It’s enough to make a person channel their inner teenager and rebel but instead of going out and getting your nose pierced or dying your hair, you flip your diet the bird and eat all the junk food you can find and then some.

So here’s a way to make sticking to you diet infinitely easier.

Take a day off!

You don’t work 7 days a week, do you? No, you get weekends (or at least a day) off, right?

And you don’t exercise 7 days a week either. So why should you be expected to diet 7 days a week? You shouldn’t.

Remember, even God rested on the 7th day when he was creating Earth.

Just like a bridge that doesn’t have any “give” to it, it won’t hold up over time and disaster will happen. The same thing happens to most of us while dieting. We stick to a super healthy and strict diet plan to get the weight off, but at some point we just can’t take it anymore and go off the deep end.

So by building in some “give” to a diet in the form of a day off makes it much easier to stick to the diet the other 6 days of the week.

That way when you’re at a restaurant and the waiter walks by with a delicious looking plate of pasta drenched in Alfredo sauce that’s practically calling your name, you don’t have to sigh and think you can’t ever have it while simultaneously stabbing the lettuce leaves in your salad with a vengeance. Instead you can smile, know that on your day off you can have it if you want, and know that you can stick to your diet for the other 6 days of the week. It’s instant resolve and willpower!

This is how it works:

One day a week you get a break from dieting. That means no weighing or measuring of food.

It means no counting calories, counting carbs, counting fat grams, counting points or counting how many Twinkie wrappers are in the trash can!

It means no writing down what you ate. Your food journal gets decommissioned one day a week.

You eat what you want when you want the entire day.

Want fried chicken? Eat it!

Want an icy cold bottle of sugary Coca-Cola? Drink it!

Drooling over that chocolate cupcake in the bakery window? Buy it and enjoy every last morsel

Then the next day get back on your diet and follow it for 6 days using that upcoming 7th day off as a source of your willpower and resolve because you can do anything for 6 days, right?

One word of caution though. NEVER EVER weight yourself the day after your day off. Wait at least 2 days of being back on your diet to step back on the scale.

My son used this technique with a lot of success. He has followed some very strict vegan, raw food, and juice fasting diets to lose weight, cleanse his body, and feel healthier. While they were tough for him to follow he was able to do it because he never did them more than 6 days in a row. He knew what he was doing wasn’t permanent. There was light (aka – any food he wanted) waiting at the end of the tunnel!

By trying this technique myself I’m finding another bonus to it – it’s keeping my metabolism from tanking which means I’m not having those super frustrating plateaus that make a lot of us give up.

So go ahead, stick to your diet plan by not following it, one day a week!

Sometimes I’m discouraged and frustrated by my lack of weight loss progress 12 times a day!

When those lows hit I do my best to remember great advice I received from my former Weight Watchers leader. She always told me, “Look for the reason why you’re discouraged so you can deal with it and change it.”

I’ve been discouraged for the past 8 months by my lack of progress so I guess it’s time for me to be brave enough to think about why I’m not doing what I need to do to continue to lose weight.

I know I can’t stop fighting the fight or I’ll be right back where I was 3 years ago when I weighed 286 pounds and was unable to walk up a flight of steps without huffing and puffing like an exhausted elephant.

So here’s to actually making use of that great advice to, “look for the reason why I’m discouraged so I can deal with it and change it.”