Tips on what to eat and not to eat. Tips on how not to gain weight through the holidays.
Ho Ho (Gulp)…You don’t have to throw in the towel before the holiday season ever begins. It’s an exciting time of year that can be a mixed journey. For some, it’s a great time for family gatherings, celebrations with friends and parties with colleagues. It can include lots of shopping, and giving or exchanging gifts. For others, it can be a very sad or lonely time. Exciting or sad, either can be emotionally, financially and physically stressful. Along with this comes a lot of eating that often leads to weight gain.
Be it just a pound or two or as much as ten to 12, the problem isn’t just the gain, it’s the fact that it’s seldom lost. Year after year, it can add up and lead to stress, frustration and health challenges that reduce the cheer and joy.
From Thanksgiving, to Hanukkah, St. Lucia Day, Las Posadas, Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, and New Year, to name just a few, the holiday season is synonymous with abundance of rich high calorie foods, lots of high calorie over-eating and over-drinking, as well as celebrations, traditions, customs, and special food dishes only made this time of the year. Mouthwatering turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie, whipped cream, cakes, frosted cookies, candies, eggnog, and more can be challenging, let alone enticing. Even the healthiest eaters can end up with extra helpings. Festivities feature snacks and treats, all while exercise is seldom even thought about, let alone done. You don’t need to overstuff yourself every time that food is near.
Choices
Key to how you will feel, actions you’ll take, and results you’ll achieve are choices you make. Don’t use this time of year as justification to eat everything in sight. Yes, food is everywhere and a full night’s sleep all too rare. Emotions, stress and challenges are high, causing a focus on your health and well-being, let alone your weight, to be blown to the wayside.
By learning to make healthier choices, you can keep off extra pounds and fight off developing health conditions that are only the beginning of more potentially serious conditions to follow.
You have inborn risk factors for health conditions, your genetic heritage. But your genes aren’t 100{b91d9daa4ecb925a4d66f4a18ad6d9aae920791e62411a070901cef80c7f8e58} responsible for your health. They actually have less than a 35{b91d9daa4ecb925a4d66f4a18ad6d9aae920791e62411a070901cef80c7f8e58} influence on your health. Yes, I want to repeat this, your genes impact less than 35{b91d9daa4ecb925a4d66f4a18ad6d9aae920791e62411a070901cef80c7f8e58} of the conditions and diseases you develop over your life. What has a bigger impact, more than 65{b91d9daa4ecb925a4d66f4a18ad6d9aae920791e62411a070901cef80c7f8e58}, is choices your make.
Your genes are impacted by their environment and decisions you make. These choices include:
- Work you do – Is your work risky or safe?
- Where you live – Do you live in the city or in the country?
- Activity level – Do you exercise regularly, or neglect it altogether?
- Life habits – Do you have regular alcohol or tobacco use, or abstain? Fight to get in enough sleep, or regularly get eight hours?
- Eating habits – Do you regularly consume home grown fruits and vegetables, or more often consume processed and fast food meals?
These are all choices that you make, day in and day out, 365 days a year. To take this one step more, four specific factors are linked to most of the sickness, suffering and early death. These modifiable behaviors include:
• Lack of physical exercise/activity
• Poor food choices/nutrition
• Tobacco use
• Excessive alcohol use
Celebration doesn’t have to include gluttonous eating and your discipline isn’t about depriving yourself of the joys of the season.
Weight gain is thought of as typical for the holidays, but it doesn’t have to be one of your traditions. You can decide if eating healthy will be a challenge or easy. Moderation is not deprivation.
To avoid over-eating, you can:
• Use a smaller plate to reduce your consumption, but still enjoy.
• Eat healthy items to fill up before going to a party and devouring unhealthy items, so you can consume a few treats with fewer calories.
• Never skip a meal.
• Avoid lingering around food.
• Pay attention to what triggers your cravings.
• Skip the least healthy choices.
• Savor the bites you take.
Here’s a list bad ingredients to avoid, but I’d be willing to bet that there are dozens more:
• Barley malt syrup
• Corn sweetener
• Corn syrup or corn syrup solids
• Dehydrated cane juice
• Dextrin • Dextrose
• Fruit juice concentrate
• Glucose
• High-fructose corn syrup
• Invert sugar
• Lactose
• Maltodextrin
• Malt syrup
• Maltose
• Maple syrup
• Molasses
Give yourself praise and credit for the healthy choices you make. The holiday season doesn’t have to be a time to lose weight, but it shouldn’t be a time for you to lose your health and to gain weight. By curbing your weight gain during the holidays, it can give you a jump start to your New Year’s resolution for weight loss.