Spring clean your diet and get yourself match-fit for Christmas


The importance of eating more fruit and vegetables is a year-round message. Spring is one more excuse to talk about it. Photo: Getty
In the rosy-cheeked world of health and wellness publishing, a perennial headline has been getting a workout: ‘How To Spring Clean Your Diet.’
The short version: Spring cleaning isn’t just about banging the rugs against the side of the house, you can freshen up your eating habits and your insides!
After all, who doesn’t have a body choked with winter casseroles?
What does ‘spring clean’ really mean?
The fact is, most feature stories about dietary spring cleaning … don’t actually mention spring, and why its arrival might play a role in changing your bad habits. We’ll come back to that.
On the face of it, all these ‘spring clean’ stories are an excuse to push the diet advice you get (and tend to ignore) throughout the year.
Over at The Healthy, you’ll find ’15 ways to spring clean your diet’. These include swapping pasta for zucchini noodles for pasta, and making water “more appealing”.
At Forbes, there are ‘7 Simple Steps, According To Dietitians’.
These include: ‘More veggies, more fruit, more often’ and ‘Eat more mindfully’.

How about swapping that mid-morning muffin for a piece of fruit? Photo: Getty
There’s also an accidental challenge to the spring clean theme: ‘Steer clear of detoxes or cleanses.’
And for good reason – detoxes don’t work. As Forbes points out: they’re unnecessary because “your organs are more than capable of cleansing and detoxing your body on their own”.
One of my favourite bits of ‘spring clean’ advice comes from the Northwest Community Healthcare in the US:
“Purge. Right now, give away or throw away the three problem foods/beverages that are inconsistent with a healthy meal plan or that are keeping you from achieving your weight-loss goals.
“Purging three items is a great start. You can eliminate additional items later. Make a pact with others in your household that no one will bring these items into the home for now.”
The diet police are here! Flush the doughnuts!
Isn’t winter something to recover from?
Huddled away from the blizzards, virtually hibernating on the couch, spreading our scones with lard, we all turn into butterballs during the colder months, right?

Potato celery gratin with cheese, a wintry delight. Photo: Getty
How much weight we put on during winter varies greatly between formal research findings and those of surveys.
In 2015, the Dietitians Association of Australia, in a news.com story claimed that nearly four in 10 women (38 per cent) and one in two men (53 per cent) were expected to gain up to five kilograms over the coming winter.
The news.com story reported: “Nine in 10 of us will eat more takeaways during winter loading us with extra kilojoules, saturated fat and sugar, according to a 2012 NSW Food Authority and NSW Health survey.”
Well, maybe.
What the studies say
Formal studies, including those with overweight participants, have found that most of us will put on some weight during winter – but not as much as legend has it.
A frequently cited US study from 2000 concluded that we put on an average half a kilo (think of a block of butter) over autumn and winter.
The researchers noted that this weight gain tends not to be reversed during the spring or summer months. This annually acquired and closely held tub of butter “probably contributes to the increase in body weight that frequently occurs during adulthood”.
In other words, a significant portion of that gradual chubbing-up that we experience over time, especially in middle age, appears to occur in the colder months.
A 2007 study from the University of Massachusetts Medical School looked at “Seasonal variation in food intake, physical activity, and body weight in a predominantly overweight population”.
The researchers found that the participants ate about 86 kcal more per day during autumn compared to the spring.
They ate more carbohydrates in spring, and more fats in autumn. The lowest physical activity level was observed in the winter and the highest in the spring.
Again, body weight varied by about half a kilo during the year, peaking in the winter.
The half-a-kilo seasonal gain – that tends to hang around forever – was also confirmed in a 2015 study.
Why spring matters
Dr Rebecca Leech is a registered nutritionist, nutritional epidemiologist and research fellow based at Deakin’s Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition.
She points out that winter can be an aid to weight control and fitness if we’d only get out amongst it. Because exercising in the cold promotes the burning of fat.
“We actually expend more energy keeping our bodies warmer, that’s my understanding,” she told The New Daily.
“But the fact that we’re so passive, sitting inside of climate-controlled environments, sort of negates that benefit.”
Dr Leech says the ‘spring clean’ mantra serves as motivation – but also has some real meaning.
“There’s a window of opportunity for motivation when the weather improves: it’s more conducive to getting out exercising,” she said.
“We also tend to focus more on healthy habits, and it’s easier to pick them up at this time of the year.”

Perhaps Santa isn’t our best role model when trying to stay fit in summer. Photo: Getty
But, as we get closer to the end of the year, “we have all these festivities – social occasions that undermine all our good work – and before you know it, the baby’s gone out with the bathwater and you’re back at square one on New Year’s Eve, looking for new strategies for weight loss”.
The real opportunity of spring
Dr Leech says that we need about 10 weeks of commitment to establish new habits that will “stand up to those external factors”.
Like chips and dips.
Taking on the dietary ‘spring clean’ makes a good starting point.
“I think it’s all about riding those waves of motivation,” she said. “We get more motivated to do things, coming out of that hibernation phase. Once people start exercising, they tend to want to eat better as well.”
But good intentions only get you so far.
“If you want to set some healthy habits in place, you need to work to a plan – because those habits need to be sustainable in the long term.”
Between the advent of spring and the office Christmas party, you have about 10 weeks to get those new habits in place.
Perhaps the most important step – as advised, above, by Forbes and Northwest Community Healthcare – is a strict overhaul of the shopping list.
Look at the foods that you know are bad for you – notably the ultra-processed foods with a long shelf life and heart-wrecking salts and sugars – and say goodbye to them forever.
These are the foods that are most likely driving the increase in under-50 cancer diagnoses.
If you want a sweet treat, eat more fruit for goodness sake. There’s plenty in season.