Eat Your Fave Holiday Treats Without Gaining Weight

Don't you wish you could dig into your favorite party and holiday foods over the next two months and not see the slightest increase in the number on the scale? You can; you just need to know a few secrets and smart strategies. Here's how to treat yourself to delectable hors d'oeuvres, fancy dinners out and sweet treats and  still ring in the New Year at the same size you are today

Give yourself some wiggle room: Breaking up with a food you love is a recipe for disaster. "Don't deny yourself certain things, like cupcakes or french fries; just limit the amounts," says Roberta Duyff, R.D., the author of the American Dietetic Association Complete Food & Nutrition Guide. "Those foods often become more and more desirable the longer you don't eat them, meaning you'll probably end up bingeing."

While you know when you've gone overboard (ending up wrist-deep in a tub of mocha-chip, say), it's tough to figure out what constitutes an acceptable amount of something that's not so healthy. Now there's an answer: In a paper published in the journalNutrition Today, Duyff and a team of nutritionists say it's OK to eat between 50 and 100 calories of indulgent foods a day. "As long as you stay within your daily calorie limit and eat an overall healthy diet, then allowing yourself a small portion of something sweet or higher in fat won't harm your waistline," Duyff says. If you don't trust yourself to keep the treat small—think a fun-size candy bar or a handful of cheese crackers—go without for a few days, bank those calories, then enjoy something more substantial later, like a piece of pumpkin pie.

Be a smooth operator :  The texture of the foods you eat can be the key to keeping your portions in check. It turns out that if you're try­ing to be healthy, you'll down a lot more of a treat if it's crunchy as opposed to creamy. The reasoning goes something like this: People assume that crunchy foods have fewer calories than softer ones, so they eat more of them, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Through a lifetime of eating, we've taught our brains that smooth foods, like butter, ice cream and cheese, are higher in calories than crunchy foods, such as celery, carrots and whole-grain cereal," says study coauthor Dipayan Biswas, Ph.D. So we'll chomp away on potato chips but eat only a small serving of mashed potatoes. Use this belief to your benefit by, say, picking a fudgy brownie from the center of the pan versus a crispy one on the end. If you're really jonesing for something crunchy, save it for when you're browsing Pinterest or in the middle of a Good Wifemarathon; Biswas says that you'll mindlessly munch less on crispy snacks than creamy ones because they take more effort to chew, forcing you to slow down.

Splurge on your entrée : The next time you're at a restaurant perusing the menu, keep this in mind: The pricier dishes could pay big dividends for your health. A new study from Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab found that people who spent a little more for an all-you-can-eat buffet felt happier with the experience than those who spent less. "Eating stimulates dopamine and serotonin, two neurochemicals that induce satisfaction," says Dana James, a nutritionist and the founder of Food Coach NYC. "If you perceive food to be of higher quality because of cost, your brain will produce even more of those neurochemicals, meaning that you're less likely to crave anything else."

Face facts : It's natural to try to pretend that a treat is healthier than it really is (triple-cream Brie is OK because it's packed with protein), but truly embracing how decadent it is can actually help you burn more calories. Research in the journal Health Psychology found that when people drank a milk shake they believed was high in calories, their metabolism sped up and worked faster to process the treat. People who drank the same milk shake thinking that it was low-calorie didn't experience the same metabolism boost.

"The high-calorie milk shake group had a huge drop in their level of ghrelin, a hormone that signals your brain to eat, and as a result, their metabolism sped up," explains lead study author Alia Crum, Ph.D. "Those who believed they had the light milk shake didn't see nearly as big a drop in ghrelin, so their brains sent out signals to eat more food and slow down their metabolism." The secret, then, to keeping your system revved when you eat something luscious is to change your mind-set about it. "If you think you're indulging, your body will react accordingly," Crum says. "So focus on how sinful something tastes instead of rushing through it."

Let loose on the weekends : On a typical Wednesday night, you sit down to a dinner of rotisserie chicken with roasted veggies, but come the weekend, you're all about a burger with fries and a glass of wine. The good news is that's perfectly OK. As long as you snap back to your normal eating pattern during the week, it doesn't matter much that you splurge on the weekends. A Finnish study found that most people's weight naturally fluctuates throughout the week, rising over the weekend, peaking on Sunday or Monday and dropping throughout the week until it hits its lowest point on Friday. "Usually when people want to lose weight, they think they have to stick to a strict diet all the time," study coauthor Anna-Leena Orsama says. "But it's healthy to have slight increases in weight over the weekends as long as you also have days during the week when you eat fewer calories than you burn to make up for it."

Save the evidence : Hang onto your plate at cocktail parties. A Cornell University study shows that if you can see clues about what you've eaten—pistachio shells, chicken bones, chocolate wrappers—you'll consume 27 percent less than you would if you were to toss them right away. "It comes down to the simple concept of 'out of sight, out of mind,'" says study coauthor Collin Payne, Ph.D. When you're chatting with friends and walkingaround and meeting new people at a party, you're distracted and paying no attention to how much you've eaten. You need visual cues to tell you when to stop. If there aren't any skewers or tooth­picks on your plate, Payne explains, it's tougher to decide to call it quits. As a result, you could easily down hundreds of extra calories without realizing it. Another possible reason holding onto your scraps could help you rein in your appetite: simple embarrassment. Nobody wants to be that person squeezing yet more food onto a plateful of leftovers.