Posts Tagged by Healthy Living

If you don’t struggle with holiday weight gain, you’re in the minority—and possibly secretly hated by many. That’s a problem I’m not qualified to address. For the rest of us, it’s a safe guess to say that the past month has been a daily struggle of choosing which of the many delicacies presented to us should be indulged in, and which we should pass up.
Unfortunately, this week is possibly the hardest of all: many of those Christmas goodies are still sitting around taunting us; we still have New Year’s festivities to look forward to; and our grand resolutions of healthy eating won’t begin for another week. Why not live it up? We’ve got an entire week before our self-enforced deprivation begins!
Well, for one thing, the more weight we pile on, the harder it will be to take it off. And face it, we’ve got enough of a challenge as it is. Following are some tips to keep you from tipping the scale even more this week.

1. Remember that aging food doesn’t lose calories the way it loses nutrients and flavor. It would be nice if that stale old sweet roll or dried out brownie sitting on the counter was lacking in calories as much as it is in taste, but it doesn’t work that way. Ask yourself before picking up that once-delicious goody if it’s still worth the full impact of calories. Chances are it will be easier to walk away.

2. Select special days for splurging. We’ve been conditioned to believe that feeling deprived will ruin our holidays. And to a large measure that could be true. But you don’t have to splurge non-stop in order to feel Christmas cheer. Select a few days—in this case possibly just New Year’s Eve—as your holiday. Treat the rest of the days like any other, with the exception of maybe one goodie per day.

3. Cut back on regular foods in order to indulge on the luscious ones. In a perfect world, we’d just eat a diet of healthy foods. But living in the real world, we know that’s not going to happen, especially during the holidays. So if you know you’re going to eat a piece of cheese cake with dinner, trade it for half a sandwich at lunch, or half your entrée at dinner. Sure, nutrition-wise we’re better off with a full healthy sandwich and no cheesecake, but in the end your body doesn’t care where the calories come from. So cut back overall if you know you’re doing to indulge in low-nutrient high-fat foods.

4. Watch the grazing. Do you find it hard to resist that plate of fudge, the box or chocolate or candy dish? Join the club. It’s those extra little bites that can send a regular diet over the edge. Pick a snack that you consider a treat, but will keep your mouth filled with some healthy: pistachio nuts, cashews, a vegetable platter with a cheese ball or dip are healthy diversions from the goodies surrounding us.

5. Finally, don’t plan a big-grand once-in-a-lifetime diet for the New Year.The suspense will only make it easier to come up with excuses to indulge this week. And it has been proven time and again that the most successful diets are common sense changes of healthy eating combined with exercise that you can stick with for the long-term—even next year’s holiday season.

Enjoy the season without weight gain or dieting.