Yes, you can avoid weight gain over the holidays!
The holidays are a time when family and friends gather to enjoy each other’s company — and eat! Indulgent meals, bountiful buffets, cookie swaps, holiday parties… it’s no surprise that maintaining a healthy weight can present even more challenges during the holidays than throughout the rest of the year.
But it doesn’t have to happen. With a bit of extra awareness, we can maintain our weight through the holidays and still enjoy lots of delicious food.
And that’s what this challenge is about. We will loosely track what we eat and our exercise in an app to determine and stay close enough to our maintenance calories throughout this part of the year. We won’t be measuring anything or trying to be exact. Estimations will work fine.
I would expect this to be the time commitment:
To Start: 20-minute set up if you are not already using a tracking app.
Saturdays: Up to 20 minutes to “close the week” and review your data
All other days: 10 minutes to enter what you ate and your exercise. (high level, no need to be exact)
So are you ready? If so, this is your 20 minutes set up to start:
Download a free version of My Fitness Pal. You can use any app, but I use My Fitness Pal, so if you use that one, I can answer tech questions for you. The rest of these directions apply to MPF, but the process may be similar in other apps.
The app may ask you some questions to determine your maintenance weight. You may have to answer them to get set up. But in the end, the app's number is not that useful. We will figure out your maintenance weight in a different way.
If the app asks you if it can track your activity, say YES.
Set the following reminders on your calendar.
10 minutes every evening to enter the food you ate that day
20 minutes every Saturday morning to weigh yourself, do a few calculations, and update your calorie goal for next week.
Make sure you get emails from julie@zoyoga.com. I will be guiding you through this process as we go.