Q: What can I do to lose the Christmas holiday weight and keep it off?
A: Aren’t you tired of asking the same old thing every year? It would appear that most people are masochists — Christmas indulgence, guilt, New Year’s resolution, gym membership, a fridge full of kale and a white flag by mid-February. Year in, year out.
Doing the same thing every year is a bit silly. We will demonstrate that small, easy changes implemented over 12 months can change this guilt yo-yo for good. You can choose any diet or way of eating, but we’ll talk about one in the news recently.
Before you think that the Water Cooler is penned by The Grinch, we do love the holidays, we do love sweet things and we do encourage enjoying life.
Loving holidays doesn’t mean funnelling down two bowls of malva pudding after six ciders on the beach every day for two weeks — besides Bheki Cele hunting you down, that would be a one-way ticket to the comorbidity queue.
Once you’ve successfully made health and wellness your lifestyle, the way you let your hair down will be very different from someone who just doesn’t care. This isn’t about “cheating” and then going on a guilt trip that spoils the holiday for everyone around you, nor is it about exercising excessively to “earn the right” to splurge.
Nor is it about putting on a show. Some people gather around and pronounce loudly how well they eat and tend to chew salad with “yum” and “delish”, only to satisfy their sugary cravings late at night when no-one is watching.
There’s no pay-off when wellness defines your lifestyle — there’s no guilt, there’s no punishment, there needn’t be anything off-limits (within reason, obviously) because you will want to enjoy it in moderation as opposed to bingeing, and you’ll want to move instead of lounging.
It’s very easy to find studies that say on average people gain about half a kilogram each holiday. The actual number doesn’t matter, but this small gain, holiday after holiday and year after year, accounts for most of the weight gain people notice every decade. “Wow, how did that happen?” Now you know.
The BMJ, which used to be the British Medical Journal, ran a study that said temporary interventions do work to arrest this trend. We don’t like that — who would want to spoil their holiday by weighing themselves daily?
The Toronto Star ran an article at the start of the year about a meta-analysis by the University of Toronto’s department of nutritional sciences that looked at markers that warn about the onset of diabetes when people ate low-glycaemic index (GI) diets. The review found a “clinically meaningful” effect on prediabetes and diabetes markers, moving them “in the right direction”.
However, there was an interesting side-effect. Across every study, people who took part in the diets lost about a pound of weight every three months without even trying or thinking about it. That’s four pounds a year, or almost two kilograms. Now, you can see where we’re going with this.
We are not endorsing any eating style. Rather, we’re demonstrating how simple changes can have a profound long-term effect. How simple would this change be? Type “GI chart” into Google and then choose to eat low-GI foods and avoid the high ones. Of course, there’s far more to how food is metabolised than its GI index — but it’s a good starting point to understand that barley and oats are better for your waistline than bagels and doughnuts.
If you prioritise eating properly year-round, you will — in the author’s personal experience — still enjoy cake (a lot), but you likely won’t want it too often and will revert to eating properly with little or no effort. You’ll also want to walk or run or cycle because you love it, not because you have to do it. You won’t come back a belt size up. Try it, and next year this time you’ll ask a different question.
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