I begin with two photos that, upon initial inspection, may seem unrelated.

First, on the left, a picture I took this morning of a ten-pound sack of potatoes.

Second, a slightly off-center “stick out your arm and shoot” photo of my son and me at Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory two years ago:

Let me explain this particular photo juxtaposition.

The ten-pound sack of potatoes provides a visual of the ten pounds that conventional wisdom claims the average person gains between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.  I myself have sat through more than one mid-November Weight Watchers meeting where the bag of potatoes is trotted out as a cautionary tale.  It’s like the suburban strip mall equivalent of Oprah and her wagon of fat.

And while actual data refutes the whole ten-pound holiday weight gain theory, the fact remains that people do gain some weight during the holidays.  One study found that the average person gains about a pound during the holiday season.  Additionally, another study found that people who are already overweight gain an average of 5 pounds during the holidays.  The worst part is, most people never lose the holiday weight.

Whatever the actual figures, it should come as no surprise that the holiday season is a challenging time for those watching their weight.  Food is freakin’ everywhere during the holidays.   Which brings me to the second picture, the one from the Garfield Park Conservatory.

Garfield Park Conservatory is a wonderful indoor greenhouse, a free local attraction that gives winter-weary Chicagoans a leafy green respite from the dreary weather.  In December, one room of the conservatory is decorated for Christmas, making it a fun annual holiday destination.

My son and I were at the conservatory for the holiday decorations when we took the above photo.  It was a bleak winter day, and I reasoned that we could use a free trip to a warm, tropical place to cure our cabin fever.  We could even take our Christmas card pictures while we were there!   And, most importantly, Garfield was a rare holiday activity that involved no eating whatsoever.  See, I was on Weight Watchers that holiday season, as I have been every holiday season for approximately the past 35 years (and I’m only 33), and I didn’t need yet another activity where festive was synonymous with excessive eating.  Garfield seemed perfect.  Not only do they not serve food there, but there isn’t even a decent restaurant  anywhere near the place.  The only things one could possibly eat at the Garfield Park Conservatory are the plants on display there, and that might lead to poisoning and/or removal from the grounds, both of which are significant enough deterrents to eating.

So, Garfield it was!  We ate our sensible lunches and made the drive to the conservatory.  And then, upon entering, I noticed a chalkboard indicating that our visit had coincided with the one hour during the entire holiday season when the conservatory was handing out free cookies and cider.  Oh.  Yay.  Employees were coming up to visitors offering trays of cookies.  I resisted, but unhappily.  It’s a wonder I’m smiling in that picture.

My point is, you can’t go anywhere during the holidays, not even a damn greenhouse, without somebody offering you food.  It’s a tough time for the weak of willpower, a group in which I include myself.

And let me make it clear that I have by no means won the battle of the bulge myself.  I’d love to show you a picture of myself triumphantly holding up my oversized fat jeans next to my much skinnier body, but the fact of the matter is that I’m currently wearing those fat jeans and filling out every inch of them.  So you probably won’t find me all that inspirational, but I’d like to think my flawed human-ness makes me more likable.  Because hey, I’m down in the trenches with you, my dieting brothers and sisters.

Anyway, my point is, as a fellow warrior in the weight-loss battle, I’m never going to be one to downplay the difficulty of weight loss, especially during the holidays.  Watching your weight during the holidays is hard, like, maybe it might just be easier to cut off my eating arm hard.  But I will resolutely march into battle, armed with a few strategies this holiday season.

Let me say that there are many holiday weight-loss strategies— namely the ones professed by magazines and TV news segments— that are totally obvious.  These strategies more or less amount to don’t eat.  More specifically, they might tell you to stick with low-fat appetizers like the vegetable tray, be aware of portion sizes, and enjoy in moderation.  Limit alcohol!  Focus on the true meaning of the holiday, not on the food!   Oh, but treat yourself once in awhile, so you don’t feel deprived!

These strategies range from nebulous at best to completely un-doable at worst.  Not eating or drinking anything at the party seems like a great plan in the abstract, but as soon as you get into the real party atmosphere with the tantalizing food and the awkward social situations, your whole dieting battle plan goes straight out the window.  Or maybe the party hosts aren’t serving any low-fat appetizers like the hosts of the hypothetical party in the article on dieting tips.  And plus somebody’s pushing food on you, encouraging you to just eat it, come on, it’s the holidays, and you just can’t maintain willpower and politeness simultaneously.

So while the usual dieting strategies are not altogether bad, I myself need more than just these fairly obvious strategies to help me through.  Here are some of the supplemental dieting strategies I’ll be using this holiday season:

-When in doubt, employ the tactics of germ warfare.  Everybody knows that people get sick more often during the winter, so it’s likely that somebody with a nasty virus has put his or her hands in the community bowl.  Just imagine somebody coughing and then immediately diving into that bowl of chips.  If possible, find an actual sick person and ask him or her to lick a couple of those chips and then mix them back in with the others in the bowl.  Lost your appetite yet?

-Be aware of your idiotic tendency to equate eating with social confidence.  No, I wasn’t calling you an idiot.  I was calling myself an idiot, really, because I find that anytime I feel socially awkward at a gathering, I immediately begin snacking.  What on earth eating, which probably makes me look like an even bigger slob, has to do with feeling socially confident, I will never know.  But damn if snack mix isn’t my first line of defense against feeling awkward.  And I figure that being aware of this idiotic tendency is the first step to eliminating it.

-Skip the party.  Okay, okay, okay, I know, I know, I know!  Skipping a party just to avoid the food is a total throwing out the baby with the bathwater, or cutting off your nose to spite your face, or some other corny adage your grandma used to say.  And it’s not in the spirit of the holiday season!  Plus, it’s never a Weight Watchers-approved strategy!  They want you to still enjoy all of the special occasions the real world has to offer, while still remaining “on plan.”  But just hear me out.  Odds are, sometime during the holiday season, there’s some sort of party, open house, or other social gathering that you just don’t want to go to.  Now, in some cases, skipping that particular activity is not advisable, because maybe attending the party is important for your career success or your relationship with a person of prominence in your life.  But maybe there’s at least one gathering in your life that you don’t want to go to and really don’t need to go to.  And since, due to the situation described above, you’re more likely to overeat at an unpleasant party anyway, you might want to make up an excuse and just skip that one gathering.  Sure you’ll feel a tad guilty, but tell yourself that you need to do something for you, to reward yourself for your weight-loss efforts.

-Keep it in perspective.  No, I’m not talking about the whole “appreciate the holidays for their true religious/interpersonal/family meanings” that most dieting experts would profess that you do.  I mean, sure, appreciating the true meaning of the holidays is great, don’t get me wrong.  But by perspective here, I just mean realizing it’s not that bad.  That’s kind of a good global perspective to have overall anyway, but I’m referring specifically here to the idea that dieting during the holidays isn’t that bad.  Sure, every news outlet on the planet is going to be talking about excessive holiday food consumption.  But, in reality, the holiday dieter doesn’t face as many trials as the media would have us believe.  Think about it.  How many truly difficult, all-out gorge-fests are you invited to this holiday season?  There’s Thanksgiving and whatever big December holiday(s) you celebrate, and maybe New Year’s.  You probably have to go to a few other personal or professional holiday gatherings.  But, at most, you might have five tough eating days, fewer if you’re unpopular like I am (see:  I skip parties so I won’t eat at them).  Nobody ever got fat eating badly on five separate occasions.  Corollary: Other miscellaneous holiday food does not constitute a “special occasion” where excessive eating is justified.  I’m talking here about that batch of cookies some random neighbor gives you (really nice sentiment, but she probably coughed in them), or that slightly nasty pre-packaged crap sitting in the breakroom at work.  You do not need to eat those food items.  There is absolutely no social pressure whatsoever to eat them.  Do not eat them.   Furthermore …

-If you eat poorly at the party, don’t eat crap all the rest of the time.  Like a lot of people, I tend to fall victim to the stupidest fallacy in dieting: The “if I already blew my diet today, I might as well blow it some more.”  You know how it goes.  You ate the cheesecake at your daytime office party, because you were just sitting there awkwardly with your co-workers, so you figure you’ve already had a bad eating day.  So then you figure, hey, since my dieting day is ruined anyway, I might as well go home and eat peanut butter straight out of the jar (hypothetically speaking, of course).   Because two wrongs make a right, don’t they?  Except now you’ve just created a holiday weight-gain scenario that really had nothing to do with holiday food.

So, those are some lesser-known, slightly more-smart-assy tips for dieting during the holidays.  I hope that if you are a follower dieter, you will be able to make use of one or more of these strategies.  I myself will be writing them on my arm in permanent marker, and possibly pushing up the sleeve of my holiday sweater to read them anytime I feel weak.  That way I’ll be able to show you a picture of myself with my too-big fat pants come January.  January 2013.

When she isn’t photographing sacks of potatoes, Shannon Ford likes to blog about parenting and other miscellany at Same Old Shannon.  She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, four-year-old son, and a rather large cat.