Don't worry so much about Christmas pounds, because there is no such thing!
We all love to go big with the holidays.
The diet goes out the door and gives way to nice dinners, glasses of champagne and, above all, Very. Lots of. Oliebollen. No surprise then that everyone always talks about “the Christmas kilos” at the start of the new year, because suddenly our trousers seem to be a lot tighter again. Right?
Well, you don't really have to worry about those Christmas kilos.
Of course we will gain some weight when we eat so lavishly, but how many that's not so bad. Because so much you can't really even arrive in such a short time.
Let's take a rather uh... extreme example: you may remember the American gentleman who, for the Supersize Me experiment, spent a month on a daily basis ate only McDonald's food: 5,000 kcal a day! In the whole month, he gained about 10 kilos, which amounts to 2.5 kilos per week. Hugely unhealthy, of course, and about the maximum you can gain weight in such a period. But unless your Christmas breakfast, Christmas lunch AND Christmas dinner consist of McDonalds burgers, you will never come close to such numbers during the holidays.
Nevertheless, it is true that we do gain a little weight during the holidays, on average just over half a kilo research shows. So that's not so bad. Moreover, some of it is not fat but moisture, because we often eat very salty food.
So why is it that we still feel like we've gotten a bit fatter at the end of the year? Usually this is largely due to between your ears. If your weight has increased, it has probably happened slowly, over several months. Chances are, you will only pay more attention to it during the holidays. A fellow dietitian always says:
"You don't get fat between Christmas and New Year, but between New Year and Christmas!"
What she means by that is that you don't have to worry so much about that one week in the year when you let yourself go for a while if you do eat healthy and exercise enough the rest of the year.
Moreover, you can make big changes even with small steps. Imagine drinking three glasses of soft drinks a day, and replace them with three glasses of water from now on. That will already save you 300 kcal per day, allowing you to lose up to 0.3 kg per week. So that's more than a kilo a month just by changing what you drink.
Now if you keep this up all year, there is all the more reason to enjoy yourself during the holidays!
Sources:
1. Whitney & Rolfes (2013), Understanding Nutrition (print 13)
2. Weight gain over the holidays in three countries, Brian Wansink et al, New England Journal of Medicine, doi: 10.1056/NEJMc1602012, published online 22 September 2016.
3. Wikipedia - Supersize Me (McDonalds Experiment)
