Just eat the cookie. And the ham. Cheers to eggnog.

By Mary MacVean

Pick your poison: latkes, Christmas cookies, eggnog? Maybe the whole damn buffet?

For anyone who weighs more than svelte, or who lives in fear of gaining a pound, every bit of edible joy can be so easily sucked out of the last two months of the year.

It’s that time when it’s easy to find advice about how to avoid everything delicious. And we are meant to believe it’s all in our control if we just do things properly. More on that in a bit.

By early November, just after the pumpkin-shaped Reece’s cups go on sale, the advice starts to appear, often in publications aimed at women. Dieting is, after all, mostly women’s work. Bizarrely, so is the cooking of much of what we are supposed to leave on the platter in favor of a lovely pile of carrot sticks.

I’m guilty of offering some of this advice, years ago as a wire service reporter who covered food and nutrition. I thought I was doing the right thing, despite evidence from my own life to the contrary.

Now, I wonder what I was thinking. Why do we have to spend our holiday season feeling a constant nudge about what not to eat or drink? Why do we presume every one of us will go to every dinner or party and just gorge on every single offering unless we have a great plan to stay on the straight and narrow? Why would it be the end of everything good in the world if we arrived on Jan. 1 a pound or five heavier?

Don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting finding every single holiday food and just eating till we drop. Nor am I suggesting that in November and December, we get a full-on pass from eating produce and being active. It does not make me happy to find my clothes a smitch tighter come the new year. But I am advocating for being kind to ourselves when the season brings some extras to our plates. And for understanding that we’re likely to drink one or two glasses of eggnog a year.

If a skinny person piles too many (How many exactly is too many?) Christmas cookies on their plate, it’s amusing or goes unnoticed. But just let a heavy person do that, and she will feel the eyes of the room boring into her abundant belly. This game is unwinnable.

And the truth seems to be that people generally don’t gain all that much weight over the holidays anyway. The New England Journal of Medicine published a study in 2000 that suggests people gain around a pound from Thanksgiving to Jan. 1. The issue, the journal says, is taking it off in the next year so the pounds don’t pile up over the decades.

Let’s look at some of that oh-so-helpful advice.

— Drink lots of water. Does water really make you not want a glass of wine or a slice of cake? It doesn’t do that for me either. Maybe the idea is that if you spend the whole party running to the bathroom to pee, you’ll burn up the calories?

— Watch your portion sizes. So many of us already do that. Those who follow any of a few diets may actually be measuring exactly what they eat every day. And it’s a tad awkward to ask your host for a knife to cut her cookies in half, isn’t it?

— Control your stress levels. Now that you’ve stopped laughing uncontrollably, just how are you going to do that? A pandemic, isolation, holiday shopping in a mask, a broken world. Having spent too much time in the house with the same small group of people. A little stress, anyone?

— Stay active. There are many reasons to work out, walk, ride a bike, whatever. But unless you are a marathon runner or a mountain climber, you are most unlikely to be able to balance holiday indulgence.

None of this is to say that I am not susceptible to the decades of eating advice out there. I run those calculations in my head, too, of whether to eat another cookie or take a slice of pie or a helping of stuffing and how little I might eat the day of a party. But for me, and likely for most people, that calculation doesn’t work very well. If only I could manage it better, right?

One of the most infuriating things about all of this is the notion of blame: You got fat, it’s your fault, so too bad for you if your holidays are infested with guilt and deprivation. Those skinny people deserve Christmas cookies. You, however, do not. You should have prepared better earlier in the year if you wanted to splurge at Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s.

Maybe next year you’ll do better.

How about looking at it this way instead? Maybe the day will come when we will accept ourselves as we are and stop worrying about making our bodies into something they aren’t.

Mary MacVean writes about diet culture, food, health and urban farming.