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Just eat the cookie. And the ham. Cheers to eggnog.
By Mary MacVean
Pick your poison: latkes, Christmas cookies, eggnog? Maybe the whole damn buffet?
For anyone who weighs more than svelte, or who lives in fear of gaining a pound, every bit of edible joy can be so easily sucked out of the last two months of the year.
It’s that time when it’s easy to find advice about how to avoid everything delicious. And we are meant to believe it’s all in our control if we just do things properly. More on that in a bit.
By early November, just after the pumpkin-shaped Reece’s cups go on sale, the advice starts to appear, often in publications aimed at women. Dieting is, after all, mostly women’s work. Bizarrely, so is the cooking of much of what we are supposed to leave on the platter in favor of a lovely pile of carrot sticks.
I’m guilty of offering some of this advice, years ago as a wire service reporter who covered food and nutrition. I thought I was doing the right thing, despite evidence from my own life to the contrary.
Now, I wonder what I was thinking. Why do we have to spend our holiday season feeling a constant nudge about what not to eat or drink? Why do we presume every one of us will go to every dinner or party and just gorge on every single offering unless we have a great plan to…