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I'm finally back; man, last week was crazy trying to get all these things with deadlines done before leaving for Thanksgiving.  My wife and I ended up going to my parents' house up in Wadsworth, Ohio.  For Thanksgiving day, we all drove over to the Pittsburgh area and hung out with grandparents, cousins, and aunts and uncles.  We really had a great time this past weekend, but I must say, my eating definitely wasn't the best.  Everything from pumpkin pie to pizza, there was all kinds of junk that I was constantly staring at these past few days.

Then it dawned on me as my wife and I were driving home.  This is why we don't have sweets and many other types of junk food in our home.  It's not because I don't like it; I love my share of sweets, just like a lot of people.  The reason I don't eat much of it during the week is because we simply don't have it staring at us from candy dishes, the counter, and the pantry.      

One suggestion I make to people during Thanksgiving and Christmas is to remember that each of these holidays is really only one day.  Turning these days into multiple days of eating poorly is where people run into trouble.  I still believe this approach to be a great approach to take to keep this time of year from destroying the results of hard work with exercise and eating right during the months leading up to now, but I also realize that it's very hard to limit the eating of pumpkin pie to one day.

So here's my suggestion.  You may have trouble eating right when you're around friends and family over Christmas, but leading up to Christmas and after Christmas, stay away from the junk food.  It's not very hard to limit the amount of junk food you eat when you don't have it to eat.  Try not to put out the red and green M&M's in a candy dish this year.  Instead of baking cookies and pies now, wait until the week of Christmas.  Just as an addict needs to stay away from what they're addicted to, keeping the junk food out of reach will help someone not eat it.  

That's what my big revelation was over this weekend.  It's not that I typically don't eat junk food because I don't like to; it's that I don't typically eat junk food because we don't have much of it in our home to tempt us.  It's kind of hard to eat M&M's or a cookie when you don't have any to eat.

Note: If you want some extra help heading into the New Year, I just released my first-ever downloadable training program called the Fat Dissolver Program; it features over 50 of the exercises I use with my own clients.  You can download them to your computer, watch them on your iPod/iPhone, or turn them into two DVDs of your own.  Make sure you check them out today! 

Dan Falkenberg, BA, ACE-CPT, NASM-PES

Dan Falkenberg is the cofounder of Your Live Trainers.  He can be reached at DanFalkenberg.com.

Tags: nutrition, weight loss