It’s me, The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I’ve come to show you something more upsetting than your own gravestone – what would happen to your body if every month was December?
I wasn’t prepared to go method on this one so I spoke to nutritionist Charlotte Stirling-Reed; a woman who finds thinking about food so good she has made it her full-time job. Together, we speculated what it would be like if we acted with this sort of festive reckless abandon all year round.
'CHRISTMAS IS FOR SHARING' 'GO ON, IT’S CHRISTMAS AFTER ALL' 'TREAT YOURSELF' 'EAT THE PIE SUSAN.'
Yesterday I stood on the tube platform looking up at a billboard displaying huge delicious Sainsburys Salted Caramel Christmas Pudding and thought, 'I want to eat that huge delicious Sainsburys Salted Caramel Christmas Pudding.'
'I see a lot of people comfort eating during the winter' Charlotte tells me. 'It’s to do with the cold but it’s also the availability. Shops tend to be pushing those high-fat 'Treat Yourself"options. And that’s where we get the problem. It’s not about heavy or stodgy types of meals, but more about how many of them we choose.'
There’s no health board coming down hard on supermarkets encouraging us to increase our risk of diabetes. They sell actual yards of Jaffa Cakes at the tills. We’re hungover consistently for 31 days so obviously we buy them. 'This is a massive problem over the Christmas period because people tend to get out of their routine and they tend to snack a lot more. And what’s generally available are the chocolates, the biscuits, the crisps and that’s what people then opt for. They are low in nutrients and you’re not being filled up. After five or 10 minutes you’re then reaching for the next thing.'
According to urban folk lore, if you live in a city you’re never more than six feet away from a rat. At Christmas, you're never more than two steps away from a mince pie. But what are the long-term effects of turning snacking into a lifestyle choice?
'The more you eat like that – less proper meals and grazing on foods that are energy dense and nutrient deficient – the more likely you are to have peaks and falls of your blood sugar levels rather than keeping them nice and steady. And peaks and falls of insulin can have an enormous negative effect on the body' explains Charlotte.
'It means you may not sleep as well, and gain weight, and possibly have ups and downs in energy level and mood.'
A collective national sugar come-down on Boxing Day may go some way to explaining why go to our local high street and fight each other for discounted televisions. I imagine scenes like this would be a weekly occurrence in a December dystopia.
3 GLASSES OF MULLED WINES, A MUG OF EGGNOG AND A BOWL OF SHERRY PLEASE
Apparently, unless you go for a drink with all of the friends you’ve ever made before 25 December, your brain resets and you’ll lose your memories and friendships. I used a calculator I found on the Drink Aware website and a diary I found under a pizza box to come up with this extremely accurate formula.
Amount of alcohol consumed by an average gal in a December week:
One x ‘we should catch up before Christmas’ = 2 wine
One x ‘are you coming to the pub later?’ = 2 beer
One x ‘Rob and Mel’s Christmas Party!!!!’ = 3 cups of punch, 1 Mulled Wine, 1 Sherry.
One x ‘Tinder Date so that you can bed down for the winter’ = 3 x G&T.
Total – 20 units of Alcohol.
1426 calories – the equivalent of running for 143 minutes. Or eating 4.8 burgers if, like me, you find that easier to relate to.
'People tend to ignore the calories that you get from alcohol when actually it can be quite a large contribution to your daily intake,' explains Charlotte. And I also wanted to ignore the calories you get from alcohol so I changed the topic to other side-effects of heavy, consistent drinking. 'Alcohol does dehydrate us. It dehydrates the skin and potentially also may affect the transportation of nutrients to the skin, so you might start to feel dry and dehydrated skin. That’s definitely an impact that alcohol would have if you were drinking a lot over a long period of time.'
I’ve always assumed my face behaves like a snowglobe in December because it was adjusting to the cold weather, and because I operate a strict can’t-be-arsed policy on taking my make-up off if I’m anything less than wide awake. But apparently it’s all that booze. Perhaps there’s actual science behind choosing that yard of Jaffa Cakes at a till if you’re hungover and/or still a bit drunk.
READ MORE: Ask An Adult: Why Are We Sometimes Way More Productive When We're Hungover?
'There is a lot of research into the next day. It’s a lot to do with trying to replace fluids, so sometimes we do make the wrong choices. Also part of the reason we feel much more relaxed when we have that first glass or two is because of our inhibitions. Alcohol affects the neurotransitions in the brain that inhibit us from doing things that normally we wouldn’t. We’d be less likely to eat more chocolate and cake if we weren’t drinking so much alcohol.'
It’s the Christmas Catch-22. Heavy drinking and overeating leads to heavy drinking and overeating. Add an the increased number of situations in which alcohol is required to ease social interaction, plus the British Law that states you cannot pass judgment on another’s lifestyle during the festive period and you’ve got yourself a tough environment to make healthy life choices.
And then there’s everything else that comes with Christmas. According to a study by ING Britons will spend an average of £350 on Christmas presents this year, so just over four grand if we had to keep that up for a year. So with a year of Decembers we’d be gaining weight steadily and possibly experiencing mood swings. We’d have less money, less will power and less skin on our faces.
But at least we’re all, like, totally ok with that. We seem to have really thought about it as a group and decided we’d like to keep December as is please: a guilt free month of excess, and everyone’s all for it.
Merry Christmas!
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Artwork by Beth Hoeckel
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.