How to Have "Cheat Days" on Your Diet and Still Lose Weight? |

You don’t get to! You don’t even get to!

I suppose if your cheat day consisted of 1 extra helping of a 300 or 400 calorie per serving desert you may still be able to lose weight. But when a diet cheat consists of 2 days of not counting calories at all, and eating whatever you want whenever you want, weight loss is probably not in the cards for you that week.

I did figure out that you can maintain. The following chart shows a sharp gain at the end. Next week you’ll see that my weight settles right back down into the 140s. But, I’m not ready to maintain!

Do you recall the Shape magazine success stories in the last section of each volume? For awhile, years ago, they did some series pieces on a few different women. They would take a woman who wanted to improve her health and fitness and they would follow her for 6 months or so. Then they would provide monthly reports about the woman’s journey in the magazine along with the regular success stories.

I hated that series because the women never seemed to make any real progress. The reports were discouraging and slightly boring to read. It seemed like the participants were each on the same ridiculous roller-coaster of being down (or up) a pound or two each month. You wanted to see powerful, inspiring changes! But, the drastic changes never materialized. In the end they would lose like 12 or 13 pounds in six months or so and looked about the same as when they began the experiment.

The women would be like, “This journey helped me so much and I learned how to eat better and maintain a new healthy lifestyle (blah, blah, blah)!” Then Shape would be like, “This is their last article in this series but, so and so plans to continue on her health journey into the future, etc….” It’s no wonder they stopped printing the segment (at least I haven’t seen it for awhile).

This, and my last 2 reports, remind me of those. But, there is one distinct difference. I’m not going to tell you it’s because I didn’t have time to workout on Wednesday, or I had too many drinks with the girls on Thursday, or a work trip interfered with my diet and/or workout schedule over the weekend.

I’m going to tell you I, straight up, ate too many calories and burned too few calories last week to enable my body to burn stored fat. End of story!

P.S. I still love the regular Success Stories in Shape Magazine!

Here are my stats from last week:
A chart of my weight for July 13th to July 19th. (Starting weight for the week = 145.7 lbs. , Final weight = 155 lbs.)
A chart of my body fat for July 13th to July 19th. (Starting body fat % for the week = 34.4% , Final body fat % = 34.1%)
A chart of my BMI for July 13th to July 19th. (Starting BMI for the week =25.2 , Final BMI = 26.5)
A chart of my overall calories burned, miles traveled, floors climbed, and steps taken for July 13th to July 19th.