Hi Autumn,
I plan in a ‘cheat day’ once week. I’ve been doing the BSD Fast 800 for 4 weeks, (although I aim for 1000 cals a day after calculating the book recipes and realising that the calorie counts were a bit ‘light’), and although I’m loving the BSD, (never thought I’d say that about a ‘diet’), I’ve found having a ‘cheat day’ is essential for my sanity.
Essentially, I know I’m only human and so having a ‘cheat day’ once a week helps me through the other days of the week if I start feeling a bit carb ‘crav-ie’.
Inevitably having a cheat day does hit the speed of overall weight loss, and after losing a lot of weight in the first week, I was disappointed when some of that loss went back on after my first cheat day, but I’m in this for the long haul/life, (I have a huge amount of weight to lose), so if it takes me longer to reach my target weight, so be it.
I’d rather it that way than total abstinence causing me to fall off the wagon completely.
The key for me is to make sure the ‘cheat’ food is not still in the house when I’m back on the BSD. If it is, then it’s a disaster!
As others have found, I get fuller, far quicker on my ‘cheat days’ than before I started the BSD and because my brain occasionally checks out of my body where food is concerned, there are the odd occasions when I’ve gone to bed on my cheat days feeling over stuffed and incredibly unwell, which in some ways is a helpful reminder of the bad old days.