By Donna V. Scaglione
Stave off weight gain at Halloween and you just might avoid having to make a New Year’s resolution to shed pounds in a couple of months.
With an abundance of Halloween treats around, that can be a tall order. Bite-size candy bars at work and dishes of candy corn at your favorite café can conspire against your good-eating plans. But overindulging now and hitting the traditional holiday season a couple of pounds overweight can make for an unhappy new year.
“Even if it’s a small amount of weight, if you start now you really have 10 weeks or so of gaining a few pounds here and there, and it can add up to five pounds,” Alice Bender, registered dietitian for the American Institute for Cancer Research, tells Newsmax Health. “And once it comes, it’s difficult to lose.”
Excess weight not only puts us at risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and high blood pressure, but it also increases our chances of suffering one of seven types of cancers: colorectal, pancreatic, esophageal, post-menopausal breast cancer, endometrial, kidney, and gall bladder cancer, according to AICR research.
The trick to avoiding too many treats is thinking ahead and knowing yourself and how you respond to food, Bender says. That means making choices about what you eat, buy, and even where you go.
“It’s not about — you can never have that. But it’s about making the choice of when you are going to have it and what you are going to have,” Bender explains. “I like to think about it as empowering yourself rather than having the environment or someone else making those decisions for you.”
