Is it appropriate to go on a diet during the Christmas Holidays

If you're working consistently towards your goal, eating in excess a couple days a year won't hurt your progress.

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I'm going to continue my cut through the holiday season. I know that a couple of days I'll be over and my weight will either maintain or go up slightly. But, because I'm planning on keeping on my cut, I won't have to worry too much about my weight possibly getting out of control or falling into old habits.

It isn't impossible to watch your calorie intake over the holidays. Eat at maintenance level on the actual holiday. Stick to your goal the other days of the month.
Today is November 20th. Set a reasonable sustainable goal like 1 lb a week and start logging today.
If you plan to go on a very restrictive low calorie diet I'd say you will not have a very happy holidays and will probably not end up being succesful at sticking to it.

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10479934/is-it-really-just-one-day/p1

Maybe have Christmas day off, but not the whole holiday period. I am going to have a day off tracking for Christmas but the rest of December will be tracked

misshoneyz2dab wrote: »

I've been told by a lot of people, that I should avoid going on diets during the Christmas period. Should I still lose weight in December?

I would log everything and stick to your plan to lose weight, take only Christmas day off.

So ballpark your numbers if you want to lose weight. Don't do daily. Do by the week. For example. This is Thanksgiving week. if you know you need 2000 calories a day to lose a pound, decide if you want that pound or can live with a half a pound and adjust the calories for that week to that number. For that pound at 2000 calories a day, that's 14000 calories for the week. Somehow I don't think you are going to eat 14000 calories on Thanksgiving day or Christmas. So from Thanksgiving Day to the next Thursday, adjust your calories so you still only get 14000 calories for that week. You will still lose a pound. Doing both, dropping to say 1/2 pound weight loss for that week and adjusting your daily calories to a weekly ball park, makes the holidays much easier and you won't feel deprived plus you won't feel totally guilty when you have that second piece of pie made with a butter pie crust or that extremely rich mac and cheese with 4 different types of cheese. And since you adjusted your goal to 1/2 a pound, you still have the success of losing weight that week. And if you want to nibble for the weeks in between, keep it on that 1/2 pound loss. A half a pound is still LOSS. And it's okay. You don't get any brownie points for losing it faster and being a martyr in the holidays if it makes you unhappy or ruins your loss. What counts is you keep on trucking toward your goal. Sometimes fast and sometimes slow.

My sin this week was a local ice cream place's quart of ice cream which has extra butter fat. They were selling out for the season. I got a quart which lasted me 3 days. And it's okay. I will adjust my calories for the week after my last bite. Usually I eat down the days before but this was unexpected and sure enough once I took that first bite, I was doomed. I could have chosen to have hysteria and throw my diet to the wind because OMG look what I ate. Instead this morning, I woke up, adjusted the calories and went trucking on. At the end of the week, I will still have a loss.

Ain't no reason not to go on a diet since you can still have a holiday.

In 2012, my husband and I travelled the world for months ... and gained weight from eating all the good food out there. We arrived in the area of Canada where most of my family are a couple weeks before Christmas, with the plan to stay there about a month. The next day we went to a local community gym and got a 1-month membership.

During that month, including Christmas of course, we both lost weight.

We were working out at the gym a couple hours just about every day ... plus going for bicycle rides for an hour or two on nicer days ... and eating a reasonable amount. We weren't depriving ourselves, you can bet I still had my grandmother's shortbread! But we weren't going crazy.


Since then, I've had about a week off over Christmas, plus it is summer (finally), so I usually ramp up my exercise through December, and then put in a lot of effort during my time off at Christmas, and I've lost weight each year. Last year, I hit my lowest weight in a long time about the day before Christmas.


So sure ... nothing wrong with making an effort to lose weight over Christmas.