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In Praise of Cheat Days
I’ve been engaged in a long-running battle with my weight. It’s the kind of thing that, when I’m winning and managing to drop the one-half to three pounds a week, I feel victorious and unstoppable and extremely friendly. And when the only thing I’m losing is the battle, I tend to huddle in my bunker and eat comfort foods while avoiding the scale. Because right, that will fix everything.
Back when I was bodybuilding — I did everything but compete, since I come from a long line of women who can weigh 95 pounds at 5-foot-4 and still have a little round belly, its just lives there and never goes away — I would eat as if preparing for a contest. I’d do that several times a year, though I’m no longer sure why. Masochism? Extreme diet? Whatever, it made sense at the time and is the reason I can no longer deal with egg whites. Or chicken. Or oatmeal.
During those years I would devour Muscle & Fitness and Flex from cover to cover (devour meaning to avidly read, not that I was actually eating the magazines, though they’d have been an improvement on naked baked chicken breasts) and in the course of all that eating and reading I came across the concept of diet cheat days. Once a week, said the bodybuilder in the article, whose name I stand no chance of remembering, he took the day to eat anything he wanted. The idea was after a week of hard workouts and strict diet, one day wasn’t going…
