A Message From Preston – December

Why is it that when it comes to watching our weight and trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle we consider the period between Thanksgiving and New Years Day to be some kind of a blank check period to throw caution to the wind?

“It doesn’t make sense to watch my diet because I know I am going to gain weight over the Holidays.” We have all heard this mantra from friends and co-workers.

But that being said, what is the skinny on weight gain over the Holiday Season?

Media stories often suggest that the average person gains 7 to 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And in surveys, people swear on a stack of Oreos that they gain, on average, about five pounds this time of year. But according to an article in the New York Times, several studies show that the average weight gain during the winter holidays is just one pound.

However, the news isn’t all good. Most people don’t ever lose the pound of weight they put on during the holidays, according to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine. Since the average weight gain during adulthood is about one to two pounds a year. This means much of midlife weight gain can be explained by holiday eating.

For people who are already overweight, the holiday weight news is worse. Although the average gain is only one pound, people who are already overweight tend to gain a lot more. One study found that overweight people gained five pounds or more during the holidays.

So if some of the employees for the companies you work with are overweight, odds are they have upped the ante (and the needle on the scale) and will be heading into 2014 even more at risk to health issues and injury on the job. So maybe now is the time to be proactive and have something in place with your business clients for when their employees return to work after the holidays, just to make sure this doesn’t happen.