How Advent can help you lose weight
Follow Advent calendar rules all year round to ration your favourite nibble
This year I got my first ever Advent calendar. Never had one before. Raised in a mostly orthodox Jewish home we never had Advent calendars nor a Christmas tree. We did get Christmas presents but they came in a pillow case at the end of the bed rather than a Christmas stocking hung over the mantelpiece. I never tasted Panettone as a child but am assured I missed nothing there!
Anyway this year I decided I’d get myself an Advent calendar. I don’t know why the idea occurred to me. It just did. I discovered they were all half price or even less by the time I ordered one with my food delivery. People who buy Advent calendars are obviously very well organised! I chose one that does my favourite kind of chocolate - truffles and an assortment of them from a make I already adore (see pic).
As I write I’m on Day Five. No one told me they only go up to December 24th! I thought they were for the whole month. That however got me thinking. Suppose we take the idea of Advent and spread it over the year? Not the religious or Christmas aspect of it. Just the idea of having one chocolate or one treat a day? Giving up chocolate if that’s your “thing” can be very difficult. You fear that if you let yourself have one - even have them in the house - you’ll eat the lot. It has to be tons or none. That’s very similar to an alcoholic, smoker or drug addict. You can never have just one.
But we aren’t substance addicts. We just like our food rather too much. And you cannot give up food. Which is why dieting - much like our roads in the UK - is so full of potholes. Many dieters say they cannot eat just one chocolate. They regard this as blowing the diet so may as well blow it properly. It’s this kind of thinking makes dieting so prone to failure. It’s probably why most diets fail.
Feast or fast
However if you can train yourself to eat chocolate but limit it, you can conquer this feast or fast attitude towards it. I’m using chocolate since that’s the tipple most dieters falter over. However it could be cheese or crisps or something else that’s high in calories which you find hard to stop eating.
The Advent way of dieting means you allow yourself one of these treats a day - or two at the very most. This way you train yourself out of a bingeing habit when let loose on the food you love.
I’m going to give it a go when I reach the end of my Advent calendar. One or two squares of chocolate each day. A ritual. Something I must do every day. Then stop. I’ll report on how it goes. For me this has always been about trying to eat as a non-dieter does. Treat food as, mostly, a necessity. For those of us who are obsessed with our food it’s probably impossible to ever entirely overcome that obsession. A former alcoholic is never a non-drinker - they’re in recovery. A former smoker is never a non-smoker; we’ll always be ex-smokers. Likewise with dieters we can’t ever eat purely for survival because that’s not how we think about food. Some eat to live; we live to eat. And we probably always will. But we can try to control it a bit or even make that control part of our obsession with food.
Use health as your motivator
For me, accepting I don’t have a normal relationship with food is a big part of how I’ve managed to lose weight. I’ve taken that obsession and used it to my advantage. So instead of being obsessed with food I’ve made myself obsessed with keeping my weight down purely for health reasons and that feels great. Health is, I think, the best motivator there is. Not just living longer but living longer in as healthy a way as possible. And it’s healthy to eat chocolate, cheese, whatever is your poison, at least some of the time rather than give them up entirely. Make friends with your greatest desire and let yourself have some. That way, so my thinking goes. you control it; it doesn’t control you.
Just one more Substack before Christmas then I’m taking a break till early January. I hope by using the Advent rule I don’t gain too much weight over Christmas. I gained five pounds last year. I hope this year it’ll be less.