FITNESS TRAINING: ARTICLES

Holiday Pounds
By John Hoeber, MS, RD

Holiday celebrating does not have to be a time of worry when it comes to your diet. For many health and weight conscious individuals, guilt and foreboding over how they are celebrating puts a serious damper on holiday merrymaking. People often feel guilty about sabotaging their diets. They fear what those eggnogs they just drank will do to their cholesterol, and dread the torture they will have to put themselves through in January to undo the damage to the waistline. Celebrating guilt free means taking care or our health and happiness on a daily basis.

Making sure your daily routine is strong in certain areas will make occasional splurging easy for the body to take. The habits that make the most difference are:

1. Cardio activity several times per week to burn calories, lower blood pressure, improve cholesterol, and more. To decide how much is enough for you remember than some is better than none and more is better. In other words, health benefits are seen with small amounts of walking (as opposed to being sedentary), but the benefit increases with increased frequency, duration and intensity.

2. Strength training to increase metabolism for long term weight loss. The cardio exercise mentioned above will burn calories while you are exercising, while strength training burns most of its calories afterwards. Those individuals with more muscle burn more calories while at rest, weather it be sitting at the computer, in front of the TV, or sleeping.

3. Keep the metabolism high by not skipping meals. Skipping a meal forces the body to slow down to conserve calories. Take the common scenario of those who don’t eat breakfast. The body essentially stays asleep throughout the morning. By lunch, normal hunger hasn’t returned and some people can go until the mid afternoon or evening before realizing they are hungry. They overeat in the evening when metabolism is slowing down. Without the opportunity to burn off these calories, the body stores them.

4. Eating when hungry and stopping when satisfied. Eating from body hunger means paying attention to cues of hunger including stomach sensations, light-headedness, fatigue, irritability, and inability to concentrate. That part, however, is much easier than the stopping when satisfied part. The reasons people eat past the point of fullness range from biologic programming to habit and emotional need. Eating more slowly is one way to physically get around the problem, but if overeating is a problem it may be further embedded than that.

5. Eating lots of fiber and drinking lots of water to keep the body full. In addition to eating slowly, eating lots of fiber combined with water will help us to feel full. Carbohydrates in general are not bad, but it’s the type of carbs that we eat that make the difference. Here a good rule is to avoid white carbs (such as white bread, white rice, white pasta) and go for the whole grain variety (whole wheat bread and pasta and brown rice). Of course vegetables, beans and fruits are great ways to get fiber.

6. Paying attention to portion size to avoid over doing it. These day’s we’ve super-sized everything to the point where a healthy portion seems to be a restriction. Take the above mentioned carbohydrates for instance. A fist sized portion would be reasonable, but go out for rice or noodles and we are usually served much more.

By strengthening the way we take care of ourselves on a daily basis, we can allow ourselves more latitude when it comes to celebrating. If we have a balance in our normal life, we will be more able to splurge without guilt.