Maintaining your weight over xmas

At Christmas time often our healthy diets and lifestyles are pushed aside in favour of calorie dense foods, alcohol and limited exercise. If you’ve been focusing on losing weight for months, it would be a shame to throw it all away and ruin your hard work in a short space of time. Think how good you would feel after Christmas if you maintained your current weight and level of fitness.

It is important to adapt an ongoing mindset of eating well out of respect for your body and not punishing yourself.

Here are a few tips to help maintain your weight and healthy eating mindset over Christmas:

1. Eat until you feel full but not sickly stuffed.
   
2. The first 3 mouthfuls always taste the best, after that the taste doesn't improve so try having just 3 bites of that Christmas cake and putting the rest away for another day
3. Exercise in the morning, before the Christmas party. Exercising first thing in the morning will ensure you don't get distracted by events during the day and miss your workout.
4. Exercise on Christmas day! Wake up early and go for a walk or run around the block before the festivities begin.
5. Include fruit or salad with every main meal to reduce the calorie content. This season offers a huge variety of yummy fruit and vegetables such as mangoes, cherries, apricots, plums, asian greens, capsicum, cucumbers, mushrooms, peas, tomatoes and many more.
   
6. Serve yourself up a piece of meat no bigger than the size of your palm then fill your plate with salad. Christmas lunch is often a buffet full of various types of meat but sticking to salad and no more meat than what would easily fit in the palm of your hand will make a huge difference to the calorie content of the meal.
7. Eat dinner before going to that party. When at a function, the canapes are often full of calorie dense foods. Eating a small meal before you go will minimise hunger meaning you won't feel like you need to go back to that platter.
8. Don't eat unless you are sitting down with food on a plate. Nibbling can add huge amounts of calories to your daily intake without you even realizing. By all means eat left overs, but put them on a plate and enjoy them as a set meal. Sit down and savour each mouthful.
9. Lastly, just because its Christmas day doesn't mean you have to try everything on the table. Remember there will be left overs so you can always try what you missed on boxing day.

This time of year should be a celebration time, so make sure you enjoy yourself. By following a few simple rules you can minimise the calories you consume but not have to miss out completely.