How To Avoid Holiday Weight Gain

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One meal in November and one in December isn’t enough to cause significant holiday weight gain. Rather, there are many factors that come into play that cause people to gain weight at the end of the year. Celebrations and gifts centered around sweets, family stress, money stress, traveling stress, alcohol, etc. If you’re like me there’s always a furniture shuffle to make room for the tree and holiday decor. When you really think about it, there’s a lot that happens in a short period of time that frankly leaves us more stressed than we normally are.

What Does Stress Have To Do With Holiday Weight Gain?

When we’re stressed we activate the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system. This system is there to safeguard us when we perceive danger by providing our body with resources to fuel itself. A stressed body releases cortisol and cortisol pulls glucose out of storage and makes it available in the blood. As a primitive person that was useful if you had to outsmart a bear or scurry up a tree to get away from a wolf. Today, however, we’re stressed nearly all the time and the holidays add more stress on top of that.

Your body is stressed and your blood is filled with glucose but at the company holiday party that you didn’t want to go to you’re not climbing trees. Rather you’re making friends with the buffet table and a few drinks because eating is less awkward than some of those conversations. You’re also waiting for the alcohol to kick in so that this evening becomes less of a nuisance. Or maybe you love your co-workers but your family leaves you stressed yet you feel obligated to see them. Maybe you are the rare person who loves absolutely everyone but the stress of holiday spending has you wound up. Whatever stresses you out during the holidays the image below shows how stress can lead to weight gain.

How Do You Manage Stress During The Holidays?

Say No

Learn the power of NO by choosing joy over feeling obligated. If an event, task, or party is going to cause more stress than happiness then skip it.

Sleep

A 2019 study from American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology showed that not getting enough restful sleep interferes with your body’s ability to manage how full you feel after eating and also leads to weight gain.

To find out how the uncomfortable schedule affected metabolism, the researchers gave participants a standardized high-fat dinner, a bowl of chili mac, after four nights of sleep restriction. “It was very palatable — none of our subjects had trouble finishing it — but very calorically dense,” Ness said. Most participants felt less satisfied after eating the same rich meal while sleep deprived than when they had eaten it well-rested.

Then researchers compared blood samples from the study participants. They found that sleep restriction affected the postprandial lipid response, leading to faster clearance of lipids from the blood after a meal. That could predispose people to put on weight. “The lipids weren’t evaporating — they were being stored,” Buxton explained.

In the Journal Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome, they studied: The impact of sleep disorders on glucose metabolism: endocrine and molecular mechanisms and this is what they found: Insufficient sleep makes a person twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes. They have increased fasting blood sugar and indicators of insulin resistance.

Large-scale cross-sectional epidemiological studies conducted in various populations including adolescents, middle-aged and elderly subjects, hypertensive patients and pregnant women have convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that self-reported sleep duration is associated with approximately doubled prevalence of T2DM or impaired glucose tolerance, particularly in women [36–47]. Importantly, cross-sectional associations between T2DM and short sleep are independent of other traditional risk factors for diabetes. Furthermore, subjectively perceived insufficient, poor or short sleep is associated with several pre-diabetic features such as fasting hyperglycemia, elevated postprandial glucose and insulin levels or indices of whole-body insulin resistance [39,46,48–56]. Finally, inadequate sleep has also been shown to be detrimental in patients who have already developed diabetes, since it negatively impacts glycemic control [45,47].

Sleep isn’t defined by the number of hours you spent in bed tossing and turning. A good night’s sleep should be 7-8+ hours and you should wake up feeling refreshed and well-rested.

Holiday Spending Limits

There are zero good reasons to go broke over the holidays. Based on the success of Marie Kondo I’m going to wager that most of us have too many things already. Does that person really need another sweater or coffee mug? For this reason, I’m a fan of consumable gifts which are typically pretty inexpensive when you make them yourself. If someone gave me a loaf of pumpkin bread I’d be happy. Pair it with tea or coffee and I’d say that’s a pretty great gift. Receiving homemade ornaments has always been one of my favorite gifts to receive. Every year when I put that ornament on the tree it’s a reminder of the person who gave it to me.

Another option is to simply spend time with someone. Take them to a museum, go on a holiday hike, or have lunch together. Make the holiday season more about your presence than presents.

Find Joy

Your top priority to reduce stress during the holiday season is to simply lean into the things that bring you joy. Imagine what a stress-less holiday season would look like. What steps can you take to make the holidays look more like what you just imagined? Do more of that!

If you’ve had a busy week you may find that going out with friends relaxes you. Conversely, if you want to curl up on the couch with a cozy blanket and warm mug of your favorite drink then do that.

Choose more moments that bring you peace, comfort, and joy in lieu of stressful situations, overly late nights, treacherous road conditions, and too much alcohol.

Holiday Treats & Weight Gain

You might think that I’m going to tell you to avoid all sweets during the holidays but I’m not. I want to help you stick to your goals but I don’t want you to be miserable while you do that. Remember that joy bit I mentioned above? If grandma’s holiday cookies bring you joy then have a few if you want. Growing up my mom would make 5 or 6 kinds of cookies in multiple dozens. We had cookies sitting around our house for weeks. (THAT’s when sugar really becomes a problem.) A few cookies aren’t going to ruin you. If you work in an office that has a candy dish and they regularly bring in sugar-laden treats that’s where you have to be mindful. During the holidays it’s all about picking your moment. Enjoy the things that truly bring you joy without any guilt (guilt = stress) and skip the rest.

The place where people struggle is that not only are they craving sugar because they’re stressed but sugar is also highly addictive. It’s as addictive as heroin or cocaine. In today’s world, they’ve added sugar to nearly everything because it makes people eat more of whatever product they’re selling. If you’ve been paleo for a while it’s easier to turn these things away. The paleo diet is naturally a low glycemic diet (it doesn’t raise blood sugar as much as the Standard American Diet does) so we’re not triggered by carbohydrate cravings. Most of us have also learned that many of these so-called sugar-laden treats don’t feel like a treat after we eat them. Instead, we feel tired, achy, and less energetic.

Navigating Social Events To Prevent Holiday Weight Gain

We live in a world where most people think that low-fat and whole grain is healthy so they’re not going to understand your paleo lifestyle. One of the easiest ways I’ve found to avoid having the attention focused on you and your plate is to simply not mention what you’re doing. If you don’t make a big deal most people won’t even notice.

Another option is to eat before you go and/or bring a dish that works for you. If you eat before you go you’ll be less tempted because you’re already full. Typically when you bring a paleo casserole or dish it will likely be one of the first things to go because paleo food is loaded with flavor and not starchy bland things. Whatever food you can contribute to the event will always work in your favor. You can browse my recipes here.

I belong to a group that has dinner events throughout the year and I simply don’t attend those events because of the menu. The tickets are usually $50 which is steep when you’re going to go home hungry. Free events are different but I find that events with food are rarely free. It’s always best to ask if you can customize your plate. If it’s a buffet it’s easier than if dinner is being catered and served.

If you won’t have an adverse reaction to whatever is being served and it’s something you’re looking forward to eating then I say go for it. Just be mindful of how many times you’ve abandoned your eating strategy for joy in the present moment. Maybe gaining 10 pounds or so doesn’t bother you. Maybe your long term goal is more joyful than whatever food-stuff is currently in front of you. That’s the beauty of the whole thing, you get to choose.

The Role Of Alcohol In Holiday Weight Gain

Again, I’m not going to tell you to cut it out completely. I simply want to give you an awareness of what happens when you do indulge. Alcohol affects weight gain in two ways, hence why it’s important to discuss. While alcohol can help you fall asleep it doesn’t help you stay asleep. Rather you’ll end up with a night of interrupted sleep. String a bunch of these together and you can see how weight gain is very simple.

When you drink alcohol the body will always burn it first so any carbohydrates you consume with alcohol will most likely end up stored as body fat. Keep that in mind if you’re a social butterfly who is going to go to ALL the holiday parties.

I’ve found that club soda with a squeeze of lime works well if I’m not in the mood to drink. It looks like I’m being a social drinker without having to actually drink. If you do drink try to avoid syrupy sweet drinks and beer (liquid bread) if you’re really watching your carbohydrate intake. A splash of agave tequila, vodka, or whiskey either on the rocks or with club soda is slightly less offensive because the sugary mix and/or fruit juice aren’t there. Red wine has beneficial health properties but I also think that most would agree that a red wine hangover is one of the worst you can have, so be sensible about it.

My top hangover tip: Vitamin C before bed. I forget where I read that tidbit but over the last decade, it has worked for me every time. I’m not saying you’ll wake up feeling 100% normal, you’ll simply wake up feeling less bad. Of course, drinking a few glasses of water before bed will help too.