Dec. 14--Eating pie twice a day is normal, right?
Well, the holiday season can make that seem so. But for those who want to try to make an effort to avoid overeating this month, we asked around for a simple tip.
Dr. Keith Kantor said he often addresses this issue. A nutritionist, he also is founder of Nutritional Addiction Mitigation Eating Drinking(NAMED which examines how nutrition can affect addiction recovery.
One way to stay full and avoid eating too much? Drink half of your body weight in ounces of water every day, he said. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds, you should drink 75 ounces of water a day, or a little over 9 cups.
This is something we should always do, he noted, but during the holidays is a great time to implement it.
"If you drink enough water, you feel somewhat full, you don't eat as much," he said. "It's very hard for us to tell the difference between if we're hungry or we're thirsty, except for the real extremes."
During the holiday season, plan strategically. If you're invited to a holiday party, drink water before you go.
"One of the things that water does is it makes you hydrated, which makes you feel somewhat full," he said. "If you feel full, you'll eat less, and if you feel full, you'll drink less (alcohol)."
Especially in a month filled with packed schedules and temptations, water is important, he said.
"First of all, it's good for you," he said. "It gets everything moving, and if you don't drink enough and you're dehydrated, everything starts moving through your body sort of like sludge."
And if you are drinking alcohol, before and after every beer, wine or cocktail, have a glass of water then too.
"The bottom line is, you feel bloated, you feel full, you feel satiated," Kantor said.
In his refrigerator, he always has two bottles of water: one with four cut-up lemons, one with four limes.
The citrus amps up health benefits like reducing inflammation, he said.
Also, don't starve yourself before going to a party.
"What a lot of people do is they save up their calories," he said. "So they're not going to have breakfast, and they're not going to have lunch, and that's definitely not going to work, because then we go to the house and we're famished. And we eat everything in sight."
The One Simple Thing series appears weekly, offering specific and small ways to improve health.
abowen@chicagotribune.com
