Weight Loss Advice for the Holidays
Many people benefit from simply maintaining whatever weight they lost. Still continue fasting but allow yourself some longer eating windows. Not gaining in December should be considered a victory.
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Weight Loss Goals for the Holidays
If you’ve been steadily losing weight for the last few months, you might want to consider making it your goal to maintain your weight for the month of December.
Please don’t stop fasting and start eating Coco Puffs at 7 am, because, “Hey, it’s December.” Don’t start putting cream in your coffee while “fasting” or taking up Diet Coke again.
Instead, keep going with whatever fasting routine is giving you success. This can also include a few longer eating windows—for example, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But it should not be an excuse to return to old habits every day.
This is your chance to practice making IF a lifestyle. For something to be a lifestyle, it needs to be flexible enough to follow you through all the seasons of life, including holidays. It needs to be something that you can do on vacation, at parties, when staying at someone’s house, when having guests at your house, when eating out.
And a lifestyle change needs to be compatible with seasons—with summer and all the cookouts and barbeques, with December and all its special food-oriented events.
One of the things that I love about IF the most is that it is surprisingly compatible with all those different challenges that every other diet plan failed on. It’s horrible to count Weight Watchers points while on vacation. It’s nearly impossible to eat a specific diet when staying at someone else’s house.
But IF is flexible and sustainable.
And yet, because so many of us had years of yo-yo dieting where we were either completely on or completely off, we need more practice flexing in and out.
Remember that the word flexible comes from the concept of flexing out of shape in order to return to the original shape, like when you bend a rubber ruler and then it becomes straight again. When you bend a hard plastic ruler, it snaps and never returns.
With IF, we need to practice flexing a little from the good thing we have going and then returning back to it. We don’t want to be so rigid that a small deviation breaks us entirely.
When I used to do various diets, I had a pattern of meniacally sticking to a diet, until something interrupted my progress. Then I fell hard and never got started again. I gained back all the weight I had lost plus some extra.
IF is the first plan I’ve been on where I can flex a bit without gaining and then pick right up doing my thing after the special time is over.
If you want to continue to try to lose in December, that’s great too. But for some people, you might want to practice a well-planned pause.
This is what I did a year ago.
At the end of last November, I was about 3/4th of the way to my goal weight—down 30 lbs with 15 more to lose. I continued to do my alternate day fasting through the first three weeks of December but took the week between Christmas and New Year’s to do a daily eating window.
There were a few days I purposely paused all IF, for example, Christmas morning.
Here’s my Happy Scale graph for November where I was losing weight at a decent clip. (The green is the trend, and the blue is actual weight.)
I started about 154 and ended about 149. Losing 5 lbs a month was a great pace for me.
But then here’s December:
Didn’t really lose that much weight in December, did I? I had a new low weight of 146 around Dec. 20th, but then it went up a little bit. I clocked in with a rogue weight of 151 (shown below) on January 1st but that quickly went back down. Maybe water weight associated with too many carbs?
And yet, I can honestly say I was very happy with this graph. I considered it a victory to have lost over 30 lbs since August and not gain any back in December.
Then in January and February, I was off to the races again.
By the end of February, I was already closing in on my goal weight of 135 despite having a more flexible December. No regrets!
You are a successful IFer if you can lighten your schedule up a bit in December in a way that doesn’t constitute a complete return to your old ways.
You are successful if you don’t gain back 20 of the pounds you just lost and you don’t temporarily put on hold everything you’ve learned for the last few months.
The World’s Richest, Tastiest Gravy
This gravy tastes a hundred times better if you make it out of broth homemade from chicken or turkey bones. For best results, roast some bone-in chicken breasts, thighs, legs, wings, or a whole chicken. Then simmer the bones in water for 12 hours. Use this broth to make the gravy.
Melt 1/4 cup butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. When melted, add 1/4 cup flour and slowly simmer for 1 minute to cook flour. Now slowly whisk in 1 cup (or more depending on desired thickness) of delectable homemade chicken or turkey bone broth and bring to a boil. Remove from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. This recipe will make enough for 6 people. Double, triple, or quadruple for large groups.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Leslie
