With my favorite meal of the year coming up I have been worried about avoiding the gain through the holidays. I would like for this to be the first year I have LOST weight during the holidays. My previous holidays would involve pigging out from Thanksgiving through New Years. We need to break it down into just that day and that meal and how we will handle it. I found some insight to that on Dr. Mercola’s site and have copied that information for you all below.
Plan Your Holiday Eating List and Check it Twice
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail — this adage applies to many walks of life, but especially to maintaining the proper diet.
In addition to finding the right program, successful weight loss also boils down to good planning; more than any other time of the year, planning is paramount during the holiday season. You need to establish a specific course of action for not only what you intend to eat, but what you will do in those specific holiday situations that often make you feel compelled to eat.
Before heading to that party, for instance, you should plan exactly what you are going to do and say when you are offered food (and drink) that you should not eat. Before heading to the relatives’ for dinner, you must be prepared with polite but firm methods of rejecting Auntie B’s famous triple-fudge pie. Yes, Auntie B and everyone else will say, “Oh, come on, it’s the holidays, just this one time…” But as you know by now, it only takes that one time.
You need to plan what you will eat instead, and in what quantity. In fact, it helps most of my patients to write their plan down on paper and carry it with them, and even refer to it as a reminder (and motivator) during the gathering. The more concrete the plan is to you, after all, the more likely you are to stick to it.
Finally, wherever possible without becoming a Scrooge, plan holiday activities that are not centered on consuming food. There are many old traditions that work well, such as caroling or ice-skating, and certainly many more activities that could become your new traditions.
Be Like a Reindeer and Graze
Eat right, but eat more often. Instead of three big meals per day, you should eat smaller portions of something healthy about two hours, ideally consuming about six mini-meals per day. This gives your body a better ability to digest and will leave you feeling satisfied, not hungry, throughout the entire day.
One of the worse blunders that people commit during the holidays is to “save their appetite” for the big meal they know is waiting at a forthcoming gathering. Even if you haven’t yet adopted the grazing advice above, eat a healthy mini-meal before you head to the office gala or family festivities. You can appreciate small portions of Mom’s famous stuffing just as much as the massive portions, and you’ll especially appreciate what the scale tells you a few hours, days and weeks later.
In This Season of Hope, Stay Positive!
The Boy Scout’s motto — “Be Prepared” — is highly applicable when it comes to maintaining a diet during the holidays. Beyond planning what you will eat, and what you will say when offered something you shouldn’t eat, it is important to prepare yourself on a psychological level, especially with all the temptations during the holidays.
For starters, it is important to focus on the desired outcome of your diet when confronted with no-nos like gooey cookies or negative emotions such as “I’m meant to be fat and unhealthy.” Picture yourself thin. Imagine yourself with an intensely higher amount of energy. Envision yourself getting far fewer colds and headaches, and really, fighting major diseases and living longer. These are the very real results of the healthy diet you are trying to maintain, and well worth the effort.
Prepare yourself for temptations, as they can’t all be avoided, by preparing to divert your attention back to the desired outcomes of your diet. Don’t dwell on the things with negative outcomes, no matter how good they might taste on the spot. Don’t cater to the feelings of self-deprivation, and don’t allow yourself to think, “I’ll never be thin anyway,” just to give yourself an excuse to eat that pumpkin pie.
Instead, devote your energy to focusing on how wonderful you will feel for having made it past the pie, past the entire dinner, and past the entire holidays with little or no cave-ins. Focus on the positives, and positive things will result. And if you buckle once and violate your plan for avoiding the holiday weight gain trap, don’t use that as an excuse to keep failing. Re-focus on your outcomes and get back on the plan.
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