A diet can easily become the crucial start to living an overall healthier life. The downside to this is that it can be hard for any one of us to find a diet that actually works. Between the fads and constant “nutrition updates” from the mass media, you can easily get derailed on a particular diet in favor of thing there is a better option or that the diet you’ve chosen isn’t ideal. You have likely dealt with this problem time and time again. Your best option will always be to talk to your doctor about what kind of dietary changes you need to make to meet your health goals. They’ll know your overall health and any special needs that you might have. In general, these plans focus on slow dietary changes over time for most people so they have a better chance of sticking. There is another trick to learning to stick to your diet though. Diet cheat days are actually good for you.

Don’t Overdo It
This doesn’t mean that a diet cheat day is a time you save up to just devour all the foods you’ve sworn off of to lose weight. This kind of eating is bad for you and will in turn cause harm to your health. A diet cheat day is best viewed as that day every now and then where you go out with friends and do order that dish you like so much. You might even opt to indulge further in the day by having a rich dessert to make the day end on a note. Diet cheat days are not about overeating. They’re about enjoying yourself. Any diet, irrespective of how you came to it, is just a little difficult to stick to all the time and you do deserve to take a break from it. This will not only benefit your health, but it will actually make it easier for you to stick to your diet in the larger picture. After all, isn’t the worst part of a diet looking at the things you love and never being able to have them?

Dessert to De-Stress
One of the helpful aspects to a diet with an occasional diet cheat day is that it more closely resembles how our distant ancestors lived. Your metabolism still thinks you’re supposed to be living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and this is part of what leads to weight issues in the modern era. Bodies simply don’t know how to cope with an abundance. There would be the occasional boon where people were lucky in finding food, but in general, there is  relatively basic diet based on the area. You are well beyond this stage of existence, but this is one area where it is beneficial to remember where you came from… sort of anyway. Remembering to take that diet cheat day will help deal with stress that has built up from maintaining the diet and other sources. It will feel like a reward that you get to indulge in rather than being an everyday occurrence.

Enjoy Your Life, Enjoy Your Diet
Diet should never be entirely about constant vigilance. A poor diet isn’t going to sneak up on you if you take a moment or few to enjoy a rare treat. In fact, mental fatigue from constantly disciplining yourself is one of the biggest potential causes for a diet to fail. We make them miserable affairs most of the time. As previously stated, a diet cheat day is both more what your body is expecting and helps you to destress. It also encourages you to enjoy and value both areas of your life. Yes, the diet is hard, but on a diet cheat day, you can enjoy your progress while celebrating. In turn, a diet cheat day gives you a reason to enjoy the diet itself as you’d otherwise feel like you’re just setting yourself up for failure as there would be no break to the diet. Most of us don’t have superhuman willpower to never take a break. So take that break. Enjoy it and then go back to enjoying your diet.

Dietary changes can be difficult if we make them. Drastic, dramatic changes are often the worst to try and make stick. The ideal diet involves a gradual change of habits in addition to incorporating diet cheat days to ensure you have the will to keep going and sticking to the diet. You should work on changing the opinion of diet cheat days. After all, it really is more a diet support day.