You stuff yourself during the holidays, then starve yourself to shed all the pounds you've gained. If two wrongs made a right, you'd be healthy and wise. But they don't, says a University of Georgia expert.

Even if you overindulge in your holiday eating, use restraint afterward, said Connie Crawley, a Cooperative Extension food, nutrition and health specialist with the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

"Go back to normal, healthy, eating habits," Crawley said. "Eat three moderate meals a day and allow time for rebalancing your diet."

Don't even get on the scales to see how much you've gained. The number might be misleading.

"After a week or more of your normal lifestyle, you'll get a more reliable count of the pounds you've gained," she said. "Then you can decide what little things to do to get the weight back off."

Keep your balance

Don't skip meals or cut out broad groups such as breads or fats, she said. Make little changes, such as cutting out the chips or extra margarine.

It's just not smart and won't be healthy to cut out whole food groups. "You always need a balanced, healthy diet of foods in all groups," she said.

Trimming dietary fats can be important, but don't just cut them out. "A totally fat-free diet wouldn't be good for you," Crawley said. "Fats make fat-soluble vitamins available to you. They make your diet more satisfying, too."

Americans tend to eat too many fats, she said. Generally, fats should be no more than 30 percent of the calories you eat. "But that percentage varies from person to person," she said.

Crawley isn't a stickler for the "ideal weights" on height-weight charts.

"That's probably not the best way to decide your ideal weight," she said. "A healthy weight for you is whatever you weigh when you eat a healthy, balanced diet and exercise regularly."

What you eat

The healthiest choice is to monitor what you eat, not what you weigh. "Food diaries are the No. 1 way to keep your weight down," she said.

The "ideal weights" from charts sometimes lead people to set unrealistic weight-loss goals, Crawley said. "Studies have shown that dieters are most successful in losing only 10 percent to 15 percent of their preloss weight," she said.

"Unfortunately," she said, "another study asked dieters how much weight loss would make them happy, satisfied or disappointed, and the most common 'disappointed' response was 15 percent or less."

Once dieters have lost 10 percent to 15 percent, though, most are satisfied. "They feel better, and they realize how hard that weight loss was," she said.

Reasonable goal

Crawley said a reasonable weight-loss goal should be no more than 15 percent of your preloss weight. If you want to lose more than that, make 15 percent your goal anyway. Once you lose that weight and stabilize there, then you can re-evaluate. Don't try to lose more than 1 to 2 pounds per week if you want to maintain muscle mass and keep the weight off.

"Setting too high a weight-loss goal leads to discouragement," Crawley said. "It makes you put off changes, such as buying new clothes that fit. But weight loss is difficult. You need to reward yourself with things that aren't food. No diet will be successful if you don't feel good about yourself."

Physical activity is a critical part of weight loss. "Include weight training, aerobics and stretching in your regular activities," she said. "To lose weight, you need to be active five to seven days a week."

Crawley said the body's natural appetite controls don't work if you're inactive. "Your body doesn't know when to stop eating," she said. "If you want to be a healthy weight, you have to move and get off the couch and out from in front of the computer."

(Dan Rahn is a news editor with the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)