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MWi Hack
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Pick the date your normal routine comes back, and put it in your calendar today. Not a resolution and not January 1. A specific day, chosen now, before any of it starts. The meals between here and there are not the thing that matters.
MWi Summary
- NIH researchers weighed 195 adults across the autumn and winter. Average gain was about a pound, and 0.8 of it came in the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year.
- The same people thought they had gained more than four pounds. They overestimated by slightly over three, which means the dread is larger than the thing being dreaded.
- What they gained did not come off. Of the 165 who came back a year later, the group was 1.4 pounds heavier than the year before.
- A 2023 review of ten studies covering 4,627 people found most of the holiday gain was still there after the studies ended, particularly in people already carrying weight.
- Fewer than one in ten gained more than five pounds, and the people who gained least were the ones who stayed active rather than the ones who ate least.
- The lever is not the meal, which is small and brief. It is the return, which is why the date is worth choosing in October rather than in January.
Smaller Than It Feels
Almost everything written about holiday eating is about getting through the meal. Strategies for the buffet, what to do before you arrive, how to handle a second helping.
The research points somewhere else. In a study run by NIH researchers, 195 adults were weighed every six weeks from early October through to the end of February. The average gain across the whole period was 1.05 pounds, and 0.8 pounds of that happened between Thanksgiving and New Year.
A pound. Across six weeks containing most of the eating anyone worries about.
There is a reason this matters more here than it might elsewhere. Social isolation ranked in the top three concerns for every one of the four member cohorts in the annual survey. The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year are when a lot of people see each other, and for some members it is the only stretch of the year when that happens. Advice that treats those meals as a threat to be managed is working against the thing that is doing them good.
What People Think They Gained
The same study asked people to estimate their own gain. They overshot by slightly more than three pounds.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it is the part that does damage. Someone who believes they have gained four pounds over Christmas behaves differently in January than someone who knows they gained one. The first person is correcting a crisis. The second is just going back to normal.
Most of the January overcorrection is aimed at weight that was never put on. It is also why so much of it collapses by February. A plan built to undo four pounds is doing three pounds more work than the situation requires, which makes it harder than it needs to be and easier to walk away from.
What Does Not Come Off
Here is the part that matters, and it is quieter than the number people fear.
The gain did not reverse. The 165 participants who returned a year later were 1.4 pounds heavier than they had been the year before. The holiday weight stayed, and the rest of the year added a little more on top.
Six weeks is the part people skip over. It is not one dinner. It is the leftovers for four days afterwards, the thing at work, the second family’s version of the same meal, the stretch between Christmas and New Year when nothing runs on a normal schedule, and then a party at the end of it. Somewhere in the middle the exception stops being an exception and just becomes how things are.
A 2023 systematic review covering ten studies and 4,627 people found the same pattern: most of what was gained over festive periods was still present after the studies closed, and more so in people already carrying extra weight.
One pound a year is nothing. One pound a year that never leaves, repeated across a working life, is the entire mechanism.
Who Gains and Who Does Not
The study found that fewer than one in ten participants gained more than five pounds, and that people who were already overweight were more likely to be among them.
It also found something about who gained least, and it was not the people who ate least. The participants who stayed more active gained the least, and some of them lost weight across the period.
Hunger tracked the same way. The people who reported themselves hungrier gained more, and the less hungry gained less. Both findings point away from restriction, because arriving hungry is what restriction produces.
That is a different instruction from eating less at dinner. It is about what happens in the days around the meals rather than at them.
Pick the Date
If the problem is that the exception does not end, then the useful decision is when it ends, and that decision is easier to make now than on December 28.
Choose a specific day. The first Monday after the holidays, or the day the children go back, or whatever marker is real in your own week. Put it in the calendar in October, while nothing is at stake and the choice costs nothing.
The date is not a diet start. Nothing about it asks anyone to eat differently than they did in October. It marks where the six weeks stop being a reason, which is all it has to do.
Then eat the meal. VA’s own nutrition service publishes holiday and party recipes, which is a reasonable signal that the meal was never the problem.
Resource
Nutrition and Food Services, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (nutrition.va.gov). VA’s nutrition service, which states it provides evidence-based nutritional services for Veterans and their families. It carries weight management sections for losing and for gaining, a Healthy Teaching Kitchen programme of cooking demonstrations, recipes including a holiday and party section, and a route to speak to a VA dietitian at nutrition.va.gov/NUTRITION/Get_Help_from_a_Dietitian.asp.
