All aboard the excess express
How to halt post-holiday weight gain.
A lot is made of Blue Monday, the day where the post-Christmas slump is at its worst. All the excitement is gone, and all that’s left is a month as boring as it is slushy, and nothing to remind you of the fun times just gone by but bills and an uncountable amount of cardboard boxes and plastic. But it’s not just rubbish round the house that can be difficult to get away from.
Christmas may be a time of peace, goodwill and joy, but it’s also a time of mincemeats, sweets and other such treats, and the grazing doesn’t always come down with the decorations. It’s bad enough having to deal with getting back to the daily slog without having a trouser button-induced panic, or looking in the mirror and barely recognising the chin-intensive visage before you. As someone who has put on so much weight over the holiday I can’t help but feel I’m empathising with a pregnant woman I don’t actually know; this is a pretty pertinent topic for me right now.
With all that in mind, what better time to discuss the pitfalls and possibilities of getting off the excess express?
To my mind, there are a few different options:
The Drill Sergeant Method:
The desire to over-correct come January can be pretty overwhelming, especially since all the shows on TV are about fitness all of a sudden and TV ads have shifted focus from selling sofas to shedding calories. However, going cold turkey is hardly ever a good idea. Especially when it’s cold turkey you’re giving up. Getting too strict too quickly with your regimen puts a shock on the system and causes your metabolism to weep in a corner (sorry if this is too scientific), and any short-term weight loss will boomerang right back once you eventually start to stabilise your eating habits. And, if you’re thinking of video fitness tapes, well, let’s just say they’re about the one thing you’d be encouraged to take with a pinch of salt.
The Snickers-on-a-treadmill Method:
For those with better intentions than willpower. Exercise and cut down of intake taken together is definitely the best way of expelling the Christmas demons, but the good buzz generated from going powerwalkies or some other such strenuous activity can sometimes act as a license to keep up the same eating habits, as a kind of cake-pro-quo arrangement. Inevitably, this cancels out any potential benefits to begin with, but the incremental approach is definitely the best.
The sure-I’ll-start-behaving-at-Lent Method:
The first man to climb Mt Everest, Edmund Hillary, was once asked why he wanted to achieve such a feat. “Because it’s there”, he explained. While that kind of attitude is admirable with mountains, it’s not so helpful when it comes to delicious Christmassy leftovers. Putting off the inevitable regular diet will likely just continue the cycle, thus making it harder and harder to get back on track, or more likely you’ll move to extremes to redress the balance.
New Years are always full of hope and expectations, but as soon as they start, the cold hard reality mixes in and suddenly what seemed easy becomes a whole lot more complex. Food is no different, but as long as you avoid quick fixes, make sure to take time out for even a little exercise and build it up from there, and resist the instinctive larder-trawling and take that down from there, then everything else will work itself out.
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