Avoid Holiday Weight Gain: Tip #1

The ground is covered with snow, I’m listening to holiday music, and I’m thinking about Christmas. So even though we still have a week to go until Thanksgiving, I thought I’d get started writing some holiday posts.

My subject? Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain. For the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some tips to help us avoid the average 3-5 pound holiday weight gain. Here’s my first tip:

Avoid Holiday Weight Gain Tip #1: Rate your food (but not out loud)

This is something I started doing last summer. It occurred to me that I often eat things like ice cream because in my mind I’m thinking, oh, I love ice cream.

But the truth is, I don’t love every single box of ice cream that comes into the house. Some of it is just so-so, and it’s the so-so I want to eliminate.

So here’s the new rule I made: if it’s not good for me, and it’s less than an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, I don’t eat it (unless I’m in a situation where it would be more loving to eat it, but that almost never happens).

I was telling my husband about my new policy on our way home from the Dairy Queen where he’d just gotten a medium blizzard.

As an experiment, I asked him to rate each bite of his blizzard because part of my theory is that the taste experience diminishes at some point in the treat-eating process.

Since my husband is an all-or-nothing kind of guy, I was expecting him to eat the whole blizzard and say, It’s still a 10.

But he surprised me.

About halfway through the blizzard, he said, “Okay, I’m at a 3. I think the next time I’ll get a mini-blizzard.”

And he did.

The next time we went to the Dairy Queen he got a mini-blizzard.

Moral of the story: if it works for blizzards, it can work for pumpkin pie and Christmas cookies.

Can you imagine how much less we would eat at Thanksgiving, if we stopped eating once the taste experience dropped to a 7 or an 8?

If you get a chance, give it a try and tell me how it goes.