Have you considered a quick diet before enjoying the gargantuan meals that await you at Christmas? If so, you had better change your mind.
Pre-Christmas diets have become a tradition for many gourmets who want to enjoy the beautiful holiday menus without feeling guilty. Lose a few pounds before the holidays to make sure you don’t gain any. A false good idea ?
According to Madame Figaro, this behavior is simply “counter productive”. Quite simply because you risk pushing your body. If you reduce the quantities, you are going to send the wrong message to your body, that of frustration. Going from a complete diet to a deprivation before starting again on large meals upsets the balance of your body. Every year as the holidays approach, nutrition experts advise French people to avoid this kind of diet that does not work. Whether before Christmas or during the week between December 25 and 31.
A diet that will make you fat!
Finally, the diet that promised you to refine your line risks on the contrary making you gain pounds. Indeed, the human body is intelligent and if it feels that you deprive it of certain foods, usually consumed, it will experience it as a situation of danger. Hunger will be seen as an alert that will prompt him to store more fat with each meal consumed, in order to withstand the shock.
“It then tries to compensate by reducing energy expenditure, and it sends a signal to the brain to tell it to eat. We will therefore be more hungry and when we bring in more calories, when we resume eating, he will do everything to store them ”, explains Cécile Betry, endocrinologist specializing in nutrition at Madame Figaro.
800 grams after the holidays
It is true that the holidays often lead to excess and weight gain. This is a phenomenon that affects the whole world according to a study published in 2016 by the New England Journal of Medicine. The article summarizing this study, conducted in Germany, the United States and Japan, reveals that participants’ weight was on average 0.5% higher 10 days after Christmas.
However, this is not a diet that will prevent you from this situation. It will be more advisable to practice more physical activity to respond to the culinary shock of the end of the year. Weight gain would be on average 800 grams on the scale after the December holidays but the return to a classic diet after the holidays would rebalance everything.