The holidays can be the hardest time to eat intelligently. The whole family comes together (cue the stress eating) and the food is plentiful (just one more hors d’ouevre!) which makes for a perfect storm of eating and regret.
But you don’t have to spend all Christmas eating until you look like Santa. Just because mom made extra latkes doesn’t mean you have to dreidel, uh, dread the scale the next day. Here are some tips you can use to make sure your New Year’s resolution is: “Lose 10 pounds,” not “Lose 25 pounds; apologize to sister for stabbing her with a fork over the last turkey leg.”
There is a lot of preparation you can do before your holiday partying. First of all, increase your workout schedule this week and sneak in a solid workout a few hours before any big meals. This helps you in several ways: one, a more intense ramp up week will kick start your metabolism in advance of some, um, let’s call it “diet bending.” Intense training can blunt hunger (provided that you don’t reward yourself for your great push-ups with a post-exercise feast) and help you burn fat. Metabolic resistance
training (the fast paced circuit training we do at Refine!) also depletes muscle glycogen (your muscles’ sugar reserves), which means that in the few hours after your workout, any incoming carbs are more likely to get used to refill your glycogen stores, rather than getting stored as fat. Simply put, if you empty your muscle’s gas tank it will look to burn stored fat for fuel and will use any incoming energy to refill its tank, rather than padding your behind.
Second, try eating fruits and vegetables throughout the day before digging in to that huge meal. Not only will that help offset the high calorie content of your dinner, but you will feel full faster when it gets down to show time, and that will help you put the fork down and take a deep breath before grabbing another piece of cake. The lines are always shorter by the crudité plate anyway.
Third, if your particular celebration is a potluck, why not bring along a healthy option you’ll enjoy? You don’t have to spend the evening eating tempeh out of Tupperware in your car, but you can fill the majority of your plate with a choice you can be proud of. Who knows – you might even impress Mom with your newfound cooking talents.
Finally, don’t spend the holiday season on the scale. Don’t weigh yourself in between courses, or whip out your calipers. Meals heavy in carbohydrates and sodium will likely lead to some water retention that will distort your scale weight and come off in a few days anyway. You are unlikely to put on a significant amount of fat with a few big meals. Instead, focus your energy on making better small choices, and savoring the splurges you do chose to make. Holiday eating (just like non-holiday eating!) is not all or nothing; it’s a series of small tweaks.
Above all, be smart and try not to get into an eating contest with your uncle again. He always wins anyway.
Instead, focus your energy on making better small choices, and savor your splurges.
