Beginning the Holiday Season

The end of October is a challenging time for me.  It marks the beginning of the holiday season of parties and events, which always includes food. Halloween kicks things off and then on to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

Holiday seasons tend to give a great many people the binge bug. From late November through New Year's Eve, the holiday season can seem like a six-week-long smorgasbord. Larger, richer meals, special desserts, a few more h’orderves, another handful of nuts, a glass of punch.

When trying for a balanced diet, It's easy to lose both the balance and the diet.

Opportunities are endlessly staged in front of us ... holiday celebrations, family gatherings and friendly festivities.

It would be great to be able to successfully diet all throughout the holiday season.

It would be good to keep from overeating on special holiday occasions. 

 I’ll settle for reducing my food celebrations to a limited few.

I am working toward making my extra food occasions into one-day-only-celebrations on the actual holiday itself. Because actually:  Halloween is one day. Thanksgiving is one day. Christmas and Christmas Eve are two days. New Year’s Eve is one day. My birthday is in there too, and that’s one day. So that totals six special Holidays for me, and one-at-a-time, I can choose not to eat myself sick on any or all of those days. Six Celebration days is just under 10% of the Sixty-three days between Halloween and New Year’s Day . While overeating 10% of the time is not ideal, it is far better than overeating 30% to 100% of the time.

Even “normal” people tend to gain 5 lbs over the holidays, and then work to take them off in the new year. Unfortunately, here in my 7th year of maintenance, while my own body seems willing to easily PUT ON additional weight, it will then absolutely refuse to drop off that regained weight later.

Nowadays, losing weight is extremely difficult for me. As an older, short, normal-weight, sedentary, reduced-obese, female, my daily calorie burn is so low (daily average about 1050 calories) that I can’t manage to drop it down more than a couple of hundred calories (daily average about 850 calories), and …. according to my own recollection, and my detailed personal records……, doing that makes my body extra hungry, and it also becomes very tired and sleepy, which causes me to lie around more, and sleep longer, and my responsive behavior works to drop my metabolism down near the level of my diet calorie intake….resulting in little or no weight-loss. It’s a vicious cycle, which I’m trying to figure out how to overcome.

If I can lose a bit of weight between now and the end of the year, 

it will be great,
but my own 2012 Holiday goal is to gain zero lbs between now and the end of the year.