It’s a very special day for every family. A day of celebration. I hope you can spend some time with your family, even if it’s on the phone.
Celebrating has always involved food and drink, it’s a tradition that has gone on for thousands of years and I’m sure it will continue on, but we don’t have to pig out.
Yes, you have to taste the important traditional dishes that your friends or relatives have taken hours to prepare, but use a small plate, take small amounts and try and avoid the sugary stuff. Remember you can’t work off a lot of calories.
A one-hour workout for an experienced athlete will only burn about 300 calories. For a person with less athletic experience, you might only burn 100 calories. On a festive holiday like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year it’s easy to consume 3000 to 4000 calories between all the food, snacks, and drinks for the day. That kind of consumption can increase your weight by 2 or 3 pounds at least.
So if you can hold down your calorie count to say 2000 calories which should only be a few hundred more than normal, you should be able to work off those extra calories in a couple of days.
The problem we all have this time of year is the continual party, one after the other with very little time in between to recoup. Then there’s the shopping for gifts. We go after work and spend a couple hours trying to find gifts and no time to eat, so we eat in restaurants with friends which involves more celebrating and more calories.
Did you know that the holiday season is the busiest time of the year for restaurants? It’s not unusual for a family to eat out 4 or 5 times a week during the holidays. So if you add up all the meals we eat in restaurants and all the social events we have to attend, it’s no wonder that the average adult will gain between 5 and 10 pounds during the holidays.
This is the typical weight gain you have to avoid. It can take months to recoup if you can recoup. Most of us will try to diet in January. We’ll lose some weight but not much because the winters are cold and in the cold weather we tend to eat more comfort food and that’s a high-calorie food.
Eating the wrong foods even in small portions will keep you from losing weight. You can’t exercise away a bad diet. Once the weather starts to warm up most of us find it easier to cut back on food, but by that time it’s hard to break the bad habits we had during the winter. We will trim down a little because we are more active in the spring and summer because the days are longer and we have more time to work outside.
I know all about this life cycle because that is the way my life was. All the weight I would gain during the cold months never quite left me. I always ended up one or two pounds heavier at the end of the year. Of course, we never remember how much we weighed the year before, so we don’t realize we keep gaining weight every year. That cycle is called “creeping obesity”. The one or two pounds you gain every year and don’t even realize it. Then when you get to be 50, you wonder how you gained all that weight. On average, a 50-year-old male will weigh between 40 and 60 more than he did on his 21st birthday. The more you weigh when you are 21, the more you’ll gain over the years. This doesn’t hold true in all cases, it’s an average over the entire population, some people are very athletic and never gain weight. I weigh the same today as I weighed when I was 17, of course, I spent years yo-yoing from 220 pounds down to 160.
Be mindful of what you eat. Keeping your body in good condition is your responsibility. It would be better for you and better for your health if you never gained any extra weight. When an adult gains weight they are adding body fat. Not good. The human body is only built to carry a small amount of body fat, like 15% of your weight. It’s there in case of emergency. When you can’t find food your body will still have fat to survive on. But because of the American diet, we are adding too much fat and it only causes health problems.
Controlling your weight and keeping your body in good condition is your responsibility. Your doctor can only relieve your symptoms, give you a pill or repair a broken bone. Your body has to heal itself and you have to feed it the nutrition it needs to do that.
Look for my podcasts on anchor.fm, or the podcast app on your cell phone. Search “howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight”.
If you really want to lose your body fat then look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You’ll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books.
There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $3.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans, or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.
My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page.
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