Christmas Time is Here, and its time to share the cheer.
Rightly so, Christmas is one of my favourite times of the year. Feasting and basking in the warm aura of friends and family deserves a place in everyone’s calendar.
For many people, this means putting on their fat pants and accepting some fat gain. Call me pedantic, but I believe that one can adequately prepare to ensure that you don’t put on too much fat, if any at all.
In this post, I outline various approaches to minimise or prevent fat gain while eating to your heart’s content during the Christmas season. These range from pedantic to relaxed approaches. Let’s begin.
The Principle
One meal won’t make you obese. Rather, longer term (say weekly) caloric balance is more important. [1]
Basically, what will get you fat is unlikely going to be your Christmas Binge, but rather the daily habits you follow (and maybe scarfing down the leftovers for the next few days).
The Method
There are some people who have written on the topic of how to deal with the mega onslaught of calories. Lyle McDonald talks about it in his article ’10 tips to deal with holiday weight gain’, and JC talked about how to deal with your Thanksgiving binge.
All we are trying to achieve is a caloric deficit to offset that which we eat during our merrymaking. Think of it as a caloric bank. We take out some energy to spend on activities, and then put it back during the feast. Simple accounting.
Sometimes, the bank may even charge interest! (a little on this in the footnote) [1]
If you were crazy and pedantic, you would eat a low calorie diet for 2 days prior to the event. Do 2 sessions of 1 hour cardio, hit the weights room before the meal to create a huge caloric sink, and then proceed to stuff yourself to oblivion.
If you’re not that crazy, maybe you would increase some cardio and call it that.
If you’ve got some sort of mental problem, maybe you would miss out on the opportunity to feast with family and friends and stick to your “Clean foods”.
Which brings me to my ultimate point
Whatever you do during the holiday season, to thy own-self be true.
If you are going to diet like crazy, do it. If you are going to not give a crap, do it.
Just make sure you do it and admit to yourself that you were 100% satisfied with your decision. Make it a fulfilling experience of EPIC proportions. Happy Holidays!
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Notes:
[1] Anecdotally, it seems that short term overfeeding (say 24 hrs) leads to some inefficiencies with nutrient absorption or some other mechanism. This stems from the observations that someone eating an excess of 7000kcal in a day doesn’t gain 2lbs of fat as would have been predicted. (1 lbs of fat yielding approximately 3500kcal) I find it best to assume that our food is 100% absorbed, but if this is true, then we’ve got even more reason to celebrate!
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