In my experience, nutritionally, the trek from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is an overtly challenging time for most. It’s the season for family, friends, and food—savory, delectable, ambrosial holiday fare that we normally wouldn’t indulge in any other time of year. But it would be a smite to little baby Jesus if we didn’t partake in but a small nibble to placate our ravenous palate that salivates with a frothy Christmas hunger, a hunger emanating from our overworked Christmassy pancreas, a hunger so deep in the red zone, it lights up brighter than the most well decorated house on your street, a hunger just waiting for you to test the boundaries of an already stretched out stomach and be appeased by all of the succulent holiday game. That’s a kind way of saying, “I see you hiding in the corner, attempting to conceal yourself in a shroud of mystery, but I don’t even need to waste a quarter to call Nancy Drew to deduce that the Mystery of the Sagging Jowls is directly intertwined with the Mystery of the Missing Christmas Cookies!”
If you’re going to be 100% with your nutrition during the season, kudos to you. You win. If you want to be like me, here’s what I do: on the day of the holiday only, sometimes I eyeball my portion sizes instead of measuring them exactly. I may have eaten an extra 50g of protein on Thanksgiving and had some extra fat from the gravy—I’m super exciting, huh? I never stray too far off track. I prefer looking and feeling my best vs. eating pie. Good for me. Who cares?
For most other people, I have given different advice over the years:
“Only cheat on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s. Those are only four days, not four months. Do it, be done, and get right back on track.”
“Don’t cheat at all. You’re on a roll; don’t lose it. If veering off track even just a little completely derails you, it’s best to avoid it completely.”
For the serial cheaters, for whom the idea of being monogamous with their nutrition plan is unfathomable when there is such a wide buffet of options available during the holiday season (“I’d like to nibble each sprinkle off that cucidati, one by one, then lick the frosting clean down to the bone before I suck the fig right out of it”—you know who you are), this advice is for you.
Do whatever the hell you want to do, but even it out by training extra hard. I mean this. You know yourself; you’ve already got your mind made up on what you’re going to do. If it’s going to be bad, even it out with as much good as you can.
If you want to lose fat, and you’re on the naughty nutrition list during the holidays, we have to get you through this period in one piece so when you arrive to the promised land of January 1st, you can jumpstart the New Year from a good starting point, not by weighing 5-10 pounds more than you did at Thanksgiving and being so far behind the eight ball that you’re going to switch to Ping Pong. Your goal between now and January 1st could be to:
1. Lose zero pounds
2. Gain zero pounds
You want some cookies at work? Fine. You want pie? Fine. You want to miss a workout? Don’t you even think about it! Apply yourself triple hard to training. Quite frankly, train more! Add an extra day a week to champion yourself through the holiday season. Show up to training like you’re getting ready for the Olympics. Do your best to cancel out any Christmas mischief you might be getting yourself into.
Long term, this approach will not work. For a month, if you’re veering off track here and there, going to town during some holiday meals, and balancing it with enthusiastic vigor whilst training and increasing your training frequency by either training more x per week or longer, you’ll be just fine. Remember the agreement though: you must work EXTRA hard while training and TRAIN more than usual. Have your fun, get to January on even ground, and then we’ll really get serious, buckle down, and take this whole body-transformation thing into overdrive.
About the author
Chris Rombola
Chris is the owner of Fit House. He's run the training departments at several commercial gyms, and after years of seeing how awful those environments were for his clients, he opened his own studio. He is devoted to getting people strong, lean, and healthy.
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