by Michelle Wilkinson

Created on: October 16, 2009

If you want to lose weight it helps to be committed to the process, but this commitment can be severely challenged with the arrival of the festive season. As Christmas approaches you find that it is difficult to go food shopping without noticing the various offers on chocolates and nibbles that only come out at this time of year, and you can find yourself reaching for items you'd usually have no problem avoiding. You might tell yourself that you're buying them for the kids or for visiting relatives, but you know in the back of your head that you won't be able to resist the temptation to partake of some calorific goodies yourself.

The festive season is generally associated with overindulgence, as people eat huge quantities of food, often containing lots of fat and sugar, and drink copious amounts of alcohol, usually forgetting how calorific alcoholic beverages are. Christmas can therefore prove to be somewhat of a nightmare if you're trying to lose weight and want to continue on the right path even though the people around you are stuffing their faces with chocolate and nuts.

It is easy to find your commitment to weight loss ebbing away when you visit relatives who thrust a plateful of cakes and cookies in your face, and being aware that eating them will mean exceeding your calorie allowance you politely decline even though you really want them. Sometimes you just don't care and so eventually succumb to temptation, allowing yourself to eat whatever is on offer. If everybody else around you is eating and drinking what they want without worrying, why shouldn't you be able to? After all, you tell yourself, you can always get back on track once the festive season is over.

This is sometimes more of a challenge than you think it's going to be, though, as relaxing your routine over Christmas can make you feel good and not so stressed out, and so the thought of having to go back to a structured way of eating and planning your meals in advance can be somewhat off-putting. This is why many people prefer to continue monitoring their diet over the festive period so they don't unlearn all the good habits that have become part of their life in the preceding months.

One day off over Christmas is hardly likely to do you any harm, but you can find that one day turns into one month of overindulgence and it can be harder to get back into a routine that will enable you to lose weight if you give yourself a complete break over the festive period. How committed you are to continuing your weight loss over Christmas and whether you can get back on track obviously depends on the kind of person you are, so it is you who has to decide on the best course of action.

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