Holiday Challenges

It’s that time of year again! The time where family gets together and Uncle Joe and Aunt Susan, your parents, your spouse’s parents, and a variety of friends have invited you to some sort of Christmas function. There’s just SO much good food and drink!! It can be incredibly hard to get out of the Christmas season in the same state that you entered in.

Good news! There are tactics for maintaining over the holidays!!!
I know that you’ve heard about moderation time and time again, but it really is the bee’s knees. When you grab the biggest plate you can find and just LOAD IT UP, you’ll find yourself, by no small amount, tremendously uncomfortable when that meal is all finished. THEN you STILL grab desert in abundance. Not to mention, you drink beer, wine, punch, or eggnog on top of it all. It’s no wonder the holidays seem to make us all grow outwards.
What would your Christmas look like if you ate a reasonable amount? Would the love that you feel from your family be any less? Would the togetherness that you experience be reduced somehow? No, but you’d probably end up having a little more food leftover when was all said and done!
Maintaining your weight over the holidays requires a game plan. So, lets talk about some good tricks to work at over Christmas!
Eat a small snack before going to dinner. This is usually a good idea when you want to limit how much you eat at the big family dinner. The whole ‘eyes being bigger than your stomach’ scenario doesn’t happen as badly, and you don’t feel completely STARVING when dinner rolls around.
Then, grab the small plate when you dish! Psychologically, we all want a full plate. If our plate isn’t full, we somehow feel unfulfilled. Switch to the small plate and load that sucker up! You’ll get that mental satisfaction and wont have that uncomfortably full stomach for the rest of the night that the big plate would give you. Now, that smaller plate doesn’t mean you go up for seconds immediately and wreck the whole point of using the little guy. That plate is meant to limit your intake of the big heavy foods. So let it do just that! If you need seconds, wait a few hours. Chat, be merry, and THEN grab another small plate full.
With that in mind, we don’t always just have one Christmas dinner to attend. So, to be accountable to yourself, journal what you have at dinner so that the next meal you attend, you can review, compare, and it need be, cut back on a little bit.
Pick a number and stick to it!! Ladies and Gentlemen, we are talking about alcohol here. The holidays are a time for libations, but that is a total KILLER to all of your hard work! A single shot of hard liquor contains, roughly, 90 calories. A glass of wine, depending on the type, contains between 120-170 calories for 5 ounces. A glass of beer can be between 100-130 calories. So, if you are planning on having a few over the season, pick a number and don’t deviate. Save up those drinks for the season! You can drink just don’t overdo it.
Hopefully these little tactics help you during this holiday season!