Holiday weight-gain fears often exaggerated - Nutrition Notes- msnbc.com

Link: Holiday weight-gain fears often exaggerated - Nutrition Notes- msnbc.com.

The main point of this article, as reflected by the headline, is intriguing enough. But I found the point in the second paragraph even more compelling: "Although our annual holiday gains may be small, many people fail to lose the additional weight from year to year." (Emphasis added.) The article details a research study in which "more than half of the study participants’ annual weight gain was put on during the six-week holiday season."

So the problem is not so much whatever weight you might put on through the annual holiday noshing, but simply going back to one's usual eating patterns--which will continue to hold your weight steady without doing anything to take off the holiday weight. Do that enough years in a row, and all those little gains will eventually add up.

In other words, once again we see that overweight is not a problem that just suddenly appears overnight, but is a long slow almost impercepably gradual process of accumulation. Which is one of many reasons why, when addressing the overweight problem, a long slow gradual process of weight loss through long-term behavior change works much better than crash-dieting.

Comments

[Allura]

I'm a bit of a Flylady fan, and one of her quotes is, "Your house didn't get dirty in a day; you're not going to clean it in a day." That's not just your home but your body, too. :)