It’s the same story every year.
People putting on enough fat during the holidays to endure a rough winter out in the Arctic. The problem? The rough winter never comes and the likelihood of keeping the added weight is higher than Wiz Khalifa on Christmas Eve.
How will you make it through the holidays without suffering the same fate? I got you covered. Here are 4 steps that’ll keep you lean and mean during the holidays.
1. Plan ahead
If you have a big family dinner or social event scheduled, modify your daily routine accordingly.
Make dinner the biggest meal of the day. Minimize daytime eating and save the majority of your calories for dinner.
The notion that a high-calorie dinner promotes weight-gain is based on presumptions, not real-world data. You need not fear to eat at night, as long as you maintain control of your calorie intake.
Stick to a moderate, protein-based breakfast and lunch (protein+ veggies or fruit), and eat like a king at dinner. By creating a buffer earlier in the day, you’ll be able to eat to satisfaction in the evening without sabotaging your fat-loss efforts.
With that being said,
2. Be reasonable
The holidays are not an excuse to put on 5+ kilos of fat.
If you overeat on Christmas Eve, don’t fall into a binge eating pattern for days and weeks because “it’s the holidays”.
Yes it’s the holidays, and yes you want to live it up, but eating till your belt buckle shoots across the dinner table is not a prerequisite to enjoying the holidays. Enjoy the get-togethers for what they truly are – a great opportunity to kick back with your family and friends.
It’s perfectly fine to overeat on occasion. But that’s not the objective here. Find other things to appreciate besides your mom’s Christmas cookies.
3. Take advantage of the calorie bump
It’s not all bad news as it pertains to your physique, though.
More food = higher performance capacity.
Use the holiday season and the concomitant calorie spike to fire up your metabolism and build some damn muscle. Hit the gym hard and smash some personal records. You’ll find that your strength will benefit greatly from the energy surplus.
Many of you will be “bulking” anyway since it’s that time of year. But instead of forcing yourself through extended bulking and cutting cycles, upgrade to a cyclical approach to eating, where you pump and deplete nutrients strategically, taking full advantage of your body’s fat-burning and muscle-building mechanisms.
4. Keep the big picture in mind
No. You don’t have to fast for 48 hours after your high-calorie binge, and you don’t have to punish yourself with marathon cardio sessions either. All this does is fuck up your relationship to food.
Don’t try to make up for bad eating on the following day(s).
Simply return to your routine as if nothing ever happened. Two weeks is just that – two weeks. You’ll be walking this earth for 70+ years. More than enough time to make up for two weeks of overeating.
Fitness enthusiasts commonly suffer from shortsightedness. They get so caught up in this lifestyle, getting their macros in every day, training every muscle twice a week, drinking their plastic shakes, and doing everything by the book, that they lose sight of the big picture. A single misstep is enough to derail them for weeks and have them questioning their faith in the God of Gains.
A couple days, a couple weeks even, of sub-optimal eating are merely a small bump on your road to a better body. Understanding this will sever you from food-phobia and compulsive eating episodes for the rest of your days.
You can have your cake and eat it. And you can sure as hell wash it down with some eggnog or a glass of gin (I know I will).
Happy holidays.
Victor
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