Stuffing yourself like a turkey on Christmas Day
Festive eating is sometimes a bit challenging, here I break down a few points to help you enjoy your Xmas day eating without stuffing yourself silly
We all do it, we love to indulge over the festive period, we’re good all year right??? So we deserve this indulgence especially on Xmas day!
This blog isn’t intending to criticise eating habits throughout the year, but just to focus on a few things that you can do on Xmas day to avoid stuffing yourself like a turkey but still enjoy your food!
Don’t eat the entire contents of your stocking for breakfast on Xmas Day
You know the drill … wake up all excited (yes I am 25 now and its still relevant!) tear into that stocking and proceed stuffing of the face with candy, chocolate. Now breaking it down, in my stocking there used to be a tube of white choc buttons, a chocolate orange, chocolate coins, a few mini santa choc things, a lindt reindeer….
This is enough chocolate for weeks and weeks, yet all it went, down in one. CRINGE!
This is completely unnecessary, and it usually ended up with me feeling sick up until lunch time but this habit was not nipped in the bud, until I came to learn about nutrition as I got older! Try and stick to a nice normal breakfast, and then you can spend your morning salivating as the smells of xmas dinner fill the house, and not feeling sick, curled up in the foetal position wishing you didn’t scoff your entire chocolate stash (again!)
Don’t over fill your plate!
We humans can be terribly polite and somewhere along the line someone taught us that if we don’t clear our plate, its rude! And you don’t get pudding. It’s probably the latter that drives the behaviour more than the former, but either way, we habitually aim to clear our plates, even if we are stuffed to bursting. If you put a reasonable portion onto your plate and finish it, wait 20mins and if you are genuinely still hungry then go for seconds.
Don’t have every single pudding going
We do love a good spread, and we love to have choices! But when did choices, stop being choices? When did choices become ‘I will have one of everything!‘ As hosts we usually put on Xmas pudding, mince pies with custard or cream, Xmas cake and a variety of other Xmassy pudding ideas. Its a chance to show of our baking skills for a start! But our guests and ourselves do not need to have 3 portions of pudding, especially if they already ate a giant size portion of xmas dinner!
Take home message
I read somewhere (can’t remember where so this may not be reliable) that we can pretty much attribute our weight gain over the years to the weight that we put on over the Xmas period. Realistically we spend about 6 weeks gorging, stuffing and filling our faces with food, it all tastes so amazing and we tell ourselves that it is only once a year. But we can easily put on 3-6kg over xmas without even blinking. And perhaps in the new year we drop a few kg naturally by being a bit more active, sticking to our new years resolutions for a week or two (another blog on this concept to come later) but most of us don’t actually lose all of the weight and we remain at this heavier weight all year long, until the next xmas where the same happens again. Over 20 years, putting on 1-2kg over Xmas adds up massively.
I hope I haven’t bummed everyone out, I am not anti-Xmas, I am not anti indulgence, we work damn hard all year and Xmas is a time for family and friends and fun! This is just intended to spread a bit of awareness about, and hopefully make people stop and think a little about their food intake.
The best advice that I can give really is to try and get in tune with your hunger levels. Before you eat that 4th mince pie, are you actually hungry?
Do you actually need it?