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It doesn't seem like spending a day eating delicious food could be anything but luxurious. But diet culture is a powerful villain.
In a typical "cheat day" video, a vlogger documents a day where they (allegedly) break from their diet and eat whatever they want. Usually, this means fast food, pastries, burgers and fries -- foods often connoted as "bad."
In February, YouTuber Sophia Kleo posted a 13-minute-long cheat day video called "in n out, pizza, & donuts." In the video, she eats all of those things (plus fruit snacks, bean dip, and more), taking enormous bites of glistening pastries and tall burgers, then holding them up to the camera.
Though it's not labeled as such, Kleo's cheat day video is similar to mukbang, the Korean viral video format where vloggers eat large amounts of decadent food on camera. (Kleo also posts video that are explicitly labeled mukbang.) The video is as much about displaying the food -- the jelly oozing from a doughnut, the sauce cloaking the animal-style In-N-Out fries -- as it is about Kleo eating it. As in mukbang, the sounds of Kleo eating are also amplified: She takes loud bites, chews vigorously, and smacks her lips. The effect is: indulgence. Decadence. Fun.
But it's a cheat day video, which implies the existence of a diet. And many of the comments have to do with calorie counting. Kleo doesn't include a calorie tracker at the bottom of her video (quite a few cheat day videos do), but one commenter did the work of adding up the estimated caloric value of everything Kleo ate.
Kleo's cheat day videos focus on the food she eats during an entire day, while authentic mukbang focuses on what the star eats in one sitting. But other (American) videos attempt to fuse the mukbang and cheat day genres completely. For example, Trisha Paytas -- perhaps the most famous American mukbang star -- has included the phrase "cheat day mukbang" in several of her video titles. She often includes the meal's calorie count, too, moving the video firmly into the language of dieting. No, she's not showing herself dieting -- but the video implies that, on another day -- a normal day -- she'd be counting calories in a different way.
The video implies that, on another day, she'd be counting calories.
Reporter Cara Rose DeFabio speaks to this very American take on mukbang in a 2016 article for Splinter. In contrast to Korean mukbang, she explains, which is understood to be popular largely for its focus on social eating (once live commenters get involved, a mukbang stream can turn into a real party), Western mukbang -- just like Kleo's cheat day video -- frequently elicits comments from people using the videos for dieting purposes. The same is often true of mukbang-adjacent content like cheat day videos.
"This helps me not cheat for some reason," wrote one commenter on a cheat day video by scientist and fitness influencer Stephanie Buttermore. (Buttermore has since stopped making cheat day content, a decision she outlined in a video last month.) "It's like I mentally ate it by watching this video."
The videos become, then, less about the warmth and excess of a decadent, memorable meal and more about a desperate respite from the norm: restriction. Unsurprisingly, many cheat day videos come from fitness vloggers who otherwise post diet and exercise content, pushing the cheat day -- already a dubious concept in the ultra-dubious world of dieting -- even further away from anything resembling joy.
The fact that cheat day videos are presented as something incredibly fun makes matters worse, underscoring that a cheat day is simply a break from something else -- the restrictive diet -- to which the vlogger must return if she wants to embody those ever-elusive beauty ideals.
"While some fans do appear to crave the company of eating with someone else, if only virtually, others seem to be using the videos as a way to change their own relationships to food," DeFabio writes. "Some use the videos to stimulate their appetites, and others as a dieting tool. The hosts, after all, are effectively binge-eating on camera, and it appears to have drawn in people with eating issues who are looking for a place to talk about them."
Diet culture is pernicious. It ruins lives. It sells toxic products, and it makes people feel bad for existing in the body they have. And cheat day videos, for all their fun, risk being part of that perniciousness. At the very least, the concept of a "cheat" could use a rebranding. If you're eating intuitively -- which, by many accounts, is a good idea -- you won't even have any hard-and-fast rules to cheat on.
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