Christmas, Thanksgiving or [Insert Your Holiday of Choice Here]… whatever the occasion, holiday weight gain is inevitable… 🎄

…or is it? 🤔

Fortunately, you can enjoy eating your favourite holiday foods, drinking alcohol and chilling out without succumbing to holiday weight gain. 🙌

And it all starts with a radio analogy.

Confused? Read on as I offer you an alternative way of thinking about your approach to the holidays, which allows you to have your cake and eat it.

1. Stop pressing the pause button during holidays
2. Implementing the Dial System to combat holiday weight gain
3. How the Dial System works
   1. Example #1: The Christmas holidays
   2. Example #2: Eating takeout food
4. The final word on preventing holiday weight gain

Stop pressing the pause button during holidays

If you want to maintain a healthy weight throughout the year, it’s often clear what you need to do.

You have to practice things like good nutrition, plenty of daily movement, quality sleep, and an appropriate way to manage stress.

That’s kind of obvious.

Throughout the year, you may find all of this comes relatively easily, but then normal life is interrupted.

Now, this interruption could be due to something nice, like a holiday or vacation. But it could be another change in your life.

Perhaps a child or partner is ill. Or you are experiencing a big life event – like a wedding, redundancy, or moving home.

When life is disrupted – for good or bad – many people will often just press the pause button on their goals.

This can feel sensible, but in the long term, it can have dire effects.

To remedy this, we are going to start thinking of your life as a stereo system, with buttons and dials.

Implementing the Dial System to combat holiday weight gain

Let’s use an example: it’s the week of Christmas. The sugar cookies are plentiful, the gyms close, and you are out partying most nights. 🎅

Chances are, you press the pause button on your healthy routines. After all, you’ll get back to the gym after Christmas, right?

While this may feel sensible, many people find it difficult to get back into their healthy routines after the holidays because they stopped completely.

Then, two weeks of holiday weight gain later, you are ready to restart… but suddenly something else happens.

Perhaps you lose your job, or your grandma is taken ill, or you have a house move planned.

You press the pause button again and say ‘I’ll get back to my healthy lifestyle in a few weeks when this all calms down’.

The problem is that life has a funny way of throwing things at you constantly.

Life rarely calms down.

How the Dial System works

Constantly pressing the pause button can really disrupt your goals, especially if you are doing it regularly.

Fortunately, underneath all those play and pause buttons, you will find some volume dials. Think of these volume dials as components in your life.

There’s one dial for nutrition, one for movement, one for sleep and so on.

When the dial is turned up to 10 on each of these things, you are doing things perfectly.

For example, your movement dial at 10 may be you doing six strenuous workouts each week and a daily hour-long walk. That’s incredible!

Your nutrition dial at a 10 may be eating homemade whole-foods based dishes for each meal, all with servings of organic vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole grains, with no refined sugars or processed foods.

Of course, most of us – myself included – have other things going on in life, and being at a 10 isn’t usually possible. It’s also not always enjoyable!

So, you may be at an 8, a 7, or a 6.

Your 6 on the dial may be three gym sessions a week and a 30-minute walk each day. And that’s great. If you are at a 6 on your dial consistently – and your nutrition and sleep dials are all at 6s too – then you’re going to make really good progress.

A consistent 6, 7 or 8 is amazing and your body will thank you for it. (If you are curious, I am probably at a 6 or 7 on most of my dials most weeks. Nobody is perfect!)

The main takeaway here is that when life gets busy, you turn your dials down.

You don’t stop completely. You just look where gains can be made.

Then, when life slows down again, you can crank the dial back up to a 7, 8 or 9!

Example #1: The Christmas holidays

It’s the week of Christmas and you are very busy.

You have family coming to stay, you have a party at work, you have to do last-minute Christmas shopping and you have to plan dinner for the big day.

Instead of throwing your hands in the air and saying ‘Screw it, I’m taking two weeks off my regular gym and nutrition plan’, you instead start moving your dials.

You turn your movement dial from a 6 to maybe a 4. Instead of three gym sessions that week, you instead aim for one bodyweight session at home and a daily 30-minute walk.

It’s not ideal, but it’s better than doing nothing.

You can turn your nutrition dial from a 7 to a 3. You can enjoy all that holiday food, but you still aim to eat at least one meal per day which isn’t processed, and you snack mindfully.

Again, it’s far from ideal but it’s way better than just giving up for the week and pressing pause.

Example #2: Eating takeout food

I love eating well, but I also love Chinese takeout food.

Whether it’s been a busy day and I can’t cook, or I simply want a nice treat, I will often order from a vegan Chinese restaurant near me.

Naturally, a lot of the food they serve is swimming in sugar and fat.

If I was to press the pause button, I would just argue, “My nutrition and fitness goals are on pause, I might as well order the sugary sweet and sour tofu and noodles… with some deep fried spring rolls”.

Instead, I use the dial system and say, “I am still working on my nutrition and fitness goals. I know Chinese takeout isn’t the best option, but I will make it as healthy as I can.”

So I ask them to make me tempeh with broccoli, carrots and Chinese mushrooms. No sides. I always have little packs of microwave wholegrain rice in my kitchen, so I use one of those on the side.

My meal now contains wholegrains, vegetables, lean plant-based protein, and not much sugar or saturated fat.

Suddenly takeout food, while still not ideal, is not too bad.

Then I go for a short walk after dinner to aid digestion.

Had I pressed pause, I’d have just gone for the stickiest, sweetest, fattest thing on the menu and then sat on the sofa all night.

The final word on preventing holiday weight gain

You can probably think about little things you can do to turn your dial down as opposed to pressing pause.

This keeps you in the mindset of your goals and helps you avoid holiday weight gain, whether that’s Thanksgiving or summer vacation.

Something is better than nothing.

Something keeps things ticking over.

As a side note, you can see how preparation can help you in these circumstances.

Have healthy snacks in the cupboards, have your gym kit ready to go, have running shoes in the car. Then when life strikes, you are prepared.

In my eyes, this kind of practice is the best way to maintain a healthy weight without having to deny yourself the pleasures of life.

(🎙️ You can listen to this article as a podcast episode here)