Personal Trainer, Nov/Dec 05

Winter Weight Maintenance
Strategies to avoid packing on pounds during holiday season.

By Stephen Hanks

    Despite our best intentions, it’s almost impossible not to gain weight and fall out of shape during the last two months of the year. It isn’t just the pigging-out at family get-togethers celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa before the New Year’s blowout that causes most of us to gain unwanted weight, but also the seemingly endless holiday parties connected to our work or social groups. The combined effect of all this short-term, high-caloric food and alcohol consumption forces us to make frantic diet and fitness resolutions on December 31.
    In 2000, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that
people at a healthy weight put on just under a pound between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Those considered overweight or obese add an average of five—count ‘em, five!—pounds during the winter holidays. How healthy is that? Think about a decade or so of holiday decadence and do the math.
    But November-December binging is a reality for almost everybody, so let’s not even talk about the idea of losing weight at the end of the year’s fourth quarter. What if the goal was merely to avoid succumbing to the temptation of holiday frivolity and maintain our current weight? Is that possible? We’ll bet you two turkey legs with skin and a dozen Christmas cookies that it is.

Motivational Training
    Regardless of how much you eat, exercise is the key to a holiday season diet and fitness strategy. How on earth, you’re wondering, does someone maintain any kind of regular
fitness program when parties are keeping you away from the training room? Good question. It isn’t easy so you need a motivational tactic. If the idea of wasting the money you spent on a gym membership doesn’t do the job, perhaps scheduling sessions with a personal trainer would. In fact, personal training sessions make a great holiday gift, so start dropping blatant hints to family members and friends that you’d appreciate such a present before turkey day.
    During this time of year we barely have any free time, let alone time for regular workouts. That’s not a reason, however, to blow off training completely. Even a half hour a few times a week—alternating between interval and strength training—would be enough to offset the extra poundage that comes from partying. On Monday, Wednesday and Saturday you could work on the cardio apparatuses (treadmill, bicycle, etc.), while Thursday and Sunday could be devoted to working with free weights and machines. Many gyms now have programs where you can use multiple machines to work most of the muscle groups in a half hour or less. And don’t forget that winter activities, such as skiing and ice-skating, are great calorie killers. Even shoveling snow can help you stay in shape, as long as you don’t throw out your back and wind up pinned to the couch for a week.

Dealing With Food
    The nutritional advice part of holiday season weight maintenance falls under the heading of “no-brainers.” They’re tips you’ve likely heard before (including in ET) regarding year-round diet planning, but they are worth repeating for the short-term strategy. In no particular order, they are:
• Portion control: A couple of years ago, a health care and research center in Akron, Ohio completed a two-year study of the diet and exercise habits followed by 600 middle-aged and overweight people. They determined that portion control had a stronger relationship to weight loss and maintenance than eating healthier foods, reducing fat and increasing exercise. So when you sit down to all those holiday meals, just reduce what you’d normally eat by about 50% and you’re halfway home to keeping the pounds down.
• Plate-only eating: Hand in hand with portion control should be eating just what you put on your plate—and make it a small plate at that. You have to resist the temptation for gratuitous grazing at all those buffets and cocktail parties you’ll be attending.
• Eat breakfast: You’ve heard it before and it’s true. Eating that morning meal (and not a heaping helping of bacon, eggs and pancakes) helps keep blood sugar and insulin stable. That, in turn, prevents ravenous hunger from consuming you later during the day, so that you’ll consume fewer calories at holiday evening dinners (in theory, at any rate).
• No skipping meals: If you don’t want your body to feel like a rollercoaster ride of energy rises and dips, you should eat at regular intervals. Without food, blood sugar levels drop and the body responds by producing more insulin. That’s what will make you feel more hungry.
• More veggies: During the holiday season we’re more likely to have seven to nine servings a day of high-calorie comfort food than what we should really be having in that quantity—vegetables and fruits. They are not only low in calories and high in nutrients but they are also filled with fiber, which helps you feel full.
• Increase protein: Studies show that protein makes us feel more satiated than carbs or fat because it takes more energy for the body to digest protein. It also helps preserve muscle, and muscle burns more calories than fat.
    So start planning now and with a little discipline between mid-November and January 1, you may not be so desperate to go the gym on January 2.

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