How To Lose Weight At Christmas Time

When you are attempting to lose weight or prioritise your health and fitness, Christmas time presents many challenges and also can spark off high anxiety.

What should I eat? How much should  I eat? Should I limit alcohol?And why am I eating left over pigs in blankets for breakfast?!

Christmas time does present a challenge as its a period of more socialising and easy access to many calorie dense foods. So essentially, more temptation and more chances to go off track!

Here are 5 areas I see people fall down in over the Christmas period and I hope by sharing them with you, it will help you enjoy your Christmas a little bit more.

1.No outcome plan

Without an idea of the outcome you want over Christmas, how can you be happy or disappointed if it does or doesn’t happen? And equally, how can you choose your behaviours to match this. If you have a clear outcome, e.g. lose weight, maintain weight or put on 2 KG, you are setting in stone how you want xmas to play out and then also helping give yourself some structure for your behaviours.

2.Alcohol

Drinking won’t necessarily take you off track. However what we do know about alcohol is it disrupts your sleep, lowers inhibitions, contains more calories than most people expect and can lead to overeating off the back of a bad hangover. So as I said it won’t necessarily take you off track, but it could increased the likelihood of you doing so! I suggest setting limits of the amount of alcohol you are going to drink, drinking lots of water after a heavy session to help with business as usual the next day, and maybe selecting a few days when you do drink and the others as alcohol free!

3.The ‘F*ck it its Christmas’ mentality

Its all to easy to use Christmas as an excuse to overeat and drink too much. Christmas however was never supposed to be about eating and drinking to excess for the month of December. That is definitely something that over time society has attached to it! So I tell my clients to remove this black and white thinking and not use it a reason to completely change their eating habits, ‘because its Christmas’.

Much of the population will say ‘well its Christmas so I’ll eat 100 celebrations in one sitting!’. But remember, 65% of this same UK population are also overweight or obese! So what most people do isn’t necessarily the best option!

So think about which days are important to you to enjoy time and share food with family and friends but don’t use it as an excuse to over consume food for a month!

4.Knowing when xmas is over

This is a really easy trap to fall into and follows nicely off the back of my last point. Christmas is not the the whole of December. Its a few days! Peoples habits do tend to change though and this can spill over into the first few weeks of January. My advice is enjoy the days that are important to you but then get back to your normal healthy habits. I encourage my clients to set a date that they remove any Christmas chocolate and food out of the house making sure they mentally move on from Christmas mode instead of still eating mince pies for breakfast in January!

5.No daily structure

The time inbetween Christmas and New Year is for many people  very strange! They have no idea what day of the week it is, time of day or what meal they are on! This can make controlling our weight very challenging. Keeping some structure can really help with this. So planning in a daily walk, and 3 meals a day for example, automatically gives that day some structure. Otherwise its all to easy to find yourself carrying out weird behaviours you’d never normally do like having your first meal at 3pm, comprising of chocolate snowmen, cheese and a few pringles!

I hope this gives you a few ideas to help you navigate Christmas to match the outcome you want for your health and fitness going into 2024!

Have a great week,

Lizzie

One Percent Club