Irish adults tend to gain half a stone in weight each over the Christmas period as we turn to comfort foods and festive drinks.
The constant indulging of boxes of tinned sweets, tasty treats and calorific beverages means that the pounds can quickly pile on during the more sedentary period.
Dr Eva Orsmond, who specialises in weight management treatments, said she often sees people putting on half a stone from Christmas to New Year's, with some even gaining a stone.
"The problem here is not just the Christmas pounds, the problem is that we as a nation are already putting on weight without these festive extra pounds," she said.
"It's quite difficult not to put on some weight over Christmas but if we could limit the amount, that would already help."
Dr Eva acknowledges that people turn to food during stressful periods, as was seen during the pandemic, but it's the tins of sweets and "liquid calories" that really have a detrimental effect on people's weight over Christmas.
"Those additional snacks can add a lot more, it's not just the Christmas Day lunch or dinner that you're having, when you're consuming probably three times more calories than normally," she told Newstalk Breakfast.
"It's that continuous [eating] - it's almost ten days that we're going to be carrying on this eating.
"Those Roses are 50 or 60 calories, so six chocolate lying around is like one chocolate bar and that chocolate bar to burn with a little bit of walking, you need to walk one hour to burn off one chocolate bar.
"It's impossible to burn off those calories with exercise if they are massive.
"Of course it helps, and the good thing about exercise is that hopefully when you are exercising you are not busy eating."
Her advice is to "try and avoid those liquid calories" and make sure there are healthier snacks on hand.
For adults, this means avoiding alcohol and trying to drink more water, and for kids, this means ensuring there are not too many fizzy drinks around.
"People sometimes give advice to have more nuts and things like that but nuts are very high in calories, we're talking about the same amount of calories in 100g of chocolate as 100g of nuts," Dr Eva said.
"Why don't you do some crudites platters and leave around some nice dips because vegetables are very low in calories, they are high in fibre and you would actually feel better and they would be much more filling.
"That would already limit the amount of snacking you're going to be doing over the Christmas days."
She said the idea by some people to eat what they like at Christmas and then work it off in January is flawed as some 66% of Irish adults are already overweight.
"I would say try to limit the amount [you eat] because losing weight is not easy, it can be done," she added.
"We're having a problem already [with people being overweight] so let's not add more into it."
