I built a piggy bank into my Health Dashboard, except it holds calories instead of coins. Every day I land deeper below my target than planned, the surplus goes into the account. Before this sounds like self-deception: the point is exactly the opposite.
Banning everything is the easy way out
Six months without anything sweet is easier than it sounds. You cut a whole category and never have to decide again. No weighing, no measure, no grey area. That works as long as the diet runs, and collapses the moment it ends, because the whole time you learned nothing except leaving things out.
But I do not want a diet that ends. I have gone from around 126 kg in June to 116.5 kg today, visceral fat down to 5.4, and that is meant to stay down. Staying down means a state where a Spezi and a homemade pizza show up now and then without everything falling apart. That is exactly the thing you have to practice, and I can only practice it by doing it, not by banning it.
How the piggy bank does the math
My maintenance burn sits empirically at 2,619 kcal, my target deficit at 500. Everything I land below that 500 on a given day is surplus and flows into a monthly pot. In August I banked 5,695 kcal over 16 logged days that way, so on average a good 350 kcal more deficit per day than I had planned.
Wishes get unlocked from that pot. A Paulaner Spezi costs 185 kcal, the big salami pizza 1,600. As long as the pot covers them they are free, otherwise the dashboard shows me how many calories are still missing. The treat is neither forbidden nor unlimited, it has a price that I earned beforehand.
Sugar runs on its own account
Calories are not the whole problem. 46 g of sugar from a single Spezi does something to blood glucose that the raw kcal number does not capture. So there is a second, independent limit: 200 g of free sugar per week, tracked separately from the calorie pot. A wish can be covered on calories long ago and still be locked because the week has already spent its sugar budget. Natural sugar from fruit counts separately and does not eat into it.
Why this is not caving in
The comfortable reflex would be to build nothing and just stay hard. The piggy bank is the opposite of giving in: it makes the treat expensive, visible and earned. A bit of snacking is no longer a slip I talk my way out of afterwards, it is a decision with a price tag that I worked out for myself over a few stricter days.
What I am training is not abstinence, it is dosing. The skill I actually need if the weight is to stay down is not saying no for six months. It is keeping the measure for the rest of it.