Healthy Holiday Eating - Tips & Secrets For Saving Calories

This article is about choosing foods wisely for a fit Thanksgiving and at home workouts to keep fitness up through the holidays. This can also be applied to the Christmas Holidays and Halloween!

This is the season where sweets and treats are prevalent, tempting and in your face at the office, at home, at friends, at the bank and just about everywhere. We are hit with a whammy every few weeks from here until the New Year making it harder to stick with an exercise regimen and proper diet. Family gatherings and holiday travel make it sometimes difficult to continue training especially if you do not go somewhere with gym access. All these holidays revolve around good, rich and yummy foods which you want to and should partake in especially if you have been exercising and eating right diligently all year round. The key is portion control on the rich and sweet foods plus consideration to the fact that it is not just one meal you will be attending that'll include these foods so portions control is stressed even more.

It is easier to control a meal if you are the one hosting, making it easy for you to use healthier alternatives which everyone will enjoy. This is a great way to teach your guests some tips so that they can take hold and use them for their own entertaining. Passing greetings this season is a blessing but teaching some healthy meal tips can save lives and help your guests with their or heath improvements. Health issues such as hypertension, diabetes and the like are easily remedies with lifestyle change in the diet but can be hard. By trying the foods you can clinch them, and then you can teach them how easy it can be to implement these new healthy foods because if they like it they will ask you about the recipe.

Choices that are lower fat and substitutes can be tastier than the original item. Using no fat plain yogurt in place of sour cream and mayonnaise can lower the fat of items such as mashed potato, coleslaw and other cold salads. Even egg and tuna salad are excellent done this way. Salad dressing can also benefit from the use of yogurt. I like to use lemons, grainy mustard and yogurt for a simple yet tasty, creamy salad dressing and you can even use this on top of a baked potato.

Vegetable pate, olive tapenade, bruschetta and chopped, marinated roasted veggies make for fast and easy finger foods, appetizers and hors d'oeuvres. An alternative to crackers is bagel chips, rye chips and Raincoast chips (this is a brand, one of their items is made with olives, honey, figs and seeds, very nutritious) are all made from lower carb and lower fat choices and are double baked to be a crisp.

Fresh veggies are always present at gatherings and with good reason. The dressing I mentioned above is a good dip for these veggies. Choose dark green and bright colored vegetables which are full of cancer fighting phytochemicals.

When visiting, make sure to pick and choose the most nutritious items then find a few of the rich and or sweet items to try out but choose smaller portions so that you can enjoy more than one but do not go overboard and this way you can try some at your next outing as well.. Alternatively if there is one item in particular you like best and can forfeit all other sweet and rich foods for, then get a nice serving of that and enjoy your treat! You can do this at each outing, within reason of course.

Whether you cooking or being cooked for, your time will be limited and the more the social activities you do with higher frequency during the holidays the more important it is to get in some type of exercise each day even if only in small spurts.

The best idea is to get up from bed 15-30 minutes early and get the workout done first. For those with fat loss needs you will want to go for 30 minutes with 15 for weights and 15 for cardio.

The cardio portion can be 15 minutes of a jog or if you wish to stay indoors, you can try 5 minutes stepping using any stair case and a bottom step or do the stairs up and down for 5 minutes followed by a series of 2 minutes jogging on the spot followed by 2 minutes jumping jacks and 2 minutes skipping with or without a rope. For the last 4 minutes you would march on the spot slowing the movement down each minute until you are done and can stretch.

The 15 minutes of weight bearing work is comprised of 2 sets of 20 pushups/knee pushups/chair pushups (depending on your fitness level), 2 sets of 20 crunches, 2 sets of 20 horizontal chin ups, 2 sets of 20 tricep dips, and 2 sets of 20 overhead presses using dumbbells or even water bottles if you have no equipment accessible to you.

Do these 6 times per week with a day off during your holiday and busier weeks. It is a very light workout so there is no fear of overtraining during this program. You can also split up the cardio and weight bearing into 2 different times of the day if you need. The sweat you get from the cardio is needed so maybe save this for pre shower time!

By Linda Cusmano