Surviving the Holidays

By far, the hardest time to make progress has to be between October to December, no thanks to the back2back holidays that all feature social gatherings centered around food. While there’s NOTHING wrong with being around family and eating a bunch of awesome food, it’s usually here where most people kind of say “screw it” to their diet and workouts. Granted, if you’re traveling for any holiday, workout consistency is probably going to suffer at least a little bit, but what ends up happening is a near 100% cutoff from both working out and staying on point with nutrition.

Because January is not so far away, a lot of people tend to put off working out, just like the whole “I’ll do it tomorrow” spiel, which is crazy, because two whole months is actually quite a long time and a good amount of progress can be made in that timeframe. Though of course, I’m not going to sit here and act like I know everything, I’m 23, I don’t have kids, nor do I need to travel halfway across the country. So for these tips, I am remaining as objective as possible.

Now when I say “being on point” with your nutrition during this period, what I actually mean is staying mostly consistent with eating the right foods, while still allowing for some room for flexibility. Here’s an example:

Usually seen with Thanksgiving, a common thing so many people do is drastically restrict their calories prior to the holiday, or even fast altogether. Then when Thanksgiving dinner comes along, they’re so gosh darn hungry that they end up going hog wild. They eat everything in sight in rather large quantities. Remember in last weeks email, I showed how a pretty average cheat day can negate an entire week’s worth of progress? - well, Thanksgiving along with Christmas are typically treated as such, a cheat day, and it ain’t hard to consume a few thousand calories on either of those two days.

I promise I’m not making this up, It’s not hard to eat 5k calories in a single day.

So the solution? Don’t be a dummy with your nutrition!

You don’t need to restrict your calories before the holiday, for most people, that’s a lose-lose battle. I had a good friend back in middle school who, before Thanksgiving, his family would all run together for around 5 or so miles to burn off the calories as a way to “prepare” for the holiday. This is kind of what’s inspiring me to write this article, because I know that a lot of people do something similar.

On the day of the holiday, have breakfast (if you normally have breakfast).

And have lunch

So then, by the time dinner comes along, you’re not starving. And because you’re not starving, you’re able to make better decisions, like not gorging on massive quantities of everything you can get your hands on. Instead, you’ll take small portions of multiple dishes and enjoy them. Because you already ate earlier, you can actually feel full without stuffing yourself!

Doesn’t matter if you’re hosting, going away, or eating out, the same tip applies. Don’t restrict your calories prior to the event, that way you can manage you’re actual intake.

And one more tip, don’t stop working out or tracking simply because it’s the end of the year. Like I said, a lot of progress can be made in two months and it really doesn’t make sense to just stop cold turkey. If you’re traveling a lot, then a 15 minute bodyweight or band workout can be an awesome hack as it’ll allow you to maintain your progress. Nutrition still applies as well; you don’t have to be in the group of people who put on 10lbs during the holiday season.

In fact, you can actually use these holidays as an advantage. Both Thanksgiving, and Christmas both feature tons of food that are really high in carbohydrates, of which, carbs are the favorite fuel source for muscle contraction. Because you’ll have more stored glycogen, you can actually see a boost in workout performance. Last year on Halloween, I was able to set a lifetime PR on my barbell squat by utilizing this strategy. I also had the energy to really push myself cardio wise as well, which lead to even more unseen gains.

Stick with your nutrition like always, fit in your workouts whenever you can, don’t restrict your calories leading up to the holiday, and use the extra carbs to fuel awesome workouts.

Pretty much sums everything up.

And one more thing, I promise this is the last tip :)

Don’t worry about the scale. Seriously, the average person can expect to gain around 5-6 pounds if not more during these couple months. But like we’ve talked about previously, the majority of that weight gain will be water weight. you'll probably be eating a ton of carbs and foods that are high in salt, you’ll also probably be sleep deprived to some extent if you’re traveling. All these will contribute to a good amount of water being stored. A good rule of thumb, if the scale goes up 3-4 pounds in a SINGLE night, you most likely didn’t gain any bodyfat. Even if you look a little puffy, a lot of this water is stored under the skin.

And I’m not asking you to track the holiday’s, that’d be crazy. Track everything else like normal, but for the day itself, just enjoy it!

Talk soon

-R