Part of my healthy lifestyle is making good choices for my diet.  It’s not about dieting, but rather eating right.  Part of my strategy is planning to fail.

Many diet plans including the Abs Diet encourage that one day off.  Call it your treat for the week, your cheat meal, whatever.  It’s the one time you throw caution to the wind and order Kung Pao chicken.

At first I thought that this was a bad strategy.  Part of living the healthy lifestyle is weaning yourself from the bad things like sugar, fat, etc.  I remember reading somewhere that it takes your body six months to stop craving fat.  Having a cheat day flies in the face of this logic.

Since then, I’ve done an about-face.  My reasoning is this.  Your body becomes more efficient at exercise the more you do it.  Stick with the same routine week after week and its impact is not as great.  Your body adapted.  It’s logical to this left-brain driven mind.  So then comes food.

It follows that your body adapts to your diet as well.  That occasional huge meal prevents your body adapting.  Thus that juicy double bacon cheeseburger sends shock waves through your system.  Your metabolism ramps up to deal with this new attack, as it were.

Now this isn’t license to order onion rings every day, but certainly granting yourself the right to be human and planning to fail occasionally can take the stress out of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Photo by FotoosVanRobin