Piggy faces everywhere...

Today, I am thinking about how we can win ourselves and conquer our weakness during the holidays.  I know my son's birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year everything are coming all at once within two months time. My biggest concern will be my diet and how I am going to control myself with all the good food around me.  So much temptations, so little will power.  Here I have some small little tips for everyone and myself to try to stay focus during this "happy, fat, eating, crazy" time.
Tip number 1: Set your goal before you start eating.
There are a few specific goals you have to set for yourselves during the holidays.  You have to know how much fat intake your body can take, you have to figure out how many days you are going to cheat and how many days you should be eating less than normal.  Figure out what your daily calories intake should be in order for you to maintain your weight and try to balance your diet out through the entire week.  Yes, we are looking about a week of diet.

I used a calender to mark the days that I am going to eat out or celebrate whatever with a big old "Piggy face".  I also marked the days that I definitely need to look skinny with a stick figure.  Those days are the days such as your company Christmas party or your family photo shoot.  In my case, I am going to "Pig" out on Nov 13, 24, 25.  (as you can see, I was a pig last night) and look skinny on Nov 19. So I know I will need to eat light like 500 calories on 14th, 15th and 18th.  I will use16th and 17th to eat normal like 800 calories or so if I need to. Or I can just simply balance my diet out with 700 calories everyday from 14th to the 18th.  Again, this is my own method. I don't want people to say, "you are eating too little" or "You are eating too much".  The point that I want to bring out is "focus" and "set goals" if you know what you are going to do, you will have almost 99.9 % chance of successful rate.

Tip number 2: If you want to lose weight instead of maintaining, try to eat 1/3 less than your normal food intake. You can lose up to 1 pound per week in 30 days because eating 1/3 less is like cutting 100 to 500 calories a day from your diet.

Tip number 3: try to eat less sugar, prefer less than 10 teaspoons a day.  First look at your food label.  Then divide sugar level by 4 = the teaspoons of sugar that you are going to consume. For example, the sugar level in my Marshmallow Treasure cereal, 1 cup is 12 g of sugar.  I will divide the 12 g by 4.
12g / 4 = 3 teaspoons. That means if I eat that 1 cup of cereal, I will get 3 teaspoons of sugar for that day. And my limit is 10 teaspoons per day.  That means, I cannot eat more than 3 cups of Marshmallow Treasure a day.  (Well this is just an example, I think in each 2 and 1/2 cups of Marshmallow Treasure, there are 12 grams of sugar)

Tip number 4: Always exercise on your cheat day.  Some of the best exercise that I recommend will be jumping rope and Turkish get-up with a kettlebell.  I am so far using a 10 pound Kettlebell and it is like nothing to a lot of "fit" people.  This is a great workout for your core, balance, cardio, strength and more importantly it is a great workout to get a flat tummy.  I have found a really good video on the internet about Turkish get-up. Turkish get-up for fat loss
I usually like to jump rope for 35 minutes that will help me losing 385 calories since 1 minute of rope jumping can lose 11 calories. As for Turkish get-up, I will just do it until I cannot do any more.

Tip number 5: Limit your fat intake on your non-cheat days.  Again read the food label.
Divide fat g by 12 = tablespoons of fat you are going to eat.  Since I have high cholesterol, my goal is to eat less than 2.5 tablespoons or 3 tablespoons the most each day.  For example, if the leg of lamb is 160g of fat,    then I will use 120 / 12 = 10 tablepoons of fat.  Since I know I can only eat 3 tablespoons of fat per day, I will only eat 1/10 of the leg of lamb and leave some room in my tummy for other fat grams.