Cheat Days: the undoing

Like you, I love to set lofty goals and power through them. Unfortunately, I have been taught to incentivise every goal; get a cheat day when dieting, buy a purse after a project etc.

We are taught to cuddle ourselves like children who cannot make decisions simply because they are good decisions.

Imagine how much different you would be if you made the tough calls.

I watched people calculate every calorie they consumed for ten or twenty days only to use their one or two cheat days to consume more calories than they used to before the diet began.

I have been guilty of resuming the gym after falling off for longer than a year, only to take a one-day break and watch that spiral into one week and multiple unplanned off days.

Commercials say new habits are formed in twenty-one days whereas they begin by the twenty-first day.

Typically, a habit gets formed between twenty-one to ninety days. This means you need between forty-five to sixty-six days to make a dent in your present habit.

Challenges like the 75 Hard have proven over and over again that many of us are not masters of consistency as we often pose.

The Cheat Day Fallacy

The University of Hong Kong’s Philosophy Department summarizes ad populum (appeal to popularity) as the truth of a claim being established only based on its popularity and familiarity. This is the fallacy committed by many commercials. Surely you have heard of commercials implying that we should buy a certain product because it has made it to the top of a sales rank, or because the brand is the city’s “favourite”.

Does this not feel similar to the cheat day trend? Have you ever researched how many people successfully hit their goals and require less motivation after a cheat day? Have you ever done something for 21 Days and checked if it became muscle memory like the adverts claim?

This means you have held yourself to standards you did not research merely because it appeals to popularity.

Please continue if cheat days at the beginning of new routines work for you. If it does not, here are three reasons why it does not:

Routines

You can achieve results faster when you create patterns around routine activities — eating, thinking, writing, sleeping, working…etc.

These patterns require your mind to work in a particular direction, lighting up the same set of neurons every time you repeat an activity (hear the same thing), thereby creating a neural pathway.

When you change a pattern physically, you are also attempting to change the way your mind processes that routine — it needs to light up different neurons from the old one and create a new neural pathway.

The problem with discontinuing a new routine is that your mind processes it as a distraction and returns to the old route it has already created.

This is why multiplication tables from primary two are more memorable than mathematics from SS3; you had cause to use your multiplication table more frequently, making that memory sharper and more recollective.

Rewards

Every habit you reward will repeat itself. Pavlov’s dog experiment for classical conditioning proves this.

Many times, we think cheat day is the reward therefore our mind focuses on the routine like it is the punishment required before arriving at cheat day and enjoyment. Therefore, we endure the routine and enjoy the sabotage.

In the experiment cited above, a dog hears a bell and then receives food. After a while, the mere bell begins to make the dog salivate and prance around even when there is no food. Dogs are still being conditioned this way but so are humans — awards, rewards, and applause all work together to condition us.

When sabotaging yourself is the reward, you automatically make it the goal unconsciously because your mind does not care about your goal but your reward. You are always chasing pleasure not pain.

Restart

When you make a mistake and fall off your new routine, every good therapist tells you to get back up and continue because it is just a relapse. However, when you continue to fall off, the relapse becomes the routine.

Because cheat days make relapses easier, you are likely to have multiple relapses if you have multiple cheat days which may cause your enthusiasm to dip and have you questioning the reason behind your goal and your capacity to follow through.

If you do begin to doubt and lose in your mind, you are most likely to quit and that means you have to restart again (if you ever want to meet that goal).

When you systematically fail, it is significantly memorable and creates another obstacle you have to overcome that was previously none existent.

No More Cheat Days

If you want success in record time, then you need to make up your mind about three things

Failure

You will absolutely fail as you go on this new journey but that is not a cheat day but a failure. Because failure is embarrassing, we attempt to lie to ourselves and sweet-talk the situation but the problem with that approach is that we do not fix the root cause.

Fairness

When you set this goal, were you fair to your present self? If you are starting your workout for the first time in three years, it will be unfair to your present self, to begin with 100 sumo squats or fifty pressups. In all honesty, that is just setting you up to be inconsistent and fail. Except, self-sabotage is the aim.

Faith

You need to believe that your present self can pay the price for your future self regardless of the pain in the present instead of fighting for the future but trying to satisfy your past. You have to choose short-term pain and long-term pleasure. You do not believe you can make it that is why you keep reaching for pleasure right now.