You can do a lot of things during Christmas, but eating too much should not be one of them. Granted, you do want to enjoy your Christmas holiday as best as possible, and one tends to think that pigging out on the Christmas buffet is one way of it enjoying it. But what you really want to enjoy in the holidays is to spend joyful moments with your friends and family, to savor the taste of good food and drink, and to find time to make your house ready for Christmas with festive decoration – all without worrying about your weight, spending hour after grueling hour at the gym to lose those pounds, and increasing your risk of diabetes, heart problems, and other weight-related illnesses.
Therefore, it is only right that you should regulate your food intake during the holidays. But one has to admit that cutting down on food is hard especially with all that food lying around. However, there is a way that you can get around this dilemma, and it is through knowing and addressing these overeating traps:
1. Variety. According to food psychologist Dr. Brian Wansiak, having a variety of foods at the table will increase the amount of food a person eats. Options in food choices, he added, tend to make us giddy and thus let down our guard. Just look at your average Christmas buffet table, and at first glance it would look as though it had everything your local supermarket sold for a month.
Dr. Wansiak suggests that you practice the so-called rule of two, wherein you put only two kinds of food that you like on your plate. That way you could immediately satisfy your food cravings, while at the same time controlling the amount of food you eat.
2. People. Another major factor that influences how much you eat is the person that you are sitting next to when you eat. Friends and family members tend to give large servings of food in order to make you feel good and appreciated, and we usually return it in kind by eating a lot as well. And while this is good for heart, this is not good for the stomach. So even though you find it hard to say “no thanks” to your dear old Grandma when she passes the beef brisket, it’s only right that you do so if you feel full.
3. Multitasking. Eating while doing other things, such as writing holiday cards or wrapping that much-delayed gift, gives you a mental pass for you to eat until what you are doing is completed. That is why you should eat first and do it later or vice versa, just as long as you do not combine the two.
4. Convenience. It’s probably simplest trap of them all, but definitely the hardest one to dodge: the more we see the food, the more we want to eat it. This way of thinking has been hard-wired to our brains, an offshoot of our primitive past wherein our ancestors had to take every opportunity to eat in order to survive. But then, our ancestors never really had the problem of piling up the pounds during the holiday season.
Therefore, it is advised that you should avoid being near food or having it within close proximity. This means that you should do away with that dish of candies you have at your desk, and skip that route where you pass the hotdog stand on the train station home. Such measures may seem to some, but one has to keep in mind that with the Christmas dinners you’ll have to go to this month, it pretty much evens out the score.
