The holidays are right around the corner. Thanksgiving is here Thursday, and before you know it Christmas will be upon us, and we can’t forget about New Years. The one thing all of these great holidays have in common is that they are all welcomed and thoroughly enjoyed with seasonal parties and gatherings. Which means lots of consuming (not ideally healthy) food and beverages. One thing that has plagued many in the past is the age-old question…how can you stay on track with diet and training when we’re constantly bombarded with food and alcohol during the holiday get togethers?
Let’s be honest, staying on point with fitness and nutrition is never going to be pretty over the holidays. But there are a few ways we can combat the constant assault of stuffing, casserole, mashed potatoes, apple pie, cornbread, egg nog, or any other food or drink you can think of that is out to annihilate all of our progress we made from January 2nd of this year. As always, training and nutrition are our two factors here, so let’s take a look at how each one can save us from packing on unreasonable pounds over the next couple of months.
Training
Staying consistent with your training or workout schedule throughout the holidays will be vital if you don’t plan on going backwards with your progress. Taking Thanksgiving Day off is one thing, as many gyms may be closed and it’s simply alright to have a day off now and then. However, don’t use the holidays as an excuse to be a lazy couch potato from Wednesday night all the way through Monday morning. That’s nearly a week of inactivity.
And although this heading is appropriately named “Training”, it would almost be just as appropriate to call it “Moving”. Get up and move. Go for a walk with family or friends, play a game that involves some type of movement. Whatever you have to do to get up and create some sort of stimulus for calorie burning. Because the main culprit of weight gain over this stretch isn’t solely resting on the endless binge eating of calorie dense garbage, but rather the inactivity and lack of movement that the majority of our population falls accustom to during this time. So train, workout, move around, and most importantly burn a few extra calories.
Nutrition
Telling people to eat healthy over Thanksgiving and Christmas is similar to telling a college kid not to binge-watch Netflix, or telling your grandparents to stop asking if you have a significant other every time they see you. It’s just not going to happen. So instead, let’s look at ways we can at least somewhat combat, if not offset the damage done over this time. We’re going to look at one main strategy that I employ every year when I know I’m going to be consuming an entire turkey to myself. This is a tactic that I’ve been a big fan of over the years, and it can be utilized in niche situations as well as everyday if you were to so choose. This strategy is called intermittent fasting, and it has been somewhat of a buzzword in the health and nutrition community over the last five to seven years. This is a whole topic, and one that I’ll probably do a future dedicated post about, but I wanted to just touch on it here so that I could describe exactly how you can use it during the holiday season.
Intermittent fasting is essentially just skipping breakfast, or fasting for a certain amount of hours (say 16 or so), before consuming your first meal. Now, how can this help on days that you know you will be eating in large quantities? Simple. Imagine you eat 400-800 calories at breakfast on a typical day. Now cut that out of your daily caloric intake. If you ate 2,000 calories during your Thanksgiving meal, you just reduced your overall daily calories from 2,800 to 2,000 simply by skipping breakfast and fasting instead. A simple, but useful tactic in saving yourself from going overboard on daily calories. That is the extremely modified version of what intermittent fasting is and how to utilize it, but trust me, you’re going to want to use it as a staple as the holidays roll around to cut calories where you can and reduce weight gain.
Don’t Let A Few Cheat Meals Ruin Your Progress
The last thing I wanted to touch on in this post is to not let your holiday meals and parties ruin your progress as a whole. We all know that progress is made over a long period of time, not overnight. So using that same reasoning, don’t let one day of eating more than normal ruin all the progress you’ve made or get you down. If you have been working towards a fitness goal, or maybe planning on starting, don’t let the holidays be a barricade to you accomplishing what you set out to do.
Enjoy it while it lasts, and get back on the horse the next day. It’s not 100% go all of the time, we are humans and need some form of outlet and release from the stress of everyday life. Family and friends can be that for a lot of people, so enjoy the holidays but use the information provided above as tools in your repertoire. Whether it is simply moving more, intermittent fasting on big eating days, or consuming a few less throughout the week, there are plenty of ways to get through this holiday season unscathed if you play your cards right.
If you’re looking for a more comprehensive meal or fitness plan, check out all the services I have to offer at www.tolkfitness.com. You’ll find meal plans, fitness plans, membership, and more! Email me with any questions at dylan@tolkfitness.com !