How to lose the Christmas belly

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean joining a gym (as so many do in January). Take the Boris Bike to work rather than the tube or go for a jog in your lunch break. Choose something that isn’t too much of an inconvenience so that you are more likely to do it and stick with it…

Anything above and beyond what you usually do will help reduce the bulge around your waistline, but you should try to aim for at least a couple of times a week for the first month. Set yourself a realistic target per week, plan them out in the diary and then tick them off in the calendar as you complete them. You never know but it might also become a sustainable healthy habit for 2017.

And I’m not talking about gardening here… more the downward spiral that is finishing all the Christmas leftovers well into the New Year. We all know that cold turkey sandwiches and slabs of Christmas cake are often too good to throw away, but your waistline will thank you if you do.

And if you don’t like the idea of being wasteful with food, try making up the sandwiches, boxing up the Christmas cake and packing in the left over chocolates for the local homeless. Not only will you be doing a good deed for another human being in need, but you’ll also be cleaning out your fridges ready to hit the ground running with your weight loss goals.

Having that mental separation between the holidays and getting back on track is also important: make the distinct switch between your festive eating and your New Year’s eating and the excess will be gone in no time.

No doubt the champagne, beers and Bellinis flowed like the Thames over the festive period leaving you with a sore head and a distinctly groggy feeling. And while this is all part and parcel of a good family Christmas, it’s now time to focus on hitting a different kind of drink: water. 

Most of the weight that people pack on over Christmas isn’t fat but an excess of water in the body due to increased intake of sugar and carbohydrates. Don’t get me wrong, if you really went hard at it since mid-December, most likely there are a few pounds of additional insulation keeping you warm, but for most of us this will mainly be stored H₂O.

To help shift this unwanted weight, you need to flush it out… and for that you should focus on drinking more water than you think. I always tell my clients to aim for 0.04 litres per kilo of bodyweight: this means an average 85kg guy should aim to drink about 3.5 litres of water a day (0.04 x 85 = 3.44).

Now this will get you visiting the toilet a lot more for the first few days, but it will also correspond to the number on the scales rapidly decreasing. Get out your calculator, work out your daily water intake and then make sure you are hitting that target every day. Then the scales will take care of themselves…

Now all of the above is not rocket-science, but then again it doesn’t have to be. All I have done is laid out a few simple steps and the action points you can take to ensure you needn’t visit your tailor come the end of the month. If you can begin to knock these over right now, you’ll be well on your way to unwrapping that post-Christmas bulge in time to reinstate it over Easter.