Holiday Strategy - red light & green light days
 

At a WW meeting years ago in S Hamilton, MA, our fantastic leader, Mary introduced a great way to manage ourselves through the tempting Holiday season.
I really liked it and found it effective, but can't remember specifics. It went something like you count all the days between Thanksgiving and New Years, then from those days, you mark the heavy eating/drinking days as green days, I guess, and then the rest are red? Maybe it was just psychological, so that when you saw the percentage of red to green, you'd see it wasn't that great a number, and it would keep you from feeling like a failure, and throwing in the towel? I believe the preplanning would help w keeping some control on those green days and knowing that you would most likely not gain if you did the plan on the red. Maybe that was all there was to it, but if there are other specifics that anyone knows, I'd appreciate reading your post to fill in the details. Thanks. Wren

I haven't heard that before. But, I can see why it would be helpful. One thing that is hard during the holidays is that it is easy to just go easy for the whole holiday season. To think of every event as a special occasion.

When I was losing weight I actually did count each and every day and tracked everything, even on the actual holidays. That worked for me (I did eat weekly points and Fitpoints if needed).

But some like to just eat freely on certain special occasions. What I saw that I found helpful was the idea of doing that on the holiday itself. So, on Thanksgiving and Christmas I felt I would eat exactly what I wanted (I did track). On other days that might have eating out I would stay within what I had planned for the day.

Where I work they have a program called freeze the gain, you keep track of your weight, activity and healthy habits from early November to a week or so after the new year. The idea is to try and end up no more than 5 pounds heavier at the end than where you started, it has helped me the last few years to manage the holiday season. I like the idea of red and Green Day's (autocorrect changed to Green Day like the band...:lol:) to put things in perspective.

Thanks for sharing!
:sunny:

I think that is a great idea - I am going to print off a calendar sheet and do that for the rest of the month!