6 Tips To Maintain Your Weight During Chinese New Year

JG Fit - 6 Tips to Maintain Your Weight During CNY

Christmas! New Year, 2018! Valentine's Day! And now, Singaporeans have yet another reason to feast in the name of Chinese New Year(CNY). As you have seen previously from our Facebook post, LadyIronChef article illustrates roughly how much calories is in these popular CNY snacks, and perhaps we should be worried, no?

To help you manage both health and weight, we have come up with 6 CNY tips to assist you in no particular order.

​1. Keep to plain water, tea or coffee
What is the first thing you would expect beside red packet and oranges when you do house visiting? The host would definitely serve you drinks such as Coke, Fanta Orange, 7-Up and even beer, slurp!

You could avoid these pit-falls by simply requesting for plain water, hot no-sugar tea or coffee. Imagine travelling to 7-8 different places in a day, that would means saving yourself from a potentially damaging 1000+- calories in a day. Be courteous when you reject the sweet drinks though.

2. Pre-CNY routine
Before all the feasting and snacking starts, create a Pre-CNY routine by reducing your food intake 2 - 4 weeks prior, to reduce some weight.
If you already know how to exercise proper, you could also adopt a more intensive training routine, so you could use the CNY period to "recover".

3. Increase Physical Activity
Do 10000 squats every day for the week. Just kidding.
There might not be enough time to get a full workout in, but you could simply adopt 10-min HIIT (high intensity interval training) workout or even 100 squats just to keep the metabolism reving.
IF, IF, you are really that busy for some reason, chosing to stand up, walk and interact more will help. Just get moving.

4. Try Intermittent Fasting before main events
Reunion dinner.. CNY day dinner.. This typically means that everyone will gather around the table to enjoy a heart-warming steamboat or home cooked food.
Ever heard of intermittent fasting? You could adopt the 16/8 method, which is to NOT eat for 16 hours and consume food within 8 hours in between. If you are feeling adventurous, you could even adopt a single meal plan; i.e. consuming food during the reunion dinner itself.

5. Feast right
Continuing from point 4, what you can do is subtlety start with lots of vegetable and meat, while avoiding processed food like hot-dogs, fish-balls as much as possible.
Next, move on to carbohydrate sources such as rice vermicelli or rice before finally ending the meal with dessert (if any). You should use point number 1 and try to drink as much plain water as possible during the meal, so that you can avoid stuffing yourself full every single time.

6. Post-CNY restart
Post-holiday, we tend to take longer to restart exercise and consuming the "right" food again. The faster you get back on track, the faster you lose away the CNY gains. This means you will go back to eating the same healthy food that you were eating before


Remember, all the points above is just our recommendations and do not restrict yourself to the point that you start stressing yourself and others out. That itself, ladies and gentlemen, is worse than gaining weight. With that, we end off our article, and Happy Chinese New Year!

Huat Ah!
JG Fit