The Saints won a great game yesterday and while they were doing it we consumed copious amounts of chicken wings, pizza, nachos and beer.

Congrats to Drew Brees and the Saints, Superbowl Champs.

And then I got to thinking about how often people in north america (and I’m sure all over the world) get together to celebrate various events and holidays with large feasts.

This is just a short list of event that involve a significant degree of overeating:

1. Thanksgiving

2. Christmas

3. Easter

4. Halloween (not a formal dinner, just way too much candy and chocolate)

5. Superbowl

6. 4th of July (USA) July 1st (Canada)

7. Your birthday

8. Your significant others birthday

9. The birthday of anyone in your family

10. Aug 1st long weekend

11. New Years Eve

12. St Patricks Day (Beer, lots of beer)

13. Any long weekend in the summer that I haven’t mentioned

And I’m sure there are many other days that are special in your yearly routine that I haven’t even mentioned here. Most social gatherings around holidays and big events usually revolve around some sort of feast. If you attend these holiday gatherings and partake in the feast then you probably eat well above your BMR for that day.

Lets say you had 15 big overeating events (like the list above) per year. If you overeat by a total of 1500 calories on the day of each event, and went back to eating at BMR maintenance for the rest of the year you would still likely gain over 6 lbs of fat each year.

And in reality I’m probably being conservative. In many cases every single weekend of the year has at least one big night out of eating for many people…but I’m sure you get the point.

Every time you have a big eating day, you have to offset it with a small eating day otherwise those extra calories will be stored as fat and never be burned off. It’s just simple accounting and budgeting that most of us forget to do.

So like I said in yesterdays post, today is about a 1000-1100 calorie day for me, and tomorrow will be the same. This should offset the extra calories I ate at our superbowl party on sunday.

John

Competitive Eater "Badlands" Booker is never embarrassed about Eating big! Love the helmet, he's gonna need it for that burger!

A friend of mine related a rather embarrassing but revealing story about eating habits the other day.

She was telling us about a barbecue she has just attended, the host was a large woman (around 300 pounds), we’ll call her “Tracey”

Anyway, Tracey wouldn’t eat much at dinner and weighed all of her food, and avoided salad dressing and seemed to have a very strict almost obsessive diet.

This would make anyone wonder how she could be pushing a 300 pound bodyweight if this is really how she eats.

No big deal so far. So here is where the embarrassing part comes in.

Just after the barbecue ended and everyone left my friend realized she had forgot her purse and went back to pick it up. When she walked into the backyard she found Tracey 4/5th’s of the way through an entire apple pie!

Now that is an awkward moment to say the least!

So, the moral of the story is this. If you feel like you need to hide the way you eat from other people, you probably need to make a change.

Secondly, there is no hiding your eating habits from anyone anyway. Did Tracey really think everyone around her believed that she was as strict of a dieters as she was playing up during the barbecue?

People aren’t that dumb, you can’t pull a fast one on everyone around you like that.

The saddest part is that Tracey obviously doesn’t believe anyone will support her or is embarrassed to ask for support with her eating issues.

In reality most people will support you if you ask for it.

Hiding it from everyone is never going to workout and just makes it an even worse and depressing experience when you do in fact eat.

Eating shouldn’t be something you’re ashamed of, it should be something that is fun, social, and celebrated with friends and family.

This is probably the single greatest benefit of Eat Stop Eat. You never have to give up any of the social events that go hand and hand with eating (and you can still lose weight!)

Anyway, I hope people like Tracey can be comfortable eating in front of other people one day soon. It really just doesn’t have to be that way.

John