we’re “allowed” to have the forbidden food. We think we’ve won a moral victory if we can wait, but in the process we’ve participated in a self-destructive cycle of craving, denial and overindulgence. That’s no way to eat, and it’s certainly no way to live.

Insulin and blood sugar levels have been shown to spike on dieters’ cheat days, leaving them with more cravings, food hangovers and false evidence that they can’t trust themselves. Cheat days split our holistic selves into warring factions. They’re a clear message to the mind, body and spirit that our desires are suspect, that we can’t trust our hunger or ourselves. We treat the appetite with resentment and resistance, the body as a wild beast that must be corralled and beaten into submission. We reinforce the idea that without strict rules and guidelines, our inner glutton would surely sabotage every meal. We resolve to keep to an ascetic diet until our next cheat day, and the terrible cycle begins again.

Does this mean we should eat whatever we want whenever we want it? Not exactly. But it does mean that if we want a life where our whole selves are nurtured, we should do away with insane feast and famine dieting and eat in moderation. This is not a new idea, and even typing it makes me roll my eyes a little. But moderation is truly the way.

It means that if we want french fries, we have a reasonable serving of them, even if we’re trying to lose weight. We don’t let french fries rent an apartment in our minds, nor do we wait until the day when we can gorge on a pound of them. We simply have them when the craving comes up, and we slow down to smell and chew and savor them. We remain active and stick to a safe workout regime. Moderation is a practice, and it takes time to get the hang of it. However, this approach and only this approach will heal our relationship to fries, to all food and to our own bodies.

 

 

Author: Mandy Learo

Editor: Evan Yerburgh

Image: Flickr