Having a “cheat” day can be super helpful-for example, it’s much easier to cook at home Monday through Friday when you know you’ll go out for a great dinner Saturday. That being said, some people find themselves binging on the weekends and killing all the momentum they made throughout the week.

If that sounds like you, try giving yourself a set number of servings you can have over the course of a week. Let’s say your goal is to replace sweets with fruit. Find the average number of sweet servings you have in a week-for this example we’ll say it’s 10 per week. Then determine your ideal serving goal-we’ll go with 3 servings of sweets per week. In this example, if a friend comes into town Tuesday night, I can have 1-2 of my servings that night, and I’m still on plan. If I was on the “cheat” program, this Tuesday night example puts me in a bind.

There’s no one size fits all approach to how you keep balance in your diet. Experiment with both approaches and use the one that works best for you-you might even switch back and forth between the two depending on your social calendar!