Have your Xmas cake and eat it…but keep the scales close by!

BETWEEN the turkey dinners and the Christmas cake, it’s a time of year when it’s all too easy to pile on the pounds.

But experts claim to have found a very simple way to avoid putting on weight over the festive season – getting on the scales twice a week.

Researchers tracked 272 volunteers over Christmas in 2016 and 2017. Half were given basic tips on how to avoid over-indulging and asked to weigh themselves twice a week. The other half were told to carry on as normal.

Members of the group who were given no advice put on 370g – just under 1lb – between November and January.

The other group lost 130g – about quarter of a pound.

The study was carried out at Birmingham and Loughborough universities. Researcher Frances Mason, of Birmingham, said the festive season provided ‘an opportunity for prolonged over-consumption and sedentary behaviour’.

She added: ‘On Christmas Day alone an individual might consume 6,000 calories – three times the recommended daily allowance.’

She said ‘low intensity interventions’ such as weighing yourself twice a week and following basic diet tips ‘should be considered by health policy makers’.

Professor Amanda Daley, of Loughborough, added: ‘On average people gain a small amount of weight of up to 1kg (2.2lb) each year, and holidays such as Christmas are responsible for most of this.’ She said this weight gain is not normally lost and builds up over years. ‘Our research has shown that a brief intervention over the Christmas period can help to prevent these small weight gains that accumulate.’

Volunteers taking part in the study, published in the British Medical Journal, were given ten tips for weight management along with a list of how much activity would be needed to burn off calories found in popular food and drinks consumed at Christmas. It would take 21 minutes of running to burn the calories in a mince pie, for example.

Sarah Drabble, a nutritionist at the World Cancer Research Fund, said: ‘Christmas seems to get more testing for our waistlines and willpower every year. Our research shows that being overweight or obese is a cause of 12 different types of cancer.’