How to Avoid Holiday Overeating

Holidays and special occasions can now be enjoyable rather than fattening. No longer do you need to fear the holiday season and packing on 5 to 10 extra pounds. This also means you won't be writing New Year's resolutions to lose weight! You can sail through the holidays—as well as vacations and special occasions such as weddings—with confidence, knowing that you are moving steadily toward your ideal size.

The Tradition of Feasting

Feasting on special occasions has been around about as long as mankind. Why? Because we like to honor life's rites of passage and religious celebrations, and what better way than to have a party that includes special foods. Feasting days through the ages have included religious holidays, life event celebrations such as marriages and births, season changes, and sporting events, just like today.

In days of old, common folk ate pretty boring and simple foods from day to day. Their meager diet included some meat, in-season vegetables and fruits, and starches such as bread or rice. Their diet might also include a soupy cereal called gruel … which even sounds boring.

But feast days were different. The English and American colonists would celebrate by making and eating all sorts of delicacies like plum pudding, mince meat pies, and yes, even fruitcake. (Imagine a bleak, cold winter without any fresh produce. Now take some fruit that was dried or preserved since the summer, add nuts, and bake them into a cake. Fruitcake would have seemed like a delicacy to you, too.) These feast days might have been the only times when the common folk had access to fancy “treat” foods.

The common folk could afford to overindulge at a feast because they seldom, if ever, had enough food, let alone enough to constantly overeat.

Now jump to the present. You don't face food scarcity from day to day. Eating enough calories to fuel your body is as easy as reaching into the pantry or the refrigerator or stopping by a fast-food joint. Finding special foods is easy, too. What you can't find at a local store, you can order over the Internet and have delivered directly to your home.

Yet, you still want to enjoy special feasts. The good news is that if you update your perspective about feasts, you can enjoy special foods without overeating them. But to get through feasts with your waistline slim, it takes some thought and planning.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has to be the biggest overeating day in the United States. Our custom is to prepare a turkey with all the trimmings, and the trimmings often include lots of high-glycemic foods such as mashed potatoes, stuffing, and bread. Plus, our informal custom is to have candy, cheese and crackers, and cookies available all day long. Even just a taste of each of the trimmings can leave a person well above 5 on the hunger scale.

After we learned to hate the feeling of being really full, we devised a Thanksgiving eating strategy. It's pretty simple:

1. Make sure that you are at 0 on the hunger scale before you sit down to dinner. This might mean passing up the appetizers and treats scattered around the house. Save those treats for later or the next day.

2. Only put on your plate modest portions of the foods you like the very best. (Perhaps you prefer dark meat, cranberry sauce, and dressing. Yes, this is an unbalanced meal, but just on this day you can afford it.)

3. Save room for dessert if you like the dessert. In other words, pumpkin pie is great only if you like it.

4. Don't worry about hurting anyone's feelings if you don't eat food they prepared. If the person insists you take some, put the food on your plate, eat one bite, and as you eat, hide the rest under something else!

5. Say a blessing. After all, this is Thanksgiving.

6. Eat slowly and try to make this meal last at least 30 minutes. Many families, when they finally sit down to eat their feast, gulp it down, sometimes in order to not miss the next football game. Bad idea.

7. Eat 0-5.

8. Don't go back for seconds unless your hunger number is below 5. The leftovers can be eaten the next day and even the day after that … and the day after that … and so on.

9. Have a conversation plan. Perhaps everyone at the table can say what he or she gives thanks for. Make it a fun, upbeat, and bonding time.

Be sure to focus your energy on the purpose of the celebration and the togetherness of family and friends. Let the food be a part of the celebration, not the purpose of the celebration.

Happy Holidays … Really

You can breeze through the holiday season, that time between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, and even lose weight or stay at your ideal size. And while you breeze through, you can still enjoy the special foods and treats of the season.

Sound too good to be true? It is possible. Other people do it. Basically, successful holiday eaters, whether they consciously know it or not, eat from 0-5. So can you, but it takes some planning. You are presented with so many opportunities to eat fabulous foods—family parties, office parties, office treats, cocktail parties, open houses, cookie exchanges, and so on. You could go through the holidays without ever feeling a simple hunger pang.

Don't be discouraged. Here are some helpful hints to get you through the season smiling:

• Always start eating at 0.

• Go easy on the alcohol. Drinking alcohol can impair your ability to feel your stomach's hunger number. Alcoholic beverages increase your body's production of the stress hormone, cortisol, which causes abdominal weight gain.

• Take small tastes of food rather than real portions at parties.

• Make sure that you get at least 15 grams of protein at meals. The protein can come in the form of hors d'oeuvres, such as shrimp on toothpicks or bacon-wrapped liver.

• Don't taste or eat everything offered. Party foods are not precious rarities. You'll have other opportunities to eat them.

• Focus on enjoying the people, the conversation, and the ambience. After all, you're at a party.

• Make the party and the people more important than the food.

• If you have multiple parties on the same day, you might want to eat only to a hunger number of 2 or 3 at each party so that you can sample food at each event.

• Always, always stop eating at or below 5 on the hunger scale.

• Maintain your exercise program throughout the holidays.

• Spend time remembering the true meaning of the holidays.

Home Alone for the Holidays

Being alone or almost alone for the holidays can be fattening. It's easy to feel left out and sorry for yourself. Don't console yourself with food. You can still share the joys of the holidays with others and yourself. Here are a few suggestions:

• Get out and do something for someone else, such as volunteering at a soup kitchen or visiting nursing homes.

• Go to church, mosque, synagogue, or temple and be with other people.

• Take quality time for yourself. Pamper, polish, exercise, read, and catch up with your projects and yourself.

• Eat with wisdom, like you've now learned to do every day. Eat 0-5.

• Savor some special holiday treats, but carefully and sensuously.

Parties

Whether you're at a dinner party, a wedding, a Super Bowl celebration, or a neighborhood potluck, apply the same eating principles:

• Make the party, the celebration, and the people more important than the food.

• Start eating at 0 on the hunger scale.

• Be selective about what foods you put on your plate.

• Eat slowly, carefully, and sensuously.

• Save room for dessert or wedding cake if you want some.

• Drink alcohol with caution, remembering that it dulls your hunger sensations, making it tough to know when you've had enough food.

• Stop eating at or below 5.

Learn how to be socially comfortable at parties so that you can have a good time without hiding out near the appetizer tray. If you need to, take a class on small talk or lessons in the art of party going. Such classes really exist, and they can be quite helpful.

Handling Family and Friends

Why does it seem that people push food on you more when you're on a program to master your weight? Some family events can be emotionally challenging all by themselves; you sure don't need anyone telling you how to eat.

In many families, food is a representation of love. Therefore, a host or hostess might assume his or her love is not accepted if you don't eat enough food in that person's opinion. Herein lies a big problem. You know that food is not love—at least you should by now—but try explaining that at a family event. It's bound to upset the fun.

The best way to navigate through this minefield at a family gathering is to keep your own counsel. Keep quiet about your weight-loss program. If anyone mentions it, thank the person for noticing and change the subject. If you're done eating and someone is pushing you to eat more, simply tell the person that you don't have any more room or that you might have some more food later after your food settles. Then you can politely refuse more food later if it's offered.

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Healthy Weight Loss © 2005 by Lucy Beale and Sandy G. Couvillon. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

To order this book visit the Idiot's Guide web site or call 1-800-253-6476.