Managing Our Diet and Weight Wisely during this Festive Season

Christmas is associated with Festivity, Fun, Food and Giving. Somebody will be giving you a chocolate or cake and most often you could be attending a party or two. Besides this you may be in a last minute rush to lose some weight before New Year’s Eve. Your mind and body are torn between feasting and fasting and you hardly get to relax and enjoy yourself. Here are some tips and suggestions on how to manage the next few days and parties before the New Year.

1. The first tip is to keep walking. Try to squeeze in a 25-30 minutes’ walk even if you are very busy shopping and partying. If you sleep in late, try to exercise in the afternoon or evening even though you missed your morning walk. If you are a regular at a gym or aerobics class and just can’t get there instead of missing exercise that day just go for a walk close to home for 25 minutes. This will help you to feel fresh, energetic and more in control when you face the food.

2. The second point is to understand that you can’t compensate any of the extra food you have eaten by skipping meals or extra exercise. Whenever you overeat and skip the next meal, be sure you will over eat again in the near future and the pattern just goes on and on. Similarly if you exercise more you will feel more hungry and you will overeat again. Just keep telling yourself there is no compensation and truly and scientifically there isn’t. E.g., any snack or sweet we eat is about 150-200 calories per piece and we usually eat two or more pieces. When we over eat in a meal we easily exceed 500-1000 calories. Then when you skip a meal or eat less in the next meal it may be a reduction of 200-300 calories only. Similarly 20minutes walk equals about 100-120 cals and this walk has to be over and above what you would be normally doing on a regular basis i.e. your normal 30 minutes plus another 20minutes and yet you would not have pulled out that 200 or 500 or more calories. Most fat people keep getting fatter though they are constantly skipping meals and exercising because of this great myth of compensation. Snap out of this now and forever and know that you have to simply pay for all you indulge in, as pounds of fat. Learn to say no or at least learn to eat as little as possible of the wrong stuff when you have to remove or reduce kilograms of fat.

3. Finally use your head and intelligence and don’t say the silly line, “anyway I am wet let me get soaked or I have lost it and started with a bite let me just eat it all and here after I will never touch it again.” The truth is, for the rest of our lives the goodies and celebration will go on. Year after year the same Christmas cakes and cookies will come round so just control yourself.

If you can say no, not at all this time, or if you must eat make it as small a portion as possible and then continue with your regular meals and exercise. Try not to eat all the goodies but choose the item you like the most and indulge only in one or two of your favourites rather than put everything in your mouth and pile up the calorie intake.

We feel happiest when we are in control, than when we lose it. So though it seems a battle at first, when the day is done we will have a much Happier Christmas if we look back and say I controlled myself rather than if we say we have overeaten and feel fat and hopeless about ourselves.