When every day can be a feast day, do you need a treat day?

Treat days are those days when you allow yourself to eat what you like, when you like. So if you want a ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast you can, followed by a muffin for morning tea...or whatever else you want to feed your body. In the days when we had to grow most of our own foods, or catch it and kill it - the feast days were those when the hunt had been successful - there was lots of food to go around, and people sat around the camp fire gorging themselves on their successes. 

In today's modern society - every day can be a feast day - which is probably why most people have more than a little excess baggage they drag around with them every day...ouch.

We no longer have to catch, kill and prepare our foods. We don't cultivate our own gardens so that it produces healthy, nutritious foods. My parents have always grown their own veggies and salad stuff. They also have 4 fruit trees - 3 types of apple and a pear, plus rhubarb and blackcurrants. As a child we could run down the garden and pick a fruit from the tree and eat it...it was so good we often had the neighbouring children climbing the fence in the dead of night to help themselves to my parents and the tree's labour. My parents still have those trees my problem is I now live some 12,000 miles away - a little harder to pick the fresh fruit. 

The hardest we have to work is finding the time to go to the supermarket. Everything labelled and pre-packaged. Grown under glass somewhere or other so that we no longer know what fruit is supposed to be "in season". In fact living and working under artificial light and air half the time we don't know what the weather is doing right now. 

So what am I saying - that we shouldn't "treat" ourselves with our favourite foods when we want to? No I wouldn't be so presumptuous to do that. You have the power to choose the way you want to live your lives. But if you are struggling to lose weight and you have severely cut your calorie intake so that you see a loss on the scale, then sooner or later you are going to lose the willpower to keep going....believe me I've been there - more than once.  

I will talk more about the problem of severe calorie restriction and why it doesn't work in the long run in a later edition (or more than one edition - it's a big subject - excuse the pun). But if you haven't treated yourself in recent times - then please do so - your body will thank you for it. And if you have been stuck on a plateau for a while - and this will be explained in more detail later too - the additional food will kick start your metabolism again. Put simply - restricting your food intake is akin to your body thinking it is "starving" and it doesn't know when the famine will be over. 

Of course this concept of a treat day does not just apply to food and dieting - it applies to everything we do. When was the last time you had a "day off" and did what you wanted? I hadn't had a day off for something like 6 months. My weekends were always taken up with kids, washing and cleaning - I'd forgotten what it was like to spend time outdoors under a tree watching the clouds scudding across the sky. Working in the marketing industry it is vital you fill your days with new experiences - failure to do so means that you have nothing new to fill the creative thought processes. So if you are feeling stuck in more ways than one - sit down and ask yourself - when was the last time you had a treat day....and aim for one treat day (for food - once a week) and a personal day off day - at least once a fortnight. You deserve it.