We’ve all been there, you tell yourself that you will stick to your diet and stay on track during the holidays but as soon as they roll around you just can’t seem to contain yourself. Don’t worry about it, you’re human after all.
I told myself that I was going to steer clear of sweets, candy, chocolate, deserts and all the things I had eliminated from the majority of my diet over the years but as the clock hit 15:00 on Friday 23rd of December (my last working day) everything seemed to fall apart. Some people may put it down to lack of will-power while others will put it down to a momentary lapse in concentration, me well I’ll put it down to just living.
Seasons Greetings
After a year of maintaining a fairly strict diet there is no reason I can’t slacken the reigns for a week and relax a bit. I have seen plenty of first hand evidence that these “off-periods” are more beneficial than trying to resist all temptation and embracing the Scrooge mentality.
With all that said many people come out the other end of the holiday season feeling worse for wear with a few extra pounds about them, not the good kind either. What we will look at here is getting back to basics and transitioning back into a healthy eating lifestyle.
If you have been active over the holiday period and kept up your gym attendance then you’re off to a good start, if you haven’t then now is the time to start again. Don’t jump back in at the deep end and burn yourself out within a week. Start slowly and build back up to your previous training intensity. I took a week off from the gym because they were moving facilities and I was unable to train, I started back yesterday with a power snatch session and I am feeling the effects today where as before I would feel fine the next day. It will take a little time but your body will re-adjust to the stresses and strains of your gym sessions but you will feel all the better for it.
Transitioning back into a healthy eating lifestyle will probably be the hardest thing of all. If, like me, you took a little detour off your diet and started to plow through pretty much anything you could get your hands on then the transition will be a little harder. You will have given your body a taste for things that you have been restricting, like sugar and excessive amounts of carbs (if on a low carb diet that is), and now it has taken a liking to them again.
The best way to get back on track with your diet is start counting calories again. If you have never counted calories before then it is probably about time you started. It may seem tedious but it can progress your weight loss faster than anything else out there. People tend to think they aren’t eating a lot until they count up their daily calorie balance and find that they are eating more than they should be to lose weight. Counting calories allows you to easily and instantly adjust your daily totals since you will have a number in mind to hit each day (approximately).
What you absolutely SHOULDN’T do when you decide it’s time to start a new diet is jump onto one of the popular fad diets, that means things like Atkins or any of these so-called Detox diets. They aren’t needed or necessary and you can end up hurting yourself rather than helping yourself. Losing weight isn’t a complicated procedure but some people really like to over complicate things or throw weird and wonderful “advancements” out there that actually do nothing for you at all. Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of popular diets out there that do work and work well but the majority of the so-called “detox” diets are just ridiculous. Some of them even claim to help you lost 21 lbs in 21 days, now to me that is just outright unhealthy. Most of the detox diets have you going on nothing but liquids for a short span before reintroducing solids. The issue is while on liquids you are generally on very low calories and then when you start to reintroduce solids you find it harder to control your eating since you are unaware of how any calories are in what you eat and how many you require as well, hence why counting calories is a much easier and more effective way of losing weight.
To work out your daily calorie requirements you can use any number of online calculators. In the past I have used this calculator to get a very rough idea of how much I should be eating. The number you are given should be used as a rough guide as the most accurate way of learning how many calories you require daily is to have medical tests done.
After you have your daily requirements then it really is as simple as looking at the back of the packets of food you will be eating as these days the nutritional information is printed in plain sight. Be careful when working with pasta, rice and any other dry ingredients as usually the nutritional values will be given as dry values and cooked values so make sure you calculate the correct totals.
The final thing I would recommend is to stop stressing. So you put on a few pounds over the holidays, so what? You can easily work it back off with some dedication and a little perseverance. The more you stress the harder you will try to inevitably you will push yourself to hard to quickly and end up back where you started, such is the life of yo-yo dieters. Although progress is slow this isn’t a race it’s more of an ultra-marathon so pacing yourself is vital!
As always if you have any questions or comments then drop them in below this post.
-Andrew
Cake Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Feature Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Technorati Tags: detox, weight+loss, diet, fitness, health, calorie, calorie+counting, stress, weight, fat, fat+loss, gym
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