Getting Ready to Celebrate the Holidays

How to avoid gaining extra pounds during the Holiday Season.

Christmas season is the time for gathering and celebrations.

Lots of celebration means lots of food and the dreaded weight gain.

Oh, what to do? What to do? I can’t be fasting when everybody is eating!

Here is a strategy. Start fasting now. It does not have to be 16 hours right away. It can be only for 12 hours. The important thing is to get started, get used to it, and make it longer.

In your workplace, you can be sure people will bring in more food. You can just plain refuse, but that may not be taken well. So start fasting the night before. If the snacks begin at 11 am, and your last meal was 7 pm the night before, then you get your 16 hours fast!

Let us say there will be a Christmas party on the 20th. You can start fasting several days before.

Remember that the opposite of fast is to eat. Just like day and night. Sun and rain. Man and woman. One does not exist alone but coexist and works well with the other.

What about the buffet?
The strategy is to avoid the first few dishes as your line goes to the buffet table. Caterers usually put the high carbohydrate foods in the beginning. The good stuff is at the end of the line. If you don’t play this buffet well, there won’t be enough room on your plate. I hope you like greens, so load your plate with them. Use vinaigrette as a dressing. The size of the protein should be about the size of your palm.

You may feel full after the main course, but when the dessert comes, there is always room for more. That is because cholecystokinin and peptide-yy, the satiety hormones, which puts the break on the appetite, does not work on sweets. If so, then share that dessert with your sweetheart or just get a fraction of the serving.

In between days of festivities, you can fast again. Keep yourself insulin sensitive and to get ready for the next feasting.

If you think you can work out the extra calories, you consumed. The answer is no. You cannot compensate for a bad diet with exercise. A slice of Mrs. Fields’ Blueberry cake has 270 calories. A cup of rice has 205 calories. To burn 205 calories, a 60 kg person has to run for 33 minutes covering 3.54 kilometers. It is not unusual to gain 3,000-4,000 calories in a buffet.

Let us say you totally broke down and pigged out. That’s still ok. It’s the holidays anyway. But you have to make up for it after the season and then do some more fasting. Don’t be disheartened. What is important is that you know how to fast. That fasting is sustainable, and it can be adopted as a lifestyle.

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