It’s that time of year again!
Rum-spiked egg nog, reruns of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and meals of the most ginormous proportions.
I’ve always loved this time of the season. Growing up in northern Minnesota, the winters were long, cold, and dark. But the holidays always cycled around like a beacon of light each year. I honestly think that all the big winter celebrations that occur across most cultures were the only way that we humans were able to stick it out through this part of the year with our sanity intact.
Maybe it’s hard for us to appreciate now, but before electric lights and heaters, this would be a truly rough time of the year, and having a big party is just what people would have needed to get through it.
From the Festival of the Wild Women in Ancient Greece to the Alban Arthan of the Druids all the way through Christianity’s Christmas, people have a strong history of banding together and celebrating during the dark season.
Food, Guilt, and the Holidays
One of my favorite parts of the season is, of course, the epic meals. Thanksgiving in particular is inextricably tied to eating, since it has strong ties to the celebration of the end of harvest season in pastoral cultures.
Roast turkey with sage stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Homemade cranberry sauce. Pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream. Oh. My. God!
Unfortunately, Thanksgiving (as well as the other winter holidays) has kinda turned into a guilty pleasure in American society. Around this time each year we get bombarded by articles such as the following:
- 10 Ways to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain
- 8 Steps to Surviving Holiday Weight Gain
- 9 Tricks to Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain
Zzzzzz…. Huh, what?
Expect to see more and more stuff like this churned out over the next couple months. And expect them all to make the same assumption: it’s all about willpower, you need to adhere to these hard and fast rules if you’re to make it through to spring without ending up looking like a latter-day Marlon Brando!
Um, no. As I’ve said before, willpower is a limited resource, and it’s a losing game to fight your body. You need to change things at a more fundamental level here, gentlemen.
Conventional wisdom states that most people gain between 5 and 10 pounds during the holidays. But a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) suggests otherwise.
According to them, the average person gains a mere ONE POUND between Thanksgiving and New Years. The bad news in all of this is that these people didn’t lose the weight after the holidays.
While nothing staggering, it is the kind of weight gain that most people would like to avoid. Over the long term, for example, you could expect to gain 50 pounds over 50 years. D’oh!
Holiday Weight Gain–A Realistic Perspective
But don’t worry. The sky ain’t falling, Chicken Little.
With a more strategic (and realistic) approach, you’ll make it through the holiday season without gaining significant weight, and lose what you do gain throughout the next year, and more importantly actually, y’know, ENJOY the celebrations!
First and foremost, pleaseohpleaseohplease do yourself and your family a favor and don’t be so neurotic about food during the holidays.
I know this is hard to take if you are struggling to take weight off and keep it off, but it is simply more important to spend time with loved ones and take part in the celebration of the season than it is to be a rude pain-in-the-ass and break your mother’s heart by refusing to eat anything she makes because they have too many carbs.
And really, is it really all that unnatural to gain a little weight during the winter?
Most animals that have to weather the chilly months put on an extra layer of adipose tissue to keep themselves warm, which they then shed in the spring. The laziness and enjoyment of comfort food you feel during the winter is quite possibly a universal evolved method that animals are able to survive the winter.
The issue we should be concerned with isn’t how to avoid holiday weight gain, but rather how to minimize holiday weight gain and lose that unwanted weight during the next year.
5 Practical Tips (That Won’t Drive You Insane)
1. Minimize feasting. How many socially-obligated meals do you really have during the winter? Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe one at your workplace? Let’s be generous and double that and assume that you have six big feasts you need to attend.
Well, you should be cutting loose at least once per week anyway, so you’re still well under your limit when you look at those “unavoidable” meals. Don’t feel bad about the celebrations you have to attend, but just don’t make it an everyday thing if you’re worried about it.
2. Keep up your everyday healthy eating routine. For the other 97% of the meals you eat stick with the healthy eating template: lots of fresh meat and veggies, not a lot of processed junk. It works during the spring, summer, and fall, and it will work during the winter as well.
3. Find something fun and active to do. Driving to and from work in the dark sucks. I know how tempting it is to just crash on the couch and watch reruns of The Office. (I’m speaking from experience, folks!)
Strategic exercise is crucial for building muscle, but I think it’s more important to find something FUN to do that is physically demanding, particularly during the dark months when it takes more willpower to get yourself to exercise. Maybe it’s skiing. Maybe it’s snowshoeing. Hell, maybe it’s even getting together with friends and playing laser tag once a week. (No judging here!)
Personally, I’m looking forward to getting back on the surfboard this winter. It’s been a hectic year and the weather still permits, so why not? 🙂
4. Sleep more. Embrace your inner grizzly bear and do some hibernating. While you don’t want to dig a hole and not come out for a few months, now’s a great time to catch up on your sleep. With the sun setting so early, your body is primed to stock up on its z’s now. The scientific research strongly suggests that sleep deprivation leads to weight gain. So in the evenings spend less time in front of screens, take a cold shower, keep the lights dim, and get some reading in before bed… which should be as early as possible.
5. Seriously, enjoy your time with others! Taking some time to slow down and have some good times with friends and family has immense psychological perks that you can’t measure with a scale or body fat calipers. The benefits you gain from this are far greater than that which you lose from eating potatoes, or gravy, or whatever else you are trying to avoid.
I’m spending Thanksgiving in Minneapolis and Christmas in L.A. And I plan on eating no fewer than 3500 Calories each time. What are the rest of you doing?
I'm a science geek, food lover, and wannabe surfer.
{ 6 comments }
I just can’t fully grasp the willpower argument. Any fundamental change to one’s diet, whether it’s calorie counting, portion control, Paleo, low carb, vegan, etc., is going to take willpower. Whenever I hear about someone taking so readily to a Paleo or vegan diet, I think to myself, “Wow! S/he must not have had that much of an issue to begin with! That would be a really hard change for me.”
For people who have trouble controlling their intake, any significant downward shift in food intake is going to be a dramatic lifestyle change. Resisting temptation is resisting temptation. Eating plenty of whole foods or protein isn’t going to take away theose temptations, at least not for people with a serious problem. (Dare I say “food addiction?” Perhaps not, but it can feel that way sometimes!)
Going from pastries, pies, cakes, pizzas, and candy bars to only healthy foods is not going to be an easy journey for a lot of people, regardless of how nourishing and nutritious the new foods are. They may help somewhat, probably more than unsatisfying 100 calorie packs or Snackwell’s or light ice cream or whatever. But it’s still going to be really difficult and require a lot of willpower.
Great perspective on eating, or overeating, during the holidays. Starting from Thanksgiving, I pretty much have a holiday party every week through New Years. Like you said, each of those days will serve as my weekly cheat day and I’ll thoroughly enjoy it!
A nice article, def bring it all into perspective.
It’s good not to be obsessive and just kind of balance it more on a weekly basis rather than a daily one.
Jordan:
Here’s a good article going over the issues surrounding our limited amount of willpower. Perhaps I gloss over it, but ANY change requires an investment of willpower. The only way to preserve it completely is to be reactive rather than proactive about everything… but that’s the reason that our collective health and fitness has suffered so much in the first place.
The question then becomes how to minimize the amount of willpower used while maximizing the results you get out of it. Any sort of artificial calorie deficit will demand willpower in perpetuity. Your body is wired to seek an energy balance based on an innumerable amount of factors, and it will fight every effort against this forever.
If, on the other hand, you can set up your environment so that you eliminate negative temptations while having a glut of healthy (and tasty) food on hand to eat ad libitum, it’ll be far easier to avoid all that crappy (and also tasty) food.
For example, I am a human trash can. I will eat any food you put in front of me. I literally cannot control myself. But that was obviously not gonna work for me. So I started filling up my fridge at home and at work with good food and I was able to get into much better shape without having to worry about “cutting myself off.”
It all comes down to the local maximum and area under the curve of a hypothetical willpower-vs-energy plot. Learning how to cook and taking some time every week to prepare food so that you’re always ready when hunger strikes IS going to be a big willpower investment. But it’s temporary. And it’ll result in an overall smaller amount of willpower in the long term. Depriving yourself, as I mentioned, is instead like pushing a car up a steep gradient indefinitely. Sure, it’s easier at first, but there’s no way most people can keep it up forever.
Ultimately, we’re being told to make short-term solutions to serve long-term problems. Of course, everyone is different, but no one can torture themselves forever.
@Dave:
For sure. It’s time to celebrate!
An artificial calorie deficit versus… a natural calorie deficit? It’s still a calorie deficit. We agree that depriving yourself is not going to be sustainable in the long run, I guess we just have different ideas about what “deprivation” means. Switching to a whole foods diet is going to feel like deprivation for a lot of people.
I’m sure there are many people with a mild problem who can make a smooth, swift transition to whole foods. But for people with more severe eating issues, I think it’s just another massive change that will be very hard to stick to. Success stories are just that: success stories. They’re the ones that made it. Perhaps it’s really the person that succeeds, not the approach.
I try to avoid eating sugary processed foods, but I can barely go a week- and sometimes just a couple of days- before I’m tempted by yet another devilish treat. haha. And once I give in, it snowballs into the next few days. I have plenty of healthy food at hand, but I’ll simply eat that *and* the sugary junk! I have room for both, and so do many others.
I agree that setting up an environment that minimizes temptation would be the best approach. Absolutely! Of course, that can be rather difficult if you live with other people, as I do. I bring in my fair share of crappy food into the house, but my willpower in the store is much better than my willpower in the house. If I lived alone, weight loss would be so much easier. But I don’t, and this house is almost never free of tempting high-calorie goodies.
So I have to figure out how to not eat those foods. I haven’t figured it out yet, not over the long haul, anyway.
Darrin,
I agree if you worry too much about calories during the holidays, you’ll just make yourself miserable. A couple of tips I use to minimize holiday weight gain are more frequent intermittent fasting periods and timing intense workouts before large scheduled feasts or holiday parties.
Alykhan
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