How often do you eat cheat foods and what do you eat?

If you don't know what a cheat food is:

Cheat Food - unhealthy food eaten once in a while by a person trying to maintain a healthy diet

I eat once a week either on saturday or sunday or sometimes both (i like to spoil myself if i feel i worked out really hard that week)

I have one cheat meal NOT a single cheat food
for example if i am choosing saturday for my cheat day, my cheat meal would be a burger with fries and most likely some really high calorie and fat chocolate bar  

also i would like to know if some people eat unhealthy for a whole day instead of a meal or a single food

Have fun with this one

oh and for my cheat foods i eat everything not just the ones listed above in case anyone wanted to know

Very rarely. I stick to the correct nutrition really well. My cheat foods tend to involve things that aren't that bad anyway, like I will make a salad with tomatoes, avocado, mozzarella, oregano, balsamic, olive oil and salami, with a couple of crusty rolls.

Although it's definitely not part of my 360 cal, 30g pro meal plan, it's hardly a heart attack in the bowl either.
Probably once every couple of months I'll do something like that, but I'll still eat 5-6 meals during that cheat day.

I've found that by making cheat meals from intrinsically decent food I feel much less guilty and much less dirty!

Like before I would be craving a bath tub full of fried chicken and fries but now if I want something like that, I will roast a chicken with roast potatoes and use olive oil. It's still delicious, but without leaving you feeling polluted or like you've fallen off the wagon. Or I would make a burger at home from lean minced beef, use decent bread, fry some potatos in olive oil. Again, it's definitely a cheat, but it's nothing as nasty as the burger you buy outside and still tastes good with all the extra ingredients like ketchup, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.

This is where bodybuilding is as much an art as a science, you really have to know yourself well.  Cheat too often and you will get fat, dont cheat enough and you might end up doing unhealthy binges and lose any progress you have struggled to achieve.  How often to have cheat meals is also dependent on where you are in reaching your goals.  Somebody whose weight and bodyfat percentage has been stable for years can have more cheat meals because they have a track record of keeping their bodyfat percentage in check. For someone who has a lot of bodyfat to remove you need to be more strict.  For someone like this, a whole bad-food-day is too much.  In one day you can negate an entire week of eating well.  I would suggest keeping it to one specified day a week (like Saturday).  If you dont use it, you lose it!  I would also keep it to one meal and dont go hog wild, just enough so you dont feel deprived.  If one meal isnt enough, maybe add one meal on another day.  I also suggest making your cheat-food meal either a breakfast or a lunch but not dinner.  The reason is this gives you time to burn off the excess calories rather than going to bed with it sloshing around in your stomach.  If you can do your daily cardio after your cheat meal, not before.

hope that helps

S

hey scooby that was a really helpful response for me, thanks!

What is this cream of ice and McDonalds you speak of?

One meal a week for me, typically friday night... pizza and beer!

I'm a pretty big cycler (I'm going to be doing a race from philly to AC at the end of the month!!!). I really only cheat on days when I cycle LONG distances (45 miles and up). Usually me and one or two of my buddies can easily finish off an entire Sicilian pizza with room for some ice cream. Other than that, I strictly monitor my daily calorie intake and only "cheat" (that is eat foods that I usually don't) when I'm in a situation completely out of my control (i.e., on vacation, at a friends for dinner, at some family gathering, etc).

I used to do entire cheat weekends, mostly because I would commute every weekend to a friend's house, where unhealthy foods were readily available. I was working on an independent film: which added stress to me as the camera man, and stress + access to unhealthy foods = an ugly situation. I gradually started to bring vegetables, but I still would cheat when not eating them. Fortunately I still maintained my weight, so my daily eating routine during the week was at least working.

But the same problem comes up when I go to visit my parents. Readily available unhealthy foods - good thing it only happens on weekends.

What works during the week is preparing my own foods to take to work, and never having an excess. I'll slip a banana here and there but that's a more healthy cheat.