“Cheat day”. “This is my cheat meal”. I have heard these words more times in the last five years than the previous 20 years combined. I heard it a few times just today.

It’s great to see a lot more people focused on health and watching what they are eating. We should not be regularaly consuming oily or sugary food. After a few months of too much oil and sugar, your body does not react well and will usually show signs of not being at it’s best.

There is no much information surrounding cheat meals, though. A quick google search will return more than 2 million results. I remember reading about cheat meals the first time in The 4-Hour Body . One takeaway from the first few chapters that I did end up reading was to avoid “white” food—sugar, pasta, rice, cheese etc. I wanted to try and combine it with the advice of having that one day where you get to satisfy all your cravings of the week. It did work wonders. I dropped a few kilos in a month.

It was tough to sustain that diet, though. If you have an active social life, having strict control over your diet is difficult. Sticking to only one cheat meal a week became very difficult after the first month of having almost no social life.

Cheat day for me so far has been a failed experiment. On/off days, though, have been working well. On certain days I eat without thinking much while eating the bare minimum the next day or another day in the week while I am homebound.