Friendly Persuasion: hold into your diet and your friends!

As Christmas approaches, I'm thinking about how I can have lots of fun whilst not getting fat and spending New Year on the naughty step with rice cakes and water.

Of course it's not just about me and my willpower:  it's more than resisting the nibbles and the siren call of chocolate. I'll have to resist the friendly persuasions of others.

Friends and family can help you get slim and stay slim or they can be a nightmare. Some folk want you to eat, drink and be merry, throw caution and diet to the wind and stop spoiling the fun. Others quietly put the bread sauce and butter for the veg separately and make sure there's healthy non alcoholic drinks about.

Without exception, all my friends and family were really supportive of me losing weight. Can't fault a single one of them. But celebrations demand that you put away the diet books and get stuck in, with ne'er a thought about the hips.

Celebration in our culture means food and drink, lots of it and in particular, unhealthy high-fat, high-calorie food. Chocolate, wine, garlic mayonnaise, sausages. Foods that are usually an occasional treat become staple fare; every meal becomes a ginormous calorie feast, nibbles are everywhere.  Healthy options are seen as the opposite of celebration and so discouraged, you should be indulging yourself - even if you really love your veg pure and unadulterated like me. The pressures are on to stop being boring, stop depriving yourself and get stuck in.

Of course we're fast approaching the most concentrated celebrations of the year and I am really looking forward to some quality time with friends and family. This in itself is worthy of celebration given how little time we get these days just to enjoy each others' company.  

BUT I DON'T WANT TO GET FAT AGAIN!!!!! 

I've had very few quibbles about my healthy eating when I was on the diet and when I had gallstones (gallstones from eating a high fat diet for years). Then it was okay for me to choose healthy foods and friends went out of their way to come up with lovely creative food that I would enjoy. Brilliant.

But when I want to eat healthily now, just because I like it, well..... healthy eating is seen as a bit odd and perverse. I'm being fussy, silly, too serious or a borderline anorexic! It's much easier just to smile and eat up rather than offend folk, and the food is prepared with love and it would be churlish and offensive not to enjoy it.  It's not the end of the world.  But I don't feel good afterwards, it's like having a fat hangover! 

Is there a way to have your rice cake and eat it? Can you keep your friends and family happy without eating food you'd rather avoid?   I've been experimenting and there are some tactics to use which help reduce the damage to your hips and your friendships.

• Don't make a big deal about healthy eating, go for low key small changes that people won't notice - leave the bread; don't put butter on it, don't eat all the nibbles.
• Do healthy eating or no alcohol, don't do both. Dry rice cakes and tap water will attract attention and pressures will build
• A glass of wine, even if you only take a sip, will reassure your chums, but don't drink more than 2 glasses!
• Plan to have one unhealthy 'treat', but make it something really special that you like -  a pudding, a starter, cheese, a nightcap. 
• Pick an expensive and healthy treat. It's dead easy to get away without a pudding if you've just eaten oysters and sea bass, and they certainly count as a treat by most people's books.
• Invite people to eat at your home, make healthy food with options to add butter; cheese sauce, ice cream etc, you all eat what you want

Because I'm training for a marathon, it's okay just now for me to be a bit picky - though people understandably think I need to eat even more than usual! But explaining the need for good fuel makes sense to people.