The holidays are a time where festive calorie-packed foods start coming out of the woodwork. It is also a time where people tend to overeat and put on a few pounds. Can you avoid gaining weight while still being able to enjoy the delicious holiday food that naturally entails the holiday season? With the right advice, you certainly can. Here are 7 tips that can help you do just that.
1. Avoid tasting every sweet treat you see.
Those cookies and other desserts sure do look good, but you should try and limit yourself to the sweets. Even if you have a natural sweet tooth, it’s not going to do any good if you’re gorging on that, especially after you already ate half the buffet.
While you may certainly be tempted to sample treats you don’t usually get to enjoy the rest of the year, a bit of self-control is still essential during the holidays. Have a few tiny bites and call it quits.
2. When cooking, limit your ‘tasting.’
You might have learned early on to taste the food while you’re cooking it, but if you’re hosting the holiday party this year, you may want to limit the tasting of it. If you get carried away, you could end up devouring thousands of calories before any guests even arrive.
3. Make sure you don’t arrive hungry.
It’s so tempting to avoid eating before going over to a holiday dinner or other festivity, but that’s not going to help you avoid gaining weight. You should eat as you normally would and don’t fall for the temptation of skipping lunch.
Eat with moderation throughout the day and you won’t be continuing to scarf down everything you see.
4. Limit the amount of alcohol you consume.
Please remember, this didn’t say don’t drink any alcohol. It said that you should limit just how much alcohol you drink while at this holiday celebration. Depending on the type of alcohol you consume, it could add a lot of calories to your daily intake, ultimately leading to more weight gain.
Beer is loaded with calories (just like soda), but alcohol also reduces your natural inhibitions, increasing the likelihood that you’re going to simply eat too much and regret it before long.
5. Get involved in conversations.
When you’re distracted by the food, you probably have a tendency to simply eat and eat and eat. You would probably keep on eating if you weren’t distracted, so make sure you get yourself involved in conversations. When you’re talking (hopefully) you won’t be eating at the same time. That’ll help temper your urge to stuff your face continuously.
6. Start walking
Walking before and after you eat can be a great way to burn some calories. Depending on how fast your walk, you may not burn as much as you hope if you’re just casually strolling. Still, any walking is good to help cut back on that holiday weight gain.
Walking is just one of many great tips for a healthier holiday, and these are some others, too.
7. Learn to pace yourself.
The moment you arrive to any holiday celebration and you’re completely hungry, you’ll have a tendency to go overboard right from the start. That means you likely won’t be pacing yourself. By pacing yourself, it will be more conducive to setting the stage for a more reasonable amount of consumption. So how do you pace yourself? Allow yourself a few minutes at the buffet and then move on to another room or seek out that cousin to whom you haven’t talked in years.
After a while you can return, grab a small plate of snacks and then move on to another conversation. As long as you avoid lingering too long at the food, you’ll end up naturally pacing yourself and that’s going to be incredibly valuable at helping you avoid gaining too much weight over the holidays.
Featured photo credit: m01229 via flickr.com
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