Holidays and Calories

Today is the American Thanksgiving and while I won’t be doing anything in particular about it (other than visiting Calendar Man in Arkham City – I love games with date sensitive content!) I know many of my readers are American, and I was told again yesterday that I should help people out that what to lose weight and get fit.  Which brings up the topic at hand.  Holidays and Calories go hand in hand, it’s pretty much unavoidable unless you are going to sit there and make a pouty face while the rest of your family eats delicious things.

My solution to the whole situation especially when I was losing weight was a two part attack.  Save my calories for the big meal of the day and do something either on the day of the even or the day before and day after.  The second part of that was a cinch for me because I did exercise pretty much every day anyways so there was no extra planning involved at all.  Do something cardio that burns some calories, it’s even better if you can do it the same day.  I have no fact based proof that that is true, but I know it made me feel a whole lot better about eating the big holiday meal.  I knew my weight was going to go up a bit, bit I also knew I had worked hard that day, and that two days hence the going up would just be a little blip on my Wii Fit chart.

Saving calories is a bit harder, depending on when you meal is.  Somewhere along the line my family decided that holiday meals were to be had at about 1pm, something to do with the length of time it took to drive to visit.  Thought about ten years ago that point became moot since we all moved to within a half hour drive of each other, but it stuck so whatever.  Thankfully we had no big eating holidays while I was while I was losing weight, because I ate so little I  would have had to have water and air for breakfast and dinner to have any calories to eat the big meal.  When my first fit Thanksgiving rolled around I was eating about 2200 Calories a day, but as you know pie has lots of calories and I like pie.  So typically then and even now I tend to have a filling but low calories breakfast on a day like that say two eggs and and English muffin, that’s 270 calories, then for dinner it might be something like cereal or left over turkey made into a sammich, so say 300-400 calories so two meals of the day only account for 600-700 calories.  That leaves like 1500 calories to spend on one big meal, not exactly the ideal way to portion out the day, but again I wanted to be able to take part, and eat what I wanted without much worry.

My second year of fit holiday meals is just coming up, well thanksgiving is already past for us in Canada, and I know I can now eat what I want.  It’s a liberating feeling once you are in shape, but the thing is, what I want to eat now is only about half of what I would eat two years ago.  The mentality of eating right is burned into my brain, and I’ve eaten the right amounts for so long that my tummy knows when it’s time to quit and I listen.

So for that reading that are getting in shape, enjoy the day, if your a fanatic I was, go for a run this morning then enjoy knowing you have done your exercise deed for the day and save a few calories somewhere else so you can have a big piece of pie rather than a little sliver.  If you simply don’t have the time for that, then don’t sweat it too bad, you’ll be up in weight tomorrow, but back to watching the scale go down the day after that.