What’s the difference between happy and merry? Happy is experiencing the effect of favourable fortune, while merry is jolly and full of high spirits.
For some, the most rapid road to high spirits is top-shelf (even bottom-shelf) food in quantity, which doesn’t necessarily bring as much joy as one anticipates. Without care, abundance during the New Year festivities may be more about the abdominal region rather than in the direction our merriment is aimed.
New year, new diet, new deal
Most diets are doomed to fail, either because they are too complicated or too extreme. Even when weight initially melts away, it can creep back on when boredom sets in and motivation lacks. However, this perennial problem for repeat dieters may have a solution. New findings from the University of Oxford prescribe 53 foolproof steps as a sure-fire route to getting slimmer.
Weight gain and weight loss are a crude way to judge one’s diet. Frequently, when touring with sports teams, players put on weight in muscle mass, but lose cumbersome body fat. A better measurement is recording body fat content, also termed ‘BMI’ or body fat index. You can buy scales that measure body fat. In the absence of a body fat machine, simply pinch the roll of tissue at your waist — your conscience will provide answers.
In an initial study published last year, Susan Jebb — a professor of diet and population health — and Dr Kerstin Frie — a researcher in health behaviours — examined what makes dieters lose their mojo.
They found people who weighed themselves daily and recorded their innermost thoughts as they stepped onto their bathroom scales were more likely to lose weight than those who carried on blindly unaware of how they were progressing.
Not everyone responds positively to self-weighing, and the team conducted pre-trial screening to ensure anyone with disordered eating habits did not take part.
“In general, people who need to lose weight worry about weighing themselves, so avoid it,” Frie says. “But we discovered when they were asked to do it daily and to audio-record their reaction, that gradually their anxieties diminished and, after two months, they were more likely to lose weight than those who avoided scales.”
Fire says it was the practice of self-regulation that came from stepping on the scales that helped to sustain motivation.
“With faddy and prescriptive diets, people are so used to following strict rules and lose heart when they slip up or break them,” she says. “By taking some control themselves, they gained dietary independence and confidence.”
Building on this, the team developed a DIY diet approach based entirely on self-regulation and, in their latest study published in this month’s British Journal of Health Psychology, they outline the 53 actions, part of what they call the PREVAIL programme, that were found to be effective.
In the trial, 100 participants were randomly assigned into two groups, with all being asked to weigh themselves daily, but only half to select at least one daily action from the list (there was no upper limit).
“After eight weeks the people adopting one or more of the 53 daily steps had lost half a stone [3.2kg] more than the others,” Frie says. “They were left to their own devices and encouraged to try as many of the steps as they could, but if only two or three were relevant they could just repeat those.
“We now know the key to losing weight is to take control,” Frie says. In the meantime, here’s how she advises getting started.
Rules
Actually start! Do not wait for your New Year’s resolution to commence. Hand to mouth is one of the worst exercises at this time of the year — try foot to pavement, your choice, or my lips are sealed.
Weigh yourself daily and record the weight either in a diary or on an app. Then stick to as many as possible of the 53 steps below, aiming for a wide range every week.
The basics
Eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables per day. Most adults manage only 4.2 portions, according to Public Health England.
Snack on vegetables only. The fibre will fill you up and they contain minimal calories.
Study the label. Stick to foods that contain less than 3g of fat per 100g.
Replace rice, potatoes, and pasta with vegetables.
Look for foods low in sugar. Stick to foods that contain 5g or less of sugar per 100g.
Make half your main meal salad or vegetables. Eat boiled or steamed vegetables and salad with low-calorie dressings made from yoghurt, lemon juice, or balsamic vinegar, which are nutrient-dense and low in calories. Potatoes don’t count.
Avoid fatty and processed meats. Remove all visible fat or skin on meat that you do eat.
What to rule out
Snacks between meals. That means no extras and sticking to three main meals per day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Crisps, biscuits, cakes, and sweets. Don’t eat these even as part of your three daily meals.
Fried food: sorry, but chips, crisps and battered fish are out.
Ditch starters and desserts at lunch and dinner. At breakfast consume only one type of food (porridge, toast, or eggs, for example).
White carbs (such as potatoes, white rice, pasta, white bread, and breakfast cereals) and sugary foods (such as pastries, cakes and biscuits, sweets, and chocolates) are out. Dairy and fruit are permitted.
What to swap
Make your vegetable intake as varied as possible. Bulk up your main meals with extra steamed vegetables, including carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage.
Replace unhealthy snacks with fruit and vegetables. If you do get the nibbles between meals, make sure you have a supply of carrots, capsicum and celery sticks, or apples and berries to keep you going.
Eat six to eight nuts. Being high in protein and fibre, nuts will fill you up, but allow yourself only six to eight per day and instead of your usual bag of crisps or unhealthy snack.
Try a meal-replacement product. Specially formulated bars, shakes, and soups are designed to provide the nutrients you need to support health, but with fewer calories than in a typical meal. Scientifically, they have been proven to help overweight people shed pounds when used appropriately.
Restructure your meals
Plan each day’s meals. This is critical. Decide what you are going to eat tomorrow and don’t deviate from it.
Stick to a maximum of three eating occasions. Allow yourself breakfast or brunch, lunch and dinner, or supper. Eat nothing in between the three meals.
Skip one meal per day. Miss out on breakfast, lunch, or dinner and don’t compensate by raiding the biscuit tin. Doing this means your body skips some of its usual calories and starts to use its fat reserves for energy instead.
Eat nothing after 8pm. People are more prone to impulsive eating during the evening. That usually means higher-calorie foods such as crisps, wine, and beer.
Count calories. A lot of people still don’t really know how many calories their food contains and yet there is clear evidence that counting calories can help people to lose weight. Use nutrition labels and apps to keep a tally and think about lower-calorie alternatives
Set a personal daily calorie goal. First, establish a rough idea of how many calories a person of your weight and height needs each day. You can do this with online calculators such as bmi-calories.com. From the total provided once you have input your details, you need to subtract 600 calories to reach your daily goal. Keep tabs on your calorie intake using apps such as MyFitnessPal and make sure you stay within your upper daily limit.
Fast once or twice per week. A fasting day — where you consume fewer than 800 calories — cuts out about half of the daily calories you usually consume. Your body will have to source 50 to 75 per cent of the energy you need from fat reserves. Make sure you stay well hydrated on your fasting days.
Keep a diet diary. Studies by psychologists have proven it not only helps people to focus more on what they are eating, but also provides insight into when they are most vulnerable to hunger pangs and snacking. Write down not just what you eat, but how you feel when you are eating it. With this knowledge you can prepare strategies to reduce boredom bingeing.
Check portion sizes. A big diet downfall is overestimating what constitutes a portion.
Think about what you drink
Stick to only water, black coffee, or tea. Fizzy, sugary, and sweetened drinks contribute more calories to the average person’s daily intake than most people realise. And don’t add sugar, honey, or syrups to your drinks.
Switch to diet drinks. A can of sugary drink contains about 100 calories.
Have an alcohol-free day. A glass of red wine contains upwards of 125 calories, a pint of beer 250 calories, and a gin and tonic about 170 calories.
Drink a pint of water before a meal. Several studies, including a 2018 paper in the Clinical Nutrition Research journal, have shown drinking water before a meal results in fewer calories being consumed.
Swap juices and smoothies for the whole fruit and vegetable to get more fibre to increase feelings of fullness. You are also less likely to get a spike in blood sugar levels.
Mealtime tactics
Take 20 chews per bite. This will reduce your eating speed, and studies have shown this results in feeling full before you overeat. Put your cutlery down between forkfuls.
Smell your food. Smell and taste every mouthful. This can help to prevent rushed overeating.
Stop before you are full: this can take practice, but it is possible to pre-empt satiety.
Use a smaller plate for a smaller serving size.
Cut up your food. Reducing the bite-size of food increases the number of mouthfuls you need to take and chew. This triggers the gut hormones into action and they send messages to the brain that you are full.
Spend no longer than 20 minutes eating a meal.
Get active
Walk or run up and down stairs. Stair climbing is fantastic for working the heart and lungs as well as the glutes and leg muscles. Do it fairly vigorously, until you are puffed. Take a breather and then repeat until you feel you can do no more.
Cycle further. Try to increase the duration of your rides by five to ten minutes.
Try intervals. Run or swim a short distance at a fairly hard pace. Take a rest. Go again.
Stretch or do yoga. Neither is a terrific calorie burner, but they do help to restore your body after exercise.
Join a Zoom exercise class.
Play tennis — you will burn about 285 calories in half an hour.
Lift weights or do a circuit. Adding some strength and resistance work to your routine helps to boost your body’s metabolic rate, and a circuit has the added advantage of raising the heart rate.
Do a daily 21-minute workout. Include a six-minute warm-up, 10-minute session, and five-minute cooldown.
Power walk for at least 15 minutes. Brisk walking (at a pace that leaves you too puffed to chat) is one of the best low-impact ways to get fit. You will burn about 155 calories in 15 minutes.
Incidental activity
Accumulate 10,000 steps throughout the day. By doing this you will burn about 500 calories.
Have as many car-free days as you can.
Walk and talk when on the phone and with friends. Minimise your sitting time.
Stand up at work. Stand at your desk and you burn between 100 to 200 calories an hour, nearly twice what you do sitting down.
Use the stairs more often. Climb a flight and you burn nine calories.
Organise a family hike or Frisbee game. Schedule an hour of outdoor activity.
Don’t sit in front of the TV. Stand up while you watch the box.
In survival skill training, where food can be spartan, imagining the consumption of a meal can be as good as the craving one has for the real thing. Try this technique over the holiday period.
In conclusion, remember, the best present you can give your family and friends is your presence in its finest form 2021.