I'm Lisa Bernbach for Howdini.
It's holiday time, which means extra pounds.
And you know it, you know it's going to happen.
Elizabeth Summers is with us.
She's a dietician and an author.
Elizabeth, how do you avoid the weight gain?
It seems like you're just punishing yourself.
Oh, I know.
Well, the good news is is we used to think
that people gained about seven pounds over the holidays,
and it's not that bad.
We're averaging one to two pound weight gain over the holidays.
So that's a little bit better.
And are we talking about Thanksgiving through New Year's Eve?
Yeah.
And that's not that big of a deal, except that people
don't tend to lose the weight after New Year's Eve.
So it becomes a gradual accumulation, which over the course of a decade
is 10 to 20 pounds.
So the weight gain isn't as bad as we thought,
but it's still something to keep an eye on.
Now during the holidays there's food everywhere.
In the office people somehow show up with tins of candy, and cookies,
and popcorn, and stuff that is-- you know, you think of popcorn,
it's more fiber than food.
But somehow you're eating without even being aware of it.
And you've got to watch out for that.
You really need to go into the holidays with a game plan,
because it's so easy to eat unconsciously.
And that mindless eating will catch up with you.
Every mouthful averages about 25 calories.
So if you walk by an employee's desk and grab a Hershey's kiss,
and then later on in the day you're in the employees lounge and that popcorn,
you pop some into your mouth, even four mindless bites in a day
and you've gained a pound in a month.
So you've really got to start paying attention.
Now, one thing you can do is keep a pencil and a piece of paper
with you and just vow to write down everything
that you're eating during the holidays.
It sounds like kind of a pain, but it will
make you conscious of every time you're putting something into your mouth.
And you don't even enjoy those mindless bites.
You know, at the end of the day--
You're not savoring them, right?
You're not savoring them.
You don't register them in any way.
So they're really totally useless calories.
You want to save those calories for the Christmas fudge
rather than some mindless bite.
Do you think that we do more mindless eating during the holidays
than we do the rest of the year?
Well, if we do it's because there's so much food around.
And you know, there's more nervousness, there's more anxiety.
You've already got a full life, and now you're cramming Christmas shopping,
and wrapping presents, and parties, and everything else into it.
So I think maybe there's a little bit more stress eating as well.
So just carrying that pencil and piece of paper around with you,
and vowing to write down things may be enough to sort
of nip that mindless eating in the bud.
Aside from the normal foods that we know we should avoid,
because they're empty calories, what are some of the holiday culprits
in terms of just avoid it if you can?
Well, just about everything out there.
OK.
OK, we've settled that one.
Next question.
No actually, There's a lot of really good holiday foods.
It's just what we do to them.
For instance, the sweet potatoes at the Thanksgiving meal or Christmas meal
are wonderful.
But if you're loading them up with butter and marshmallows, then
you can triple the calories in a serving.
Traditional holiday foods or drinks, like eggnog,
I think eggnog looks fattening.
Yeah.
Is it?
Watch out, it's way more fattening than you realized.
Some of the recipes, if you check them out, can have 300, 400 calories.
In a serving of eggnog or hot buttered rum,
that's the calories in a cheeseburger.
And then if you have two or three of them,
you had your entire day's allotment for calories.
And the thing, too, about liquid calories is they don't fill us up.
They don't register on our appetite clocks.
So we eat just as much food, maybe more, because alcohol
tends to dissolve or resolve.
You know, we go to a party all set to really be good
and we have one glass of wine and say, oh, what the heck,
I might as well just go ahead and eat whatever I want.
So not only do they dissolve or resolve, but then you've
got a whole lot of extra calories packed onto the food you're
going to eat anyway.
So you can walk away from a holiday party having consumed 2000 calories
and not even feel that full.
And you've already had lunch and breakfast.
Yes.
And how do we know how many calories we should be taking in?
Put the food thing in perspective.
It should be an accent to an otherwise rich experience of spending time
with the people you love.
It shouldn't be the main focus.
So what you can do is you can have parties,
but maybe gear them around things that are not so food related.
Maybe have friends over to do things you have to do anyway--
sign Christmas cards, or make ornaments, or wrap presents with your friends,
and then have a few little treats to eat.
But the real focus is on the activity rather than the food.
Good.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
For Howdini, I'm Lisa Bernbach.