Amid Lunar New Year feasts and festivities to welcome the Year of the Horse, revelers should pay attention to their weight during a holiday season that causes almost 40 percent of people to gain about 2kg of weight, health officials say.
The Health Promotion Administration (HPA) has suggested fruit and vegetables as a healthy way to avoid holiday weight gain after a telephone survey of 1,089 adults showed that 37.9 percent of respondents put on the kilos during the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday last year. Men on average gained 2.1kg, while women gained 1.8kg, it showed.
HPA Deputy Director-General Yu Li-hui (游麗惠) said that while the recommended calorie intake was 700 per meal, many holiday dishes are so high in calories that a single Lunar New Year meal can mean consuming four times that amount.
During this year’s six-day holiday, which runs from today until Tuesday, a 60kg adult could gain as much as 1.4kg even by eating one meal of traditional dishes a day, the agency said.
Meanwhile, the survey showed that 80 percent of respondents did not eat enough fruit — eating less than two servings a day — over last year’s holiday. The situation is compounded for children and teenagers, who tend to prefer sugary fruit juice to actual fruit.
The HPA estimated that a 60kg adult would need to cycle for 7.5 hours, speed walk for 5.5 hours or run 3.7 hours to shed the extra calories gained from a single traditional meal.
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