FITNESS: Avoiding holiday pounds

The holidays are both a festive and stressful time of the year for most. Eating surrounds almost every activity, making it hard to stick to established eating habits.

Trying to keep stress out of your decision-making when it comes to food is a challenge. However, you can avoid putting on those extra holiday pounds by examining your motives for eating.

Most experts define emotional stress as a reaction to any situation that places special physical or psychological demands on individuals so as to unbalance their equilibrium. These demands give rise to feelings of fear, anger, anxiety or worry as the body responds to the perceived threat to its well-being.

Emotional stress is difficult to measure because it is highly subjective and influenced by personality and experience -- every person has a different sensitivity to stressful events.

The fight or flight response still regulates our body when it comes to dealing with stress. Recent research studies show that chronic outpouring of stress hormones may result in undesirable body changes. For example, some researchers believe that chronically elevated cortisol levels can lead to weight gain, especially in the belly.

The tough part about holiday eating is that so many emotions are identified with the foods we love. We all have fond memories that seem to be tied to certain foods. Without realizing it, we many times try to recapture those special moments by creating the same atmosphere, including the food served. We are taught from infancy that love and food are intertwined and throughout our lives we associate food with celebrations and happy times.

Although the holidays, like clockwork, arrive at the same time every year, many people tweak their stress levels into overdrive. Examine the sources of your stress. Shopping, visiting relatives and social occasions are all events that disrupt our daily lives. Although pleasurable, these events seem to raise our stress levels.

Instead of simply trying to avoid all those goodies during the holiday season, now is the time to kick your workout into overdrive. Where do you find the time? You make the time, since this should be the most important activity of your day. Exercise is a great way of dealing with stress while working off those holiday calories. Of course, exercising regularly does not mean you can eat anything and everything you want. But you can enjoy the foods of the season without packing on the pounds.

Adding a mind-body discipline such as yoga to your regular exercise routine might be just the key to dealing with mounting stress. Meditation, breathing techniques, biofeedback, relaxation tapes, guided imagery, journal writing and other forms of self-expression are likewise quite effective stress busters.

Making better decisions when it comes to food options should always be on your mind, even more so during the holidays. At social occasions, look at all of the food available before you start piling it on your plate. Take mental note of which foods are better options than others. Make only one trip to the buffet table and choose one dessert. Cutting down on alcoholic drinks also will reduce your caloric intake for the evening.

If you know you are going to an event where you will overindulge, make sure you get your workout in beforehand. Stress and holiday pounds can be managed by making better food choices.

Kim Springer and her husband, Mike, are Certified Personal Trainers and owners of Springer Training. They can be reached at 233-9442 or at their Web site www.springertraining.com.


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