The Christmas Holidays are just around the corner and they usually come with lots of family time, fun and plenty of delicious food to eat! Now, being food lovers ourselves, we don’t want to begrudge anyone this special treat and we just wanted to give you a little tip on how to avoid over-indulging and then feeling bad about it come January.

The first question is: can we enjoy Christmas to the fullest without feeling guilty about it afterwards? As Barack Obama used to put it: Yes, we can! And it’s pretty easy, too!

Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule? To be fair, it has been adapted and used in lots of industries and themes, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. For our purpose, it basically means that if you have a healthy diet throughout 80% of your meals, then it’s ok to indulge in some less healthy treats for the 20% of the meals that are left. You can obviously apply it either to your day, week, month or even year, but to be honest a daily or weekly application is probably the most useful and easiest, just because you can easily keep track of these time frames.

So, what does this mean for Christmas? Well, to keep it simple, let’s look at the weekly application of our 80/20 rule: In one week, you would ideally have 3 full meals and 2 healthy snacks per day, which amounts to 21 meals and 14 snacks in total. After quickly cheating with a calculator, we find that 80% of 21 meals equals roughly 17 meals, while 20% of 21 equals roughly 4 meals. So, if you eat 17 healthy meals during Christmas week, you can allow yourself up to 4 “festive” meals during the week. For the snacks, it amounts roughly to 11 healthy snacks and 3 “treats”.

As you can see, your Christmas Dinner plus leftovers the next day can be enjoyed without any injury to your conscience, if you make sure that you keep to the 80/20 rule! Obviously, you don’t HAVE to use up the whole 20%, but it gives you a bit of an idea of how much you can indulge, while still making sure that you are on the healthy side.

With that said, the BetterBe Team will also be indulging in a bit of festive Christmas cheer over the holidays and we’ll be back with our next blog on the 4th of January. Until then, we all wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!