Cheat Days

Right, so. I ate refined sugar this weekend. But I don't really know what to call it. I wouldn't say that I "fell off the wagon" because it was sort of a planned event.

It was a pretty exciting weekend for us. My parents watched Eleanor from Saturday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, so Keith and I went out for a leisurely dinner on Saturday evening, full of adult conversation and even occasional silence. Then we came home, watched a movie, and slept in on Sunday morning.

Sunday afternoon, we picked up Eleanor from my parents and then went to my friend's house for her daughter's first birthday party. When I stopped eating refined sugar, I knew about our plans for this weekend. So I had already struck the bargain with myself, "If you can make it a whole week without eating sugar, then you can have cake and pop at the party."

So that's what I did. I had decided it beforehand, and had also decided that I wasn't going to let the "cheat day" get too out of hand. I ate well all day Saturday, until dinner. At dinner, I didn't even drink gallons of Coke, but just had one beer instead. (This may not sound like restraint to you, but trust me, it is!) At the party, I had one 12 oz can of Coke and shared one piece of cake plus ice cream with Eleanor. Then, Sunday night, with Keith's help I chopped veggies and cooked chicken breasts and got prepared for another week of clean eating. It all went according to plan.

Except, I just don't know how I feel about it. I can't decide what my policy is on cheat days. I mean, I do believe that I need to accept that, at times, I will be less than perfect in my eating. I need to know that it's okay to slip up once in a while, or else whenever it happens I'll get very frustrated and only make things worse.

But what is "once in a while?" Once a week? Once a month? Do planned cheat days even make sense? Maybe I should just take them when I'm having a really bad day.

FitGeGe: What do you do?

I do feel a certain amount of pressure to have this all figured out RIGHT NOW so that I give myself the optimal opportunity for success, this 237th time of trying to eat healthier. I'm afraid that, if I take the wrong strategy about cheat days, I'll be back here next week to confess that I'm back to drinking pop every day, feeling like crap, and have just completely given up. I do want to try, but at this moment I don't know if I can trust myself to stay away from the sugar.