It’s Sunday, the day you’ve been waiting for all week – you wake up and feel your excitement pooling because today is your cheat day. Cue the pancake breakfast, pizza for lunch and whatever you’re craving next for dinner.
Cheat days are an extremely popular way for people to justify sticking to a certain program or way of eating in which they otherwise feel deprived.
There are a couple different schools of thought when it comes to “cheating”. One is the idea that you pick one day of the week as your cheat day and the other is when you have something as your cheat item each day.
When you’re being highly restrictive to the point of deprivation for six days of the week and then deciding to let the floodgates open on that seventh day, you’re setting yourself up for a destructive cycle.
When it comes to refined sugar and processed foods, it takes three days for your system to fully process those ingredients and substrates. That means that your one cheat day will lead into a subsequent three days in which you’re not at your best.
Indulging without limits on any food for an entire day is going to throw you off balance no matter what that food is. So when you decide to do that with foods that are highly refined and loaded with sugar, you’re doing yourself much more detriment.
On the contrary, if you decide to pick a certain item as your cheat item and incorporate that into your daily routine, then you are to a lesser degree keeping yourself slightly off kilter on a consistent basis.
Something we champion at Sweet Freedom is taking foods that would normally be considered a cheat item, and create a highly nourishing, natural version of them that allows you to indulge while also providing your body with valuable nutrients.
For example, if peanut butter cups are your go-to cheat item, then you would love to explore the option of the Sweet Freedom Nut Butter cup.
When you transform your favorite cheat item into something that is highly nourishing yet still decadent, you notice how there is no need to gorge. For example, if you look forward to your Sunday cheat day for a large pancake breakfast at a chain diner, try staying home that morning and recreating the meal with high quality ingredients.
Instead of refined sugar filled pancakes, make some buckwheat pancakes. Instead of topping them with highly processed strawberry jam and canned whipped cream, mash up your own fresh berries and create your own coconut whip.
When you start to do this with the foods that you used to look at as cheat items, you’ll notice that you can have all of the indulgence with a fraction of the amount of food. This is because your body is SMART.
When you feed your body with whole real ingredients, it recognizes that it is being satiated. The contrary is also true. When you eat highly refined, sugar loaded foods devoid of other nutrients, your body calls out for more because you’re not providing adequate nutrients just a large amount of calories.
Here at Sweet Freedom, we don’t focus on the cheat days. We focus on creating and cultivating a life where cheating doesn’t feel like an indulgence, it feels like a deviation and a compromise that actually lessens your quality of life, not enhances it.