Before Christmas and until New Year’s Eve there is a strange phenomenon in the pages of diets, fitness, nutrition and wellness: most of the people who frequent these pages are generally careful to stay in shape, during the Christmas holidays, and to a lesser extent, even in those of Easter, it is sensationally in panic. 

Another good chunk of people, on the other hand, no longer wants to hear about diets until 7 January , the moment from which the good intentions of the new year are triggered. Join the gym, go on a diet, change your life with healthier habits. Whether you belong to the first or second group, Christmas and the New Year put you in crisis: but have you ever wondered why? The answer of course is that you are afraid of gaining weight:but have you ever wondered exactly how much fat you will gain and if you will really gain weight?

Now I’ll explain, studies in hand, why you fear the Christmas binge and if this fear makes sense or not.

Does Christmas binge make you fat?

1) Yes, but not so much as to cause worries .
If we stopped at the banquets on days 24, 25 and 26, 31 and 1, the total amount of body weight gain would be a maximum of 2 kilos, which corresponds to a surplus of about 14,000 and 500 calories more than ours. energy requirements. This is according to the statistics. Chili that we could easily lose starting from January, returning to good eating habits.
2) Yes, but of a kilo if we went on a diet on the other days.If we were to reduce calories on days before holidays or between holidays, the possible overweight would be about one kilo. On the other hand, doing a 1,000-calorie diet on days 23, 27, 28, 29, and 30 would have that over the course of ten days, five are on a strict diet and five are in calorie surplus. Clearly, when we eat we tend to eat a lot more than we imagine, and a kilo in the end is taken. Yes, but who is afraid of a kilo? 3) No, if we are trained people and with good eating habits: if we have a good basic body composition and we are usually moderate at the table, we should not be afraid of cheating, unless we have to parade in a bikini on the second day of January.

So why does the idea of ​​the Christmas binge make us panic?
The reason is indirectly explained by this 2000 study , which, based on the winter weight fluctuations of the participants, summarizes the consequences of the Christmas holidays: people do not gain on average more than a kilo and a half or two and a half kilos maximum. during the holidays, which could easily lose soon after. Too bad they don’t. On the contrary. It happens that people try to go on a diet, get bored after a week, and hold on to the weight of the holidays, which becomes a real winter weight gain . This is in addition to the accumulated weight of previous years, which could not be disposed of.
So the problem is not the holidays themselves, but the fact that, knowing each other, we are afraid of not being able to lose weight afterwards : this is because we did not have good eating habits before the holidays, and we are afraid of not being able to have good habits starting from 2. January. And all out of laziness. 
In short, good resolutions must not stop at being resolutions, but facts. Only in this way, we could experience the holidays year after year without considering them a negative and self-destructive moment.