People, it's November. We need to have a serious talk about the eating season creeping up on us. But first... an analogy.

Weight management is a lot like money management. Your weight can get away from you just as easily as your finances can. One minute you're cruising along, enjoying life - eating, drinking, shopping and being merry - and then next thing you know you've racked up piles of credit card debt. Gaining the debt was easy; getting rid of it is the hard part. You make tiny payments, barely chipping away at the debt. The number never seems to go down. It takes months to make a dent! And all because of a few weeks of good livin'.

I'm not a big fan of credit. I don't think I ever have been. When I was 20 years old, my parents suggested I buy a house. I was making my first full-time salary, and I got pre-approved for a small mortgage. I bought a small house with my small mortgage, nowhere near my dream house. But, dream house or not, it was "important for me to build equity," I was told.

I came to learn that all equity got me was piles of credit. And when you have piles of credit, you can get into trouble.

To be truthful, I've never struggled with being very overweight like millions of Canadians do - although I have struggled with weight management in my own way. But I have struggled to repay financial debt. The financial struggles I had in my youth have made me the cash-junky I am today. If I don't have the cash, I don't buy the item. I know it's not the most luxurious way to live, but you have to admit it makes a lot of sense.

Why not apply the same logic to weight management?

Mmmmmmm.. I love Turtles
So here we are. Early November. In Canada, we've already had Thanksgiving. The sound of that electric knife carving the turkey was like the starter's pistol for the Big Eating Season.

Life becomes more festive as we cruise through the last couple months of the year: companies and acquaintances hold "holiday parties," workplaces become rife with home baking and boxes of chocolates, friends invite friends over for egg nog and appetizers. It's dietary mayhem... but it's also incredibly fun. It would be a shame to miss it.

Turn on the radio anytime in December and you'll hear some cheesy radio personality spewing the same tired statistic: "Hey-heyyyyyy! Did you know that the average person gains between 7 and 10 pounds over the Christmas holidays? Uh oh!" (Look, it's really hard to convey the "cheesy radio personality" voice in a blog. Cut me some slack...). But it's true. The big eating and the resulting weight gain are anticipated, almost joked about. But it's no joke when the bill comes in the mail in January.

We spend the early part of every year trying to work off all the pounds we gained over Christmas, with varying degrees of success. We spend that same amount of time paying off our Christmas credit card bills. For months after one of the happiest and most festive times of the year, we slave and struggle to repay all that fun we've had. Talk about a buzz-kill.

I'm a pretty big fan of the You Only Live Once/If It Feels Good Do It line of thinking, so I'd rather enjoy my holidays with reckless abandon. That's why this month, I'm overpaying my credit card so I start with a debit on my account before I start Christmas shopping. Even though I'll still spend a grotesque amount, it will seem less horrible.

And I like to do the same with my holiday eating. Because if I enter a room with egg nog in it, you can bet I'm drinking some of it. 18 grams of fat per cup be damned (I do not advocate "Light" egg nog; if I wanted egg-flavoured water I'd have stayed living on the farm and drinking out of the well!).

Egg nog has a very high, er... interest rate, but I have no problem adding that to my debt-load. Life's too short not to.

Your Q4 Fiscal Action Plan
November is your last chance to prepay your dietary credit card before the crazy eating season really starts. Start making smarter diet choices now, and see if you can cruise into the holiday season with a "debit on your account." If you were to lose even 2 pounds before December rolls around (no pun intended), you'll still be slightly ahead of the game in terms of the 7-10 pounds the average Canadian gains each Christmas.

But here's the other half of the puzzle: exercise. They say diet contributes about 75% of the work to a weight management program, and exercise makes up the other 25%. And I agree with that. But where earning calories is concerned, I suggest putting your emphasis on exercise starting right now in November. Here are a few reasons why:

November: With diet alone, you'll be able to make a nice small prepayment on your dietary credit card for the holidays. Exercise will help to increase the size of that payment. Imagine if you exercised enough in November that you waltzed into December with a 5 or 6 pound pre-holiday weight loss? Even after you gained the typical 7-10 pounds that Canadians pack on over Christmas, you'd come close to breaking even! Not only is that good for your physical wellness, but it's a great mental and emotional boost, too, to know that you've remained in control of your exercise and nutrition during the most challenging time of the year.  

December: The work you put into your exercise in November will not only afford you a dietary credit card overpayment, but something else will happen behind-the-scenes too: you'll have been establishing a habit. Not only will this habit help you earn even more treats during the big eating season but more importantly, that habit will hopefully continue on through the month of December - a.k.a., the month when all dietary hell breaks loose. Studies have shown that it takes 21 days to make a habit; that's what November was for. Once the calendar turns to the month of December, that habit will already be engrained and you'll be more inclined to exercise to earn or burn all those delicious Christmas calories. Go ahead. Envision yourself saying 'Yes' to a second glass of full-fat egg nog WITH rum, knowing that you spent 30 minutes earlier that day having a brisk incline walk on a treadmill. The few hundred calories you'll be racking up by drinking a few glasses of rummy egg nog will have already been paid in advance by your exercise habit. 

January: Cut your fitness-related New Year's resolutions off at the pass. Gyms bust at the seams with Resolutioners in January, February... March? Not so much. But chances are very good that you'll make a similar resolution. Will you stick to it? It's a heck of a lot of pressure to be one of the hundreds or thousands of new members at a gym trying to get inspired to build a fitness habit. But you could already have your habit built by then. Listen, you've got two months before you have to make that resolution, and you KNOW you're going to make it, right? So start your exercise plan now. Get the habit started early and beat the resolution crowd to the punch. By the time all those nervous, wide-eyed Resolutioners hit the floor in January, you'll already be on auto-pilot.

Ka-Ching!
If you start right now, and vow to exercise all the way through the holiday season, three times a week for 30-60 minutes at a time, burning an average of 500 calories each time, that's 1500 extra calories you can consume each week and still break even - because the holiday season is no time to try to lose weight, just as it's no time to try to save money. You can drink full-fat egg nog, you can have an extra heap of stuffing and gravy with your turkey dinner and you can have Turtles for breakfast, as long as you've made a little room on your dietary credit card.

When the New Year rings in and the holiday season finally starts to fizzle out on January 1, 2010, aim to be the same weight you were in October before all this eating madness started. And even if you do gain a few pounds, at least you've taken great strides toward creating your fitness habit. You've been making your minimum payments. And it's easier to avoid going into debt than it is to pay it back once you've gone into the red.

Building or continuing an exercise habit through the month of November will set you up to continue the habit through December, and into 2010 and beyond. Even with all the parties and the Turtles and the nog, as long as you've got a regular exercise habit under your belt (no pun intended) you'll come closer to ending the Christmas season in the black.