Ah, November and December, where months are spent celebrating and being merry and the time of year when diets go completely off the rails. It’s a difficult time to keep to our diet and exercise goals, but there are a few changes a person can make so we can get through the long holiday season relatively unscathed. Because it would be nice to not completely blow all our health and weight loss goals, especially if you’ve made some great gains the previous year.
One of the things I started doing in November was food prepping. It can be a difficult thing to get into. There’s a lot of planning, shopping, and cooking that a person has to do, but it makes it a lot easier to just eat what’s in the fridge rather than the temptations that are everywhere during the holidays. Heavy rich foods that tempt even the most stalwart of us because “it’s just the holidays, anyways” can be a convincing excuse.
Meal prepping involves preparing all the food in a single day that a person needs for the next 5 days. I actually make yogurt (for me) and bread (for my spouse) one day, then the next day I make food for our meals so it was kind of split into two days. So yeah, both my days off during the week are spent cooking.
In general I don’t eat baked goods, deserts, or ice-cream as part of my weight loss regimen.
Oh, how I miss you ice-cream. But during this time of year, I’m extra disciplined about not snacking at night.
Breakfast was ¾ cup homemade yogurt with a teaspoon of granola and a teaspoon of hemp hearts, and ½ cup of oats with ½ a cup of plain almond milk and berries for overnight oats. Lunch was hummus with carrots and celery, or tomato and mushroom omelet over rice with steamed vegetables. Dinner were such things as ginger chicken over rice with a large serving of steamed cabbage, or stir fried beef with peppers over rice. For dinners, I just made sure to practice excellent portion control and included extra servings of steamed vegetables with each meal like broccoli, cabbage, or cauliflower, when I prepped my meals into those black meal prep containers (I prefer the two split compartment ones). You don’t even have to order the containers online anymore, they sale large stacks of them at Walmart for reasonable prices.
Being so regimented with eating the majority of the month gave me the freedom to have those indulgences on days when treats were all around at work, or the week after Thanksgiving or Christmas when delicious high calorie leftovers were everywhere.
By New Year’s Eve I had only gained two pounds while still being able to feel like I got to enjoy the holiday season with plenty of indulgences.
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