How to beat the festive fat trap with just a few simple rules this Christmas

The average woman gains 5lbs over Christmas - but it's not just down to greed. Dietician Dr Susan Roberts reveals the hidden psychological triggers that trick us into over-eating...

Not only turkeys fatten up at this time of year. It’s shockingly easy to gain 5lb or even 10lb in the three weeks between early December and the start of the New Year.
That is equivalent to eating 25,000 or more excess calories — 700 calories a day more than we need.
The result is not just a few extra inches around the middle but also an overwhelming sense of disappointment because, in retrospect, the enjoyment we got from those extra calories is pretty paltry compared to the long hard slog of taking them all off again.
Of course, avoiding the festive binge isn’t impossible, but there’s a lot more to it than just vowing to count our calories.
The real challenge of Christmas isn’t the food we eat, but the circumstances in which we eat it.
On Christmas Day alone, we eat about 3,000 calories more than we need with the first chocolate eaten at 8.39am (according to recent research).
This isn’t just down to greed — it’s a natural human response to a particular set of triggers.
The huge amounts of food prepared cause unconscious overeating — the sight and smell of it sets off metabolic signals of hunger and expand our stomach so that we need to eat more to feel equally full.
And then there is the food itself.
The defining characteristic of traditional festive items — the bacon-roasted turkey, butter-laden stuffing, potatoes cooked in goose fat, Christmas pudding with brandy cream and rich fruit cake topped with marzipan and icing — is that they’re extremely high in calories and very low in fibre. In other words, you have to eat huge amounts of them before you feel full.
Unfortunately, the challenges don’t stop there.
That huge variety of food on the Christmas table is part of what makes Christmas dinner special, right? Wrong.
The sheer luxury of choice means that most diners eat an extra 400 calories simply tasting all of the delights on offer.
And you know that lovely big crowd at the dinner table?
Well, according to research you can add another 35 calories to your intake for every guest settling down for the festive lunch — with, say, 11 guests at the table, you’ll probably eat an extra 400 calories without realising it.
Eating in a group relaxes us, and the sight of other people tucking in encourages us to do the same.
These ‘social facilitators’ of overeating are so effective at increasing our mealtime calorie count that nursing homes — where weight loss is often a problem — are starting to use them to increase calorie intake levels of their residents intentionally.