Make a Plan to Keep Your Holidays Healthy!

Despite your best intentions, all the holiday dinners and parties (not to mention the gifts of cookies, pies and other treats that come your way) mean that there's a good chance that you'll be eating more this season. But even though you might be convinced that those extra calories mean that a bigger belly is on its way, you're not destined to gain weight, or at least not as much as you might fear.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the average weight gain from mid-November through early January was only one pound. The bad news? If you don't exert damage control, those measly pounds do add up over the years.

But it's easier than you may think to battle the calorie surge, and the beauty is that you can still enjoy those holiday feasts. All you need to do is balance out your calorie burn over the week. A holiday meal can add an few thousand calories to your day (one piece of pecan pie is around 400 calories, one cup of spiked eggnog can add another 500, one icing-topped Christmas cookie can be at least 100 to 200 calories). If you ate this much more every day, you'd definitely gain weight. But you can stave off seasonal pudge: Simply rev up your body on big-meal days and counteract splurge days with days where you eat less and exercise more. Here's how:

The days before and after your holiday splurge
Consider a typical winter-time week: Let's say you eat an extra 1,500 calories on the day of a big meal, and you stack on an additional 1,000 extra calories at a holiday party on another evening. If you burn off that surplus 2,500 calories on the other five days of your week, you're likely to keep your weight in check. That means you need to create a caloric deficit of 500 calories on non-feasting days.

If you have the time to squeeze in a 60-minute cardio workout on your non-party days, you're covered. But if your schedule is jam-packed or you need an easier exercise load, you can split it up by burning 250 more calories through exercise, and cutting out 250 calories from what you eat.

Shaving a few hundred extra calories from food each day can be as simple as skipping butter on your toast, drinking a diet soda or water instead of a sweetened drink, and choosing leaner cuts of meat.

An easy way to burn a few hundred extra calories is by spending 30 to 40 minutes walking briskly or using a cardio machine. If you're too busy to devote this much time all at once, break up your exercise quota throughout the day. Do two to three of these mini-workouts (they each burn around 100 calories a shot):

• Tune in your MP3 player and dance to four or five fast-paced songs.
• Walk the dog a mere 15 minutes or so longer (and pick up the pace!).
• Using moderate-to-heavy dumbbells, do at least one set of 15 reps of moves such as biceps curls, lunges, squats, chest presses, etc.
• Do your chores: Crank up some lively music and scrub the floors, wash the windows—and don't forget the tub! One speedy cleaning for 20 to 25 minutes zaps around 100 calories!
• At home, turn up the radio and walk up and down your staircase for four to five songs (about 15 minutes).
• While you're waiting for a pie to bake, march in place (3 minutes), then alternate jogging in place, jumping jacks and pretend jump-rope (six minutes—about 15 seconds of each). Then, march to cool down (three minutes).
• Take the stairs anytime possible at work or in malls or office buildings. Five or six two-minute flights in a day can blast around 100 calories.