Have you noticed that since Thanksgiving, it has been a chain of feasts and parties and there are still more to come? This is the party season, and no matter how bad the economy is, it can’t stop people from holding parties.
Shaking your head to say no to more food to control your calorie intake and watch your health is easier said than done.
You might not have noticed but throughout the holiday season, a bite here and a spoonful there, a sip of this and a gulp of that will all add up and you will see the results when you wake up one morning after the holidays to find your clothes have grown tighter.
You may have memorized a set of rules to control your food intake at a party like drinking lots of water before going off, taking a small plate and refusing to go for seconds, or staying away from the buffet table to avoid temptation but oftentimes you may have found these rules easier to make than follow.
At a recent party, controlling one’s diet was so hard to do because the menu changed every 30 minutes or so as more guests arrived with different platters of food that “you just have to try.”
You can have a feast at the parties and suffer the consequences of a wider waistline afterward but if you want to lose all the calories that you took in, you can walk it off. One holiday meal could have as many as thousands of calories and you do not eat just one meal. Here, it is undeniable some even start as early as when they are grilling the barbeque at the grill or cooking in the kitchen and all the way to the party proper and all the way to clean up the leftovers the next day.
On a small island as Saipan where people know one another, you will get invitations to more parties and could have more mega meals in a week during the holidays, not to mention the snacks and other meals you sneak in between.
Mission impossible
In other countries, walking/running is an inevitable part of everyday life to get to where you’re going. You need to walk or run to get from one bus stop to another and from one point to another. In the CNMI, walking is just mission impossible for the vast majority. Here people ride their cars to buy something from the store at the next block.
In this case, walking off the calories for one who is glued to the office chair for the whole day or wheels the chair around to get to the next table, and nailed to the couch in front of the TV when home at night, walking is next to mission impossible.
Holiday calorie calculator
Have you even heard of a holiday calorie calculator? This thing teaches you to count how much calories you took in, and how many miles or steps you have to walk to burn those calories.
Here’s an example on how to calculate your calories from walking.about.com website:
If you are at a party and this is what you had: one mixed drink, a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, a glass of juice or cider, a cup of eggnog, 10 Wheat Thins, two tablespoons of cheese ball, one mini-quiche, two oz. boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce, two oz. Swedish meatballs, one slice of pumpkin pie, one slice of fruitcake, one snickerdoodle cookie, one iced gingerbread cookie, and one piece of divinity.
Your total intake would have been 2039 calories. This means you need to walk 20.39 miles, 32.88 kilometers, or take 40,780 steps (that is if you cover one mile in 2,000 steps) to burn the whole meal off.
Another article published in the walking.about.com web site states that you can burn some calories without being aware of it in doing daily chores such as spending 45 minutes to clean the house to burn 162 calories, or spending 20 minutes in packing a suitcase and loading it to the car to burn 52 calories. Cooking dinner for 30 minutes can also burn 78 calories while washing the dishes for 15 minutes is estimated to burn 33 calories.
You mop the floor for five minutes and you burn 22 calories, or play hide and seek with the children for 15 minutes and you burn 74 calories.
Chocolate culprits
In addition to all the food that literally made the table groan under its weight, chocolate candies were everywhere—in plates and boxes beside the door, on the kitchen counter, so easy for anyone to pass by and sneak in a bar or two or more, and come back for more.
Using the calorie calculator, this means a full size bar of Snickers and Hershey with 275 calories will require you to walk 2.75 miles, 4.43 kilometers, or 5500 steps, if you can cover one mile in 2,000 steps.
Are you familiar with Hershey’s Kisses? Those cute little raindrop-shaped temptations have 50 calories and you need to walk 0.5 miles, 0.80 kilometers, or 1000 steps to burn it.
A fun size plain or peanut M&M packet contains up to 90 calories which requires you to walk 0.9 miles, 1.45 kilometers, or 1800 steps. These calculations are not meant to dampen your holiday mood and lessen your appetite for the feasts, but with these glaring facts, think first if you are willing to take those long walks the next time you take another bite of the delicious food for the holidays. The price may be too high to pay for some of us.
