How To Avoid Holiday Weight Gain But Still Indulge

The winter holidays may be merry and bright, but they are also infamous for marked weight gain. But, if you are armed with a treadmill and a strong resolve, you can enjoy your favorite holiday foods and still avoid gaining weight.

Watch Your Portions

With a lavish holiday spread, be it a family dinner or office party, indulgence becomes a relentless temptation. To avoid overeating, you can try a variety of things:

Use a calorie tracker to log what and how much you’ve eaten.
Select a smaller plate to help control portion sizes.
Keep track of liquid calories, as they can add up quickly.

Avoid Mindless Snacking

Aside from holiday parties, there seems to be an excess of treats laying around every office, home, and school. It can be all too easy to reach a hand out and snag a frosted sugar cookie, a handful of minty candy, or other tasty goodies until you are nearly sick with mindless snacking.

So, while you don’t have to abstain entirely from all the holiday-specific delights, be mindful of what you are eating. If you really want that Santa-shaped cookie, stick to taking just one and avoid going back for more.

Add More Calorie-Burning Workouts To Your Routine

Normally, we don’t recommend trying to out-run overeating, as it is best to strive for a healthy balance between your workouts and nutrition. However, adding a couple more exercises to your routine can help offset overeating. Some workouts you may want to do are:

Incline Workouts

Adding incline to your walking and running workouts can help you burn calories faster, as well as improve your overall fitness.

Check out this incline workout!

High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

For fast calorie-burn, only a few things can compete with HIIT workouts. By mixing fast-paced exercise with short resting intervals, you can burn off that extra cookie in no time.

Check out one of these HIIT workouts!

Full-Body Workouts

To engage your whole body and build muscle for extended calorie burn, you should focus on full-body workouts. You can find many of them on iFit® – a top-notch virtual training program that has over 12,000 workouts available and accessible on NordicTrack machines.

Check out this full-body workout!

Stick To A Regular Sleep Schedule

Irregular sleeping habits and/or too little sleep can lead to weight gain. So, during the winter holidays, try to make it a point to stick to a regular sleeping schedule. Adults need 7-8 hours of sleep a night, so try to plan your holiday activities to accommodate your body’s needs.

Opt For Lighter Ingredients

To make your favorite foods less calorie heavy, you can swap out ingredients while still preserving the flavors. Some healthy cooking substitutions you may want to try are:

Switch out butter for applesauce or Greek yogurt.
Opt for low-fat dairy products.
Seek recipes that don’t include flour.
Halve the sugar in any recipe and use extracts (vanilla, peppermint) to flavor.

To help support you through the winter holidays and help you avoid gaining weight, check out the array of equipment available at NordicTrack. Whether you are ready to bring your running workouts indoors or want a full-body cross-training machine, you can find it at affordable prices.