You know that all Holidays have one thing in common: and that is overeating and sugar. This includes Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year, the 4th of July, or even a family get-together.

Getting fat is not about one bad meal or one good meal. It is about staying away from the wrong chemicals. One of the worst is sugar and alcohol. Plan for the event, work a little more out before, after, and cut your calories down before the event. Moderation is the key, have fun and enjoy your time together. Ask questions at [email protected], and we will answer all of them.

Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:00:09] Welcome to Wellness Insights with Dr. Chalmers. I’m Dr. Chalmers. So out of all the different questions I’ve been asked and that I’ve gotten published on, probably the question I get asked the most and that gets published the most is how do we avoid getting fat over the holidays?

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:00:28] Well, it’s pretty easy. Don’t take in the calories. It’s also really hard, especially when you have kids like I do, who go to their grandma’s house and come home with cake and cookies and pies as if they made for the holidays and they say, Daddy, will you eat when you eat a piece of the pie that I made? It’s a look at your parents who are their grandparents, you know. Thanks. Thanks for this one and you can’t you’re not going to say no to your kids.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:00:53] So the easiest thing to do is to take out the chemistry that is the most dangerous so that’s key to your sugars. Not all fad diets have helped everyone. The keto thing has helped a lot more people than just who needed keto.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:01:12] We’ve come up with really good ice creams, desserts, different sugar substitutes that you can use when you’re making your same old things. So you can make fantastic cookies, you can make really, really good cakes, you can make really good pie, you know, you can even make them gluten free. My my kids are with my my mom, their grandmother making gluten free, sugar free desserts that are every bit as good as the old as the old stuff used to be. But it has no sugar in it.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:01:39] And so the insulin response, the glycemic function. Is much different than it used to be. You know, now you can have ice cream and you can have, you know, some of these things. My parents, they made this pickle, this pecan pie. Now, if you’ve ever made pecan pie, you have to understand how ridiculously difficult it would be to make a cookie dough pecan pie.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:02:04] You start with sirup, which is basically liquid gel sugar and you start with this, you start with sirup and then you add a ton of sugar to the syrup. they boil it down so that you further condense the amount of sugar. So it’s basically just this malatness, just just sugary goo they he put the carbs in it and you’re done. That’s how you make pecan pie.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:02:33] So to make that keto ain’t going to be easy. They made some things that were really, really good. I would not. If you blindfold me, I would never have thought this has pekan pie. But they were good. And so that was fun. You know, that’s the other side of this, you know. It was all good knowing it was pecan pie, but it was all good and my kids had a blast making it.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:02:57] So if you’re if you’re walking into the holidays and you’re thinking, you know, I want to I want to have the experience of making cookies and making gingerbread houses and doing these things with my kids.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:03:10] I’m not going to say no to my kids when they make cookies or they make pie, they want me to try it. I’m definitely not going to say no to that. You know, we’re going to have all these parties. People are going to be coming over. What do we do?

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:03:22] Look to the KETO people and look to those recipes for desserts. Yeah, there’s talking of calories and I’m not saying you can use me calories you want to especially, you know, the Keto guys that that’s one of the things they say as long as you say Quito, you can have as many calories as you want that’s not accurate. But what I am saying is that if you can find a way to radically decrease the amount of sugar you’re eating, it’s going to help a lot.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:03:45] You know, and here’s the thing if you have a day, let’s say your normal caloric intake is $2500 calories and you have a you have a big day and you eat 3500 calories. Not going to wreck your body. You might not even ever notice. You know, you’ll have more food in you. So if you wait the very next morning, you’d be heavier and then as your body processes and expels it over two days, let’s say you’re going to come back down to roughly where you were before.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:04:12] So it’s not even a huge, huge issue of eating one bad meal you know, one bad meal is going to break you and one good meal isn’t going to help you. So keep that in mind. So don’t freak out too much.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:04:24] What hurts us the most is the is the constant intake of this problem. So if this happens to me a lot because everybody loves my wife and so they want her to go to parties and then she makes me go because for some reason I have to be there.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:04:40] So. But what I see every time we go like, Oh my God, it’s going to be we’re going to ten between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and then there’s gonna be a New Year’s party so I guess it’s 11 or 12. It’s at least 11.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:04:55] So we’ve got all these silly parties that we all go to and let’s be honest, all of us want to go to every single one, but there’s always cookies and there’s always alcohol and there’s always, you know, things like that so those are going to be your two alcohol and sugar.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:05:13] If you guys if we all decided, hey, look, we’re going to we’re going to take, you know, sugar free cookies, we’re going to we’re going to take that sweetener free, but we’re going to take sugar free stuff. So we take cookies and pies and all sorts of things that don’t have sugar they have monk fruit, they have stevia, They have, you know, something else? I don’t like to eat sucralose very often, but I’ll I’ll take sucralose every single time over sugar.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:05:36] So if we did some of that, if we just cut back a little bit on the alcohol, I think that what we’d see is that the weight issue isn’t that big of a deal. We wouldn’t have all that weight we’ve got to worry about in January.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:05:50] So. That’s that’s my big piece of advice is that you know, if you get it, if you’re going to go through normal, take the sugar out, cut the alcohol back and you’re not going have to worry about this weight issue, this fat issue nearly as much.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:06:04] So the other thing you can do. Is if you know you’re going out this is an all the time type of thing. If you know that you to go out for the Super Bowl or for someone’s birthday or something, or there’s a football game, the OU Texas game or whatever, there’s a big game coming up that you want to be for, but you know you’re going to eat terrible.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:06:26] You can work out just a little bit more a couple of days before a couple of days after you can cut your calories back, 100, 200 calories, a couple days before, a couple days afterwards. And as far as the fat function, you’ll be fine even if you go radically after your diet.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:06:41] Now, I’m not saying that your stomach will be okay with that. If you go radically, radically off your diet, if you don’t eat gluten, you don’t eat, you know, cheese and you don’t consume alcohol or sugar. And then you have four slices of deep dish pizza with six beers and four sugar cookies. You’re going to feel like hell.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:06:59] So FYI. But. Couple days later, weight wise, fat wise to make that big of an impact. So it’s this consistency thing. If you consistent and being healthy, you will be healthy if you’re consistent in being unhealthy or unhealthy.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:07:18] So if you go to these ten parties and then the £4,000 of stuff that’s always brought to everybody’s offices, you know, around the holidays. If you eat that stuff for six weeks, you’re going to be fat, unhealthy and unhappy.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:07:35] But if you’re like, You know what? I’m not going to eat that stuff. I gonna eat the sugar free stuff. I’m going to work out a little bit more. You’ll be fine. So just don’t don’t freak out.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:07:43] So that’s my big advice for weight and fat issues around the holidays is cut the sugar cut the alcohol work out a little tiny bit more not crazy more, a little bit more, eat just a little bit less. And the meals and other days that you can and things will end up being okay so we’ll get there.

Dr Matt Chalmers [00:08:04]  If you guys have any other questions, hit us up at [email protected] we’re gonna get them all knocked out. Thanks so.

Ask your Questions at [email protected]