Don’t you wish you could dig into your favorite party and
holiday foods over the next month and not see the slightest increase in the
number on the scale? You can; you just need to know a few secrets and smart
strategies. Here’s how to treat yourself to delectable hors d’oeuvres, fancy
dinners out and sweet treats and still ring in the New Year at the same size
you are today.
Give yourself some wiggle room.
>Breaking up with a food you love is a recipe for
disaster. “Don’t deny yourself certain things, like cupcakes or French fries;
just limit the amounts,” says Robert Duyff. “Those foods often become more and
more desirable the longer you don’t eat them, meaning you’ll probably end up
bingeing.”
While
you know when you’ve gone overboard (ending up wrist-deep in a tub of
mocha-chip, say), it’s tough to figure out what constitutes an acceptable
amount of something that’s not so healthy. Now there’s an answer: In a paper
published in the journal Nutrition Today, Duyff and a team of nutritionists say
it’s OK to eat between 50 and 100 calories of indulgent foods a day. “As long
as you stay within your daily calorie limit and eat an overall healthy diet,
then allowing yourself a small portion of something sweet or higher in fat won’t
harm your waistline,” Duyff says. If you don’t trust yourself to keep the treat
small – think a fun-size candy bar or a handful of cheese crackers – go without
for a few days, bank those calories, then enjoy something more substantial
later, like a piece of pumpkin pie.
Be a smooth operator.
>The texture of the foods you eat can be the key to
keeping your portions in check. It turns out that if you’re trying to be
healthy, you’ll down a lot more of a treat if it’s crunchy as opposed to
creamy. The reasoning goes something like this: People assume that crunchy
foods have fewer calories than softer ones, so they eat more of them, according
to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“Through
a lifetime of eating, we’ve taught out brains that smooth foods, like butter,
ice cream and cheese, are higher in calories than crunchy foods, such as
celery, carrots and whole-grain cereal,” says study coauthor Dipayan Biswas,
Ph. D. So we’ll chomp away on potato chips but eat only a small serving of
mashed potatoes. Use this belief to your benefit by, say, picking a fudgy
brownie from the center of the pan versus a crispy one on the end. If you’re
really jonesing for something crunchy, save it for your’re browsing Pinterest
or in the middle of the Good Wife marathon; Biswas says that you’ll mindlessly
munch less on crispy snacks than creamy ones because they take more effort to
chew, forcing you to slow down.
Splurge on your entrée.
The next time you’re at a restaurant perusing the menu, keep
this in mind: The pricier dishes could pay big dividends for your health. A new
study from Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab found that people who spent
a little more for an all-you-can-eat buffet felt happier with the experience
than those who spent less. “Eating stimulates dopamine and serotonin, two
neurochemicals that induce satisfaction,” says Dana James, a nutritionist and
the founder of Food Coach NYC. “If you perceive food to be of higher quality
because of cost, your brain will produce even more of those neurochemicals,
meaning that you’re less likely to crave anything else.”
Face facts.
It’s natural to try to pretend that a treat is healthier
than it really is (triple-cream Brie is OK because it’s packed with protein),
but truly embracing how decadent it is can actually help you burn more
calories, their metabolism sped up and worked faster to process the treat.
People who drank the same milk shake thinking that is was low-calorie didn’t experience
the same metabolism boost.
“The high-calorie
milk shake group had a huge drop in their level of ghrelin, a hormone that
signals your brain to eat, and as a result, their metabolism sped up,” explains
lead study author Alia Crum, Ph.D. “Those who believed they had the light milk
shake didn’t see nearly as big a drop in ghrelin, so their brains sent out
signals to eat more food and slow down their metabolism.” The secret, then, to
keeping your system revved when you eat something luscious is to change your
mind-set about it. “if you think you’re indulging, your body will react
accordingly,” Crum says. “So focus on how sinful something tastes instead of
rushing through it.”
Let loose on the weekends.
>On a typical Wednesday night, you sit down to a dinner
or rotisserie chicken with roasted veggies, but come the weekend, you’re all
about a burger with fries and a glass of wine. The good news is that’s
perfectly OK. As long as you snap back to your normal eating pattern during the
week, it doesn't matter much that you splurge on the weekends. A Finnish study
found that most people’s weight naturally fluctuates throughout the week,
rising over the weekend, peaking on Sunday or Monday and dropping throughout
the week until it hits its lowest point on Friday. “Usually when people want to
lose weight, they think they have to stick to a strict diet all the time,”
study coauthor Anna-Leena Orsama says. “But it’s healthy to have slight
increases in weight over the weekends as long as you also have days during the
week when you eat fewer calories than you burn to make up for it.”
Skip the skim.
>A life full of cappuccinos, cheese, butter and ice cream
sounds like a path to pudginess, but a recent analysis of 16 studies linked
eating more full-fat dairy, rather than less, to a lower risk of obesity, “While
dietary guidelines say to skip drinking full-fat milk and to avoid using
butter, we believed there was a discrepancy between those guidelines and what
research actually shows,” says Mario Kratz, Ph.D., an associate member at the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “And sure enough, we found that people
who consume the most full-fat dairy products have the lowest obesity risk.”
The
researchers don’t know why; Kratz says that eating full-fat dairy may be more
satisfying, so you need less of it. Or it could be that they fatty acids in dairy affect
your metabolism in a way that prevents
weight gain. The bottom line: “There is little evidence to suggest that you
benefit from choosing nonfat or low-dairy products,” Kratz says. “Opt for
full-fat.” Just watch your portion sizes. A serving of chocolate chunk ice
cream is fine. The whole pint? Not so much :)
Save the evidence.
>Hang onto your plate at cocktail parties. A Cornell
University study shows that if you can see clues about what you’ve eaten –
pistachio shells, chicken bones, chocolate wrappers – you’ll consume 27 percent
less than you would if you were to toss them right away. “It comes down to the
simple concept of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’” says study coauthor Collin
Payne, Ph.D. When you’re chatting with friends and walking around and meeting
new people at a party, you’re distracted and paying no attention to how much
you’ve eaten. You need visual cues to tell you when to stop. If there aren’t
any skewers or toothpicks on your plate, Payne explains, it’s tougher to decide
to call it quits. As a result, you could easily down hundreds of extra calories
without realizing it. Another possible reason holding onto your scraps could
help you rein in your appetite; simple embarrassment. Nobody wants to be that
person squeezing yet more food onto a plateful of leftovers.
Hope this helps SURVIVE THE HOLIDAYS,
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