How to Avoid Getting Fat During the Holiday Season

By The Fit Advocate, Craig Pepin-Donat, International Fitness Expert and Author of "The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie"

The holiday season is among the experiences in life that almost guarantee to increase calorie consumption and lead you down the pound-packing path. If your goal is to avoid gaining weight needlessly, it is important to be aware of situations where you are more than likely to over indulge and stray from your normal eating habits. These events include vacations, travel, parties, relationship breakups, a job change, colds, moving or just about any situation that takes you out of your normal daily routine or involves stress. Since people are creatures of habit, it only makes sense that creating a routine of healthy eating and moderate exercise will improve your health and help you manage your weight. When this routine is broken, things can spiral out of control very quickly. The holiday season is much longer than you may think, and because it is riddled with food-centered events, we tend to cram calories without thought. This holiday-season calamity makes us fat and leads to the New Years' resolution delusion where we think we can start over on January 2nd.

The season starts in September with Labor Day Weekend when any efforts made to get into better shape for the beach erodes as we celebrate the end of summer by gorging ourselves with food and alcohol. Halloween hits in October when we trick ourselves into thinking we can treat our taste buds with fists full of candy without consequence. Thanksgiving arrives a few weeks later. We become the stuffed turkeys. We gobble "seconds" and "thirds" of heavy meals and follow them with pies and ice cream until we can barely breathe. The Thanksgiving gluttony typically lasts another week as we devour the leftovers. Alcoholic consumption is at an all-time high with office parties and celebrations with family and friends. Everywhere you turn there is another plate of cookies and other delicious temptations that seem to have a homing device for your mid section, butt and thighs.

Once the trend of over eating is set by some of life’s circumstances, many of us fall into the trap of continuing with our increased food consumption and inactive ways and expect no consequences. Unfortunately, there are always consequences to our actions. If you don’t want to set a foundation of increased fat during the holiday season, here are five simple things you can do to fend off the fat.

1. Increase your physical activity. Don’t wait until January to make a resolution to lose weight. Increase your physical activity before or during the holiday season so that you are burning more calories and fat as your caloric consumption increases. For most people, self-control isn’t enough. You need to have a plan in place to ensure that you are staying active and burning off those calories. Even small amounts of increased activity can pay big dividends in the fight against the flab.
2. Make wise decisions about alcoholic drinks. If you are going to drink alcohol, avoid the high-fat, high-calorie drinks such as eggnog and any cream-based drinks. Holiday punch and sweet, mixed "novelty" cocktails are loaded with sugar and calories. Additionally, set a drink limit before you go out, and stick to it. Drink your drink until it is finished before your host tops it off. Most people tend to get caught up in party mode and stop counting their drinks. This typically results in overdrinking which makes you sick and fat.
3. Enjoy, but don't overindulge. When there is a plate full of cookies sitting on the table, go ahead and have one or two. Don’t even think about three or four. Once you start stuffing cookies and sweets into your mouth with reckless abandon, you are venturing down the path of out-of-control eating that leads to increased fat.
4. Don't Skip Regular Meals. We all do it—there's a party tonight, so we skip lunch or dinner. Don't. Skipping your regular meals increase the chances of overeating and over drinking at the party.
5. Watch Your Weight—Literally. I am not a proponent of using a regular bathroom scale to track your fitness results. A body composition scale weighs your body weight, your fat weight and water weight and is a better tool to track you fitness results. But, if all you have is a bathroom scale, use it every single day to monitor your weight. If you gain a pound or two, you can at least return to the principals in tips one through four so that you don’t fall into the big, fat abyss.

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