Five tips to get through Advent with pleasure without extra kilos

Every year, sweet temptations that pack a punch put many people to the test.

Everywhere people are baking, cooking, feasting, and drinking – especially in the ongoing Corona pandemic, many want to do something good for themselves and bring the long-awaited Christmas season home.

But many of the culinary delights that make the Christmas season genuinely festive have plenty of calories – and often few nutrients.

Snacking is, therefore, all too often followed by a guilty conscience – and after the holidays, the reckoning on the scales.

But that’s easy to avoid. So here are five tips on how to enjoy the Advent season to the fullest – without gaining weight and panicking on New Year’s Day.

1. don’t strain your sugar intake
Who doesn’t love cinnamon stars, gingerbread, and homemade vanilla crescents?

Instead of indulging in ready-made cookies and Christmas pastries from the supermarket, you can bake the treats yourself. In addition, you can control the amount of sugar you use and avoid adding white, refined sugar to the dough.

In moderation, perfect sugar alternatives are apple pulp, almond paste, dates, date syrup, baking cocoa, rice syrup, or maple syrup.

2. bring the Christmas market home – healthier snacks
Fried foods, roasted almonds, or hearty hand bread – all quite delicious, but also quite “heavy.” Of course, enjoyment shouldn’t come too short, but perhaps slightly healthier nibbles are a better strategy for avoiding extra calories.

Roasted chestnuts, for example, are a healthy Christmas snack. In addition to starch and fiber, the inner core of the chestnut contains many minerals, especially potassium and vitamins C, B1, and B6.

Thanks to the fiber, one hundred grams of chestnuts have 192 calories, are low in fat, and keep you full for a long time.

In comparison, a bag of roasted almonds has almost 600 calories because they are roasted in caramelized sugar.

3. maintain everyday exercise
Ten thousand steps – that would be perfect! Use your lunch breaks, the end of the workday or shopping for Christmas presents to reach the daily target number of steps.

A little motivation: 10,000 steps burn an average of 210 calories. That would be the equivalent of a glass of mulled wine – worth it, right?

4 Cook fresh, colorful and natural food
In addition to hearty, heavy Christmas menus, it is recommended to cook fresh, light, and natural meals for lunch or dinner.

Protein-rich meals with complex carbohydrates and plenty of vegetables promote fat metabolism and muscle definition and provide many healthy vitamins and minerals.

Why should protein be a daily companion? Plant and animal proteins fuel metabolism and also keep you full much longer.

This is mainly because the body has to expend more energy to break down proteins into amino acids. In addition, this is because the body already burns calories during its digestion. Therefore, almost a quarter of the food energy of proteins goes to waste without ending up on the hips.

5. stay motivated and exercise
Maintaining the sports routine in the partly stressful Advent season is not so simple.

Whether it’s 15 minutes of power yoga, a short HIIT workout, or a 30-minute running session – if you start your day like this, you’ve already gained a lot and more than earned your cookies in the afternoon.

If you stay true to your sporting rhythm, you won’t have to worry about the scales suddenly showing more kilos during the Christmas season.