How Much Weight Will I Gain At Christmas?
I am sure you have seen the headlines and the memes all over the internet, in Gyms, and from Personal Trainers trying to win your business this year leading into Christmas that are shaming you into earning your Christmas Dinners calories. That its “the little black dress party season and you want to look good for it don’t you?” or one truly disgusting post that I found when searching “Christmas Fitness”:
Images like this:
Headlines that are just so shockingly Fat Phobic it makes me more passionate about trying to get regulation on speaking this way.
But I should expect nothing less from The Daily Mail.
If they aren’t focussing you on how much weight you will gain at Christmas, they are not so subtly telling you to prepare to have to lose weight after Christmas, or before Christmas, to help prepare you for what is about to happen at Christmas.
I think the less said about Micheal Mosely here the better. But he is traditionally fat phobic and promotes very unsustainable weight loss strategies - buyer beware.
I was also recently sent this photo from a friend in New Zealand. It’s an advert from her old Personal Trainer which he has plastered to the wall…
You can see why he is her old Personal Trainer right?
The internet is littered with messaging like this. Messaging that is trying to make you think you have to earn your Christmas Calories. That you can somehow get ahead of Christmas in terms of your calories, and if you work hard now, the effect of Christmas on your body weight will be diminished.
Or the complete opposite, where they try to create absolute fear into you about what will happen on the other side of Christmas you are literally unable to enjoy a Roast Potato without feeling like you’re doing something wrong.
These are all lies for a number of reasons - but the main one is that you can’t build enough muscle to protect your metabolism in time for Christmas with 6 weeks to go.
Also, if you actively lost weight in the 6 weeks before Christmas, you must expect to regain it during Christmas as you have become smaller, and your caloric maintenance is now less.
The short answer to the very simple question of: “How Much Weight Will I Gain At Christmas?” is simply this:
And that’s coming from Morgan Freeman.
MORGAN FREEMAN PEOPLE.
It’s all good and well this being my position on such things, however, that probably doesn’t help take away the anxiety you might be feeling about this time of year. Therefore I need to tell you and show why this is my position. I will do this using the wonderful tool of Science and my experience as a Coach for nearly 10 years having worked with people all over the world and helping them navigate Christmas guilt-free.
I hope this article succeeds in that, and helps you enjoy Christmas completely guilt-free, and take that huge weight of shame you feel off of your shoulders.
I hope that sounds like exactly what you were looking for when you typed into Google: “How Much Weight Will I Gain At Christmas?” and it’s my absolute pleasure to be able to help you with it.
Thanks for being here.
Before we begin, I want to ask if we can become friends.
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Oh, and I will also send you some free fitness goodies to help start our new friendship off on the best foot possible.
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR: HOW MUCH WEIGHT WILL I GAIN AT CHRISTMAS?
What does the science say?
What does the science actually mean?
Why you don’t need to worry about overindulgence at Christmas.
The best way to navigate your fitness through Christmas
What the Science Says…
There is a really wonderful Narrative study on this topic called: Effect of the Holiday Season on Weight Gain: A Narrative Review [1]
It went through research databases and analysed all of the results from all of the studies it could find on this very subject.
It literally did the work for me. Which is great.
The study reviewed six studies for the adult population dating from 1985 all the way to 2013 and here are the breakdowns in black and white.
A quick note, I personally find it really hard to read studies and the way in which they word things - therefore I have summarised them to make the data accessible. If you just want to skip past, and find out what I think it all actually means…I won’t be offended.
Number of participants: 22
Method: An observational study with repeated weighing and fasting blood tests from one month before to one month after Christmas.
Conclusion: Over the Christmas period in all subjects an increase in weight was observed (mean 0.8kg), which was maintained through January.
Changes in nutritional status in adults over Christmas 1998 [3]
Number of participants: 26
Method: Twenty-six adults completed anthropometric, blood pressure and total blood cholesterol measurements before and after the Christmas holiday.
Conclusion: An increase in mean weight occurred by 0.93 kg.
A prospective study of holiday weight gain [4]
Number of participants: 195
Method: We measured body weight in a convenience sample of 195 adults. The subjects were weighed four times at intervals of six to eight weeks, so that weight change was determined for three periods: preholiday (from late September or early October to mid-November), holiday (from mid-November to early or mid-January), and postholiday (from early or mid-January to late February or early March)
Conclusion: The average holiday weight gain is less than commonly asserted. The mean weight increased during the holiday period (gain, 0.37+/-1.52 kg), but not during the preholiday period (gain, 0.18+/-1.49 kg); or the postholiday period (loss, 0.07+/-1.14 kg)
Weight and body composition change over a six-week holiday period [5]
Number of participants: 13 men and 21 women
Method: Baseline testing occurred the Monday or Tuesday prior to Thanksgiving Day (November 24 or 25, 2008), and the post-holiday assessment was the Monday or Tuesday after New Year's Day (January 5 or 6, 2009)
Conclusion: Thirteen men and 21 women ranging in age from 23-61 years completed the study. The majority of participants (24 of 34) perceived that they had gained weight, and four did gain ≥2 kg. However, despite some changes to dietary and exercise habits, on average there was no difference between pre-holiday weight (74.0±17.8 kg) and post-holiday weight (73.9±18.1 kg), nor between pre-holiday body fat percentage (25.4±9.0%) and post-holiday body fat percentage (25.4±8.9%). Despite a perception of substantial weight gain, body weight and body fat remained unchanged over a six-week holiday period.
Number of participants: 443
Method: In a secondary analysis of previously published data, ΔBW normalized over 90 d from mid-September/mid-October 1999 to mid-January/early March 2000 was analyzed by sex, age, and BMI
Conclusion: Sixty-five percent of men and 58% of women gained ≥0.5 kg BW, with ~50% of both groups gaining ≥1% of preholiday BW. Obese men (BMI ≥30) gained more BW than did obese women.
Number of participants: 148
Method: A total of 48 males and 100 females (age 18-65 years) with a mean body mass index of 25.1±0.5 kg/m(2) were evaluated in mid-November (visit 1) and early January (visit 2; across 57±0.5 days).
Conclusion: Our participants gained an average of 0.78 kg, which indicates the majority of average annual weight gain (1 kg/y) reported by others may occur during the holiday season. Obese participants are most at risk as they showed the greatest increases in BF%. Initial BW, not exercise, significantly predicted BF% and BW gain.
What does the Science actually mean?
There are always limitations to studies - many of these studies don’t tell us the frequency of weighing their participants which could give greater insight into how much weight was actually gained (or not). During the holidays you are going to gain a lot of water weight due to eating more calories in general, and many of those calories come from an increase in carbohydrates through food and alcohol. Across all of the studies, the most amount of weight gained by a single person IS 4.3kgs. She is described as a healthy woman in the 1985 study but she was only weighed 5 times during the time period of the study. Chances are she was caught on a day of high fluctuation as well due to many of the other factors that control scale weight, especially in women.
Another limitation is that they have all been done in the Northern Hemisphere where it is usually colder during the holiday season, which does impact behaviour relating to weight. but my instinct would suggest that would impact bodyweight increases, not decreases.
I have only summarised the studies that were controlled, not that were based on self-monitoring. With the self-monitoring studies, the trend is very similar in that weight isn’t gained by anywhere near as much as you think. The highest weight gain in a participant was 2.4kg.
The bottom line here is that on average across all of these studies, people only gained around 1lb of bodyweight or 0.45kgs.
Only one of these studies found no increase in weight gain and that is Weight and body composition change over a six-week holiday period [5].
There are two phrases I think it is important to focus on when looking at these conclusions.
The first:
“The average holiday weight gain is less than commonly asserted”
Meaning that the world is lying to you with regards to how much weight you might actually gain over the Holidays.
The second:
“Despite a perception of substantial weight gain, body weight and body fat remained unchanged over a six-week holiday period”
We all perceive to gain fat over this period, however, we actually don’t gain as much as we think we do.
This statement is true in life. I see this in my clients all the time, they believe that they are causing more setbacks to their health than they really are from missing one workout, or overeating on one particular day.
The premise that is so often peddled by the fitness industry, in that you should “train hard so you can play hard this Christmas” just doesn’t hold true either. In the study Effects of exercise during the holiday season on changes in body weight, body composition and blood pressure [7] they find that the biggest predictor of weight gain at Christmas is the starting weight of a participant - not the amount of exercise they actually do.
This all comes down to the all-or-nothing mentality. If you adopt this mindset you will always end up with nothing, because you live in a world where you expect perfection, and you believe that perfection is the only path to success.
And when you encounter events that challenge that path, like vacations, holidays and Christmas, you feel like a failure because you weren’t able to continue your path of perfection.
You need more balance in your mindset towards your health and fitness, and then you will be able to put these events, like Christmas, into better perspective.
Why You Don’t Need To Worry About Overindulgence At Christmas
There is a difference between body weight increase and body fat increase.
Now as you are reading this, although you are concerned about weight, in general, I respect that, scale weight is made up of many many factors, whereas if your concern is related to health and body composition then we need to look at Body Fat Percentage.
Two of the above studies looked at BFP. This again is only a best guess because to truly know your Body Fat Percentage, you need to have an autopsy. That’s a little inconvenient.
But that being said, this is what they found:
In the 2012 study [5}, they looked at BFP and concluded:
“No significant changes were observed in weight before and after the holiday period (74.0 kg versus 73.9 kg, difference −0.1 kg, p = 0.87) nor in body fat (25.4% versus 25.4%, difference 0.0%, p = 0.97).”
In the 2013 study [7] they also looked at BFP and concluded:
“Participants gained 0.78 kg (p < 0.001) and increased their fat percentage by 0.5%. It should be noted that obese subjects showed a greater increase in fat percentage compared to normal-weight subjects (1.6% versus 0.2%, resp., p < 0.05), but no difference was noted in body weight compared to normal-weight subjects”
This doesn't surprise me.
On TikTok I have put up a couple of videos about Weight Gain from overfeeding - and the Science on overfeeding would back up these studies as well.
In both of the Studies, you see that overeating a significant amount of calories each day led to minimal body fat gain.
In fact, in the first video it led to only 500g of total body fat gained, and in the second study [8], after 8 weeks of overeating every single day, only 9lbs was gained by the participants.
Christmas lasts half of that time at most…
The 2000 study [4] which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine also concluded that:
“Average holiday weight gain is 0.37 kg, far less than commonly asserted. As this gain is not reversed during spring or summer months, the net 0.48 kg fall/winter weight gain appears likely to contribute to the increase in body weight that frequently occurs during adulthood.”
This conclusion, in my opinion, sums up one of the biggest and most common issues I find in working with people online with The Strong and Confident Program who have a goal to lose weight.
The hardest battle after an extended period of indulgence is always getting back on track - because if you are able to get back on track, at the earliest opportunity afforded to you after Christmas, then losing 370g, really isn’t that daunting.
But because you believe you have set yourself back a lot further than that, due to the headlines, the messaging you see in Gyms and in Fitness Marketing and the two months of incessant fat-shaming, getting back on track seems so much harder than that of 370g of body weight.
The emotional weight you have gone through with Christmas feels more like 10kgs.
That is why so many people find it so very hard to simply get back on track after Christmas.
Interestingly, as a one-to-one coach, I have always found January to be a really slow month for sign-ups, compared to February and March. I believe this occurs for two reasons, the guilt people are feeling after Christmas, and the massive uphill battle they believe they have, combined with the fact people in January are still getting over the debt of Christmas.
Please stop worrying about how much weight you will gain at Christmas. The science isn’t there to back up what you see in the marketing and the headlines at this time of year.
On average its a gain of only 0.45kgs and that’s from a sample size of nearly 1000 people from all different walks of life, and who all had different body’s.
The Best Way To Navigate Your Fitness Through Christmas
In fact, if you have got this far into the article, you have already done one of the best things I can suggest to help you alleviate the guilt and anxiety you might be feeling about this time of year.
You have educated yourself on the objective facts.
With that knowledge, you can establish great power. You can establish perspective, and begin to regulate your emotional centre with your logical brain.
Before I wrote this article I put a post up on TikTok which summarised some of the studies and explained what to expect at Christmas in relation to weight gain. The video got this comment:
During Christmas, whenever you have feelings of guilt creeping in.
Whenever you feel yourself resisting the urge to say yes to something that you want to eat because you are worried about whether it is “good” or “bad” for you, I want you to think back to this article.
Think back to those hundreds and hundreds of people who were in those studies and averaged a weight gain of just 450g. Not the one stone you think you will gain by eating that mini Mars Bar out of the Celebrations tin.
Actually, just on that, why do Celebration Tins even have Bounties in them? Who wants Coconut Flavoured Chocolate at Christmas??????? Some things never cease to amaze me.
Knowing all of this is one aspect of how to navigate Christmas.
But another is that the work starts right now.
You need to practice behaviours that will help remove the guilt around all food, not just during Christmas. This is hard work, this is an ongoing journey, and Christmas can bring with it more emotionally difficult situations as well which might lead to higher bouts of indulgence and more challenging feelings around food-associated guilt.
For example, this year 2021, is my first Christmas in Australia. My fiancee is having to work on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and I am without any of my family who always made Christmas such a special time of year for me. We used to have a massive Boxing Day get-together, and I remember every year I would just sit by the window on Boxing Day morning watching every car pass my house, hoping the next one was my Aunty, my Uncle and my Cousins.
I loved going to the park and playing football with my Cousin, my Uncle and my Dad after Dinner and after we all got our presents. I never had Grandparents to celebrate Christmas with, so each year whilst I was a child, my extended family and my parents would always try to make Christmas as special as possible.
And they truly succeeded. I probably haven’t told them that enough in my life.
So I am without them all this Christmas. I will be on my own. A client has invited me round for Christmas Lunch which is incredibly generous, but it won’t replace the emotional gap I will feel,
And it will be very easy for me to replace that emotion with food.
As it always is as a human being.
If you feel more disconnected during the Christmas Season, you will replace that connection with food, and are more likely to overeat and still feel hungry. Even to the point of physical discomfort.
Therefore start now.
Start questioning your hunger. Is it emotional? Is it physical? Is it boredom? Is it stress? Is it tiredness? Is it low willpower due to a stressful busy day?
We feel hunger under all kinds of pressures, and being able to denote whether it is actually physical hunger - or emotional hunger will truly help you navigate your way to less overeating at Christmas.
If anxiety is high about gaining weight at Christmas, then you need to stop restricting your calories in the build-up to Christmas, stop restricting your food choice in the build-up to Christmas and begin to reduce your negative self-talk around your food and your body.
You can do this by, practising mindful eating and spending time with your food. Stop eating on the go and when in a rush. Nourish yourself by sitting with your food, giving yourself time to enjoy your food and listening to your body about whether it is full or requires some more food to be satiated.
When you do overeat, use compassion with yourself. Do this by investigating your hunger more, and understanding the emotional cause of why you overate, rather than just berating yourself for doing it. This will over time help with your negative self-talk, as you are internally investigating why this is occurring more, and bringing more understanding to your behaviour.
I am a huge fan of exercising at Christmas. Not because I think it offsets your calories because I know that’s not why we move. But during Christmas, I think it can be very important to keep moving. Let loose off of your plan, but try to move. Whether that be a big family walk, playing football with the family, a Christmas Day Bike Ride, or spending some time down the beach.
Exercise helps us digest food.
And you will, without a doubt be eating more food at Christmas. By moving your body, you will help the food get through your system, and the feeling of bloatedness and “weight gain” will be diminished. You will have more calories in your system, because it’s Christmas, and therefore more energy to move, it would be a missed opportunity to not see what movement feels like when you have more calories to work with.
Movement, especially resistance training, is always easier when you have more calories, and you could use this holiday season to explore what that feels like.
Essentially the body feels better when it moves, and if you don’t move during this time then the barrier of entry to movement post-Christmas will feel so much harder.
With my clients on The Strong and Confident Program I talk about their fitness dials.
Imagine your fitness is like a soundboard in a recording studio. But instead of the dials saying “Master Volume”, “Bass”, “Treble”, “Fade”, “Reverb” they had terms on them like:
Movement
Nutrition
Structured Eating
Work
Family
Mental Health
You can add whichever terms to the fitness dials you want, as we are all influenced in terms of fitness by different things.
But the goal, just like your soundboard is to create a harmonious symphony.
At a time like Christmas, the fitness dial of “Nutrition” will be dialled up to a 10, and therefore you must balance that with a lower dial somewhere else. For many people it could mean movement comes right down to a 1.
However things like work are likely to drop down to a lower number during the holidays, so you can allow that fall, and keep movement up at around 4 or 5, it will be so much easier in January to get that dial back up to where it was pre Christmas.
Essentially the balance to create the fitness symphony might change slightly, but it doesn’t mean it has to stop entirely.
Enter: Sir Isaac Newton - who was actually born on Christmas Day in 1642.
His First Law of Motion:
“That an object at rest remains at rest, and an object that is moving will continue to move straight and with constant velocity, if and only if there is no net force acting on that object.”
The key message here with both your nutrition and your movement during this time of year is to try not to stop completely.
You can dial it down yes because other parts of your life will be dialled up.
But try not to halt entirely.
Because if you stop both in terms of your nutrition and your movement, then you will indeed find it so much harder to start again and the feelings of Christmas failure, the feelings of Christmas Weight Gain will be compounded, and the longer you stay stopped, the more and more energy it will require to get started again.
All you have to do, with any Holiday Season, be it, Christmas, a Vacation, Easter, Thanksgiving, your Birthday or anything else, all you have to do is get back on track once it’s done.
If you can do that, you will never ever worry about how much weight you will gain at Christmas ever again.
Did You Find This Useful?
Firstly I want to say a huge thank you for reading my article. I hope that you now have a much better perspective on everything. With this perspective, I hope you can enjoy Christmas with your family, with your loved ones, or even enjoy the merriment that exists around you, if you don’t have a family to enjoy it with, like me, this year.
Christmas is a time for thankfulness, peace and love for all.
My wish for this article is that it has helped you find some peace from your anxiety around the holidays, combined with showing you a path to be able to continue and practice self-love.
If you are able to feel that within yourself, then you will be able to carry that forward into the world and help make this Christmas more special for everyone you come across, whether that be online, in person or any other way you socialise this Christmas.
All that is left for me to say is that I wish you, your family and your loved ones a truly Merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas. Or a truly peaceful and loving time of year if you celebrate in another way.
Eat the Chestnuts on the Roasting Fire.
Enjoy your Yule Log Cake.
Eat the Selection Box of Chocolate.
But above all, create Happy and Loving Memories - because that is what you truly deserve to do.
I would also love to invite you to grab some free fitness goodies from me,
The Free Fitness Goodies include:
✅ Get yourself a free month of workouts (Home and Gym-based options)
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References:
Díaz-Zavala RG, Castro-Cantú MF, Valencia ME, Álvarez-Hernández G, Haby MM, Esparza-Romero J. Effect of the Holiday Season on Weight Gain: A Narrative Review. J Obes. 2017;2017:2085136. doi:10.1155/2017/2085136
Rees SG, Holman RR, Turner RC. The Christmas feast. Br Med J (Clin Res Ed). 1985 Dec 21-28;291(6511):1764-5. doi: 10.1136/bmj.291.6511.1764. PMID: 3936575; PMCID: PMC1419184.
Reid, R. and Hackett, A. (1999), Changes in nutritional status in adults over Christmas 1998. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, 12: 513-516. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-277x.1999.00205.x
Yanovski JA, Yanovski SZ, Sovik KN, Nguyen TT, O'Neil PM, Sebring NG. A prospective study of holiday weight gain. N Engl J Med. 2000 Mar 23;342(12):861-7. doi: 10.1056/NEJM200003233421206. PMID: 10727591; PMCID: PMC4336296.
Wagner DR, Larson JN, Wengreen H. Weight and body composition change over a six-week holiday period. Eat Weight Disord. 2012 Mar;17(1):e54-6. doi: 10.1007/BF03325328. PMID: 22751272.
Cook CM, Subar AF, Troiano RP, Schoeller DA. Relation between holiday weight gain and total energy expenditure among 40- to 69-y-old men and women (OPEN study). Am J Clin Nutr. 2012 Mar;95(3):726-31. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.111.023036. Epub 2012 Feb 1. PMID: 22301936; PMCID: PMC3278247.
Stevenson JL, Krishnan S, Stoner MA, Goktas Z, Cooper JA. Effects of exercise during the holiday season on changes in body weight, body composition and blood pressure. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2013 Sep;67(9):944-9. doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2013.98. Epub 2013 May 22. PMID: 23695203.