‘Tis the Season: Time to Shift Goals and How to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain
10 Strategies to Help You Get to January Without Expanding
As we approach mid-October, it’s a good time to assess or reassess how your health and fitness goals might be going, and it’s a good time to do so because we’re basically knocking on the door to the holiday season, and the next 2.5 to 3 months are going to see waves if not deluges of good foods and treats coming right for us.
If you’ve been making progress on your health and fitness goals—which can be anything from losing weight, gaining strength, increasing cardio fitness, or even increasing your intake of fruit, veg, and fiber—you’re in a good spot. You likely have your systems, routines, schedules, menus and meal plans all in place. This is your baseline. You might have deviations, but it’s not a big deal.
It’s a big deal, though, when the deviation is the new baseline, and then the healthy meal or the workout becomes the deviation to that baseline. That’s a hard hill to climb, and there’s no amount of tasty food or inactivity that is worth being in that position, so instead of falling completely off our wagons, it’s high time to roll with the punches.
First, as this season occurs once a year, and it’s short and finite and full of parties and gatherings, now’s not really the time to run a diet, so instead of trying to lose weight, a good strategy is to shift goals.
One goal should be more of weight maintenance at this point, unless you’re willing to forego the season and sit on the sidelines.
So, know that it’s okay that you’ll be consuming some extra calories. Still, consider using some of the extra energy towards muscle and strength building when lifting weights. Work volume (that is, number of sets and reps) is one of the primary drivers of muscle growth, so take your favorite muscle group and add an additional gym session and have some fun.
What if you don’t lift weights?
Brothers and sisters, this is the perfect time of year to start.
If you feel uncomfortable with how you look, first, don’t; everyone does, which is why they go to the gym. Second, mostly everyone’s all layered up in the gym now anyway, so you won’t be that one person wearing a hoodie and baggy sweatpants in the middle of a heat wave.
Since it’s the season of fast times with sugar highs, you’ll have plenty of energy, and muscle accrual is an energetically expensive process, first with the actual movement of lifting weight and then the subsequent adaptations to muscles. That doesn’t mean to go YOLO mode and go buffet hopping, but if you’re new to lifting, this is the perfect time to capitalize on those newbie gains, which are the initial muscle and strength adaptations, which can still happen in an energy deficit, but they’ll be mitigated compared to being at maintenance or surplus energy levels, and that combo—newbie gains with adequate energy—is where the real magic happens.
Likewise, use some of that extra energy to focus on some of your cardiovascular work. Increase the intensity and push things, like going for a certain distance in less time. Similar to weight sessions, add some more work volume. If you’re an endurance athlete, add another session or two during the week. Like muscle adaptations, cardio adaptations largely follow work volume, so you’re gonna need some food.
Thus, tis the season for performance, and performance adaptations require energy.
Sometimes, people try to combine performance and dieting (I certainly did), but exercise and sport performance are not weight loss strategies because it’s all an issue of energy availability. You need to have the energy to do the work as well as be able to recover from it. In a diet or an energy deficit, you don’t have the adequate energy to really push yourself. It’s not likely that you’ll be able to push yourself as much as you need to, either in intensity and/or frequency, to trigger the adaptations you want. Though it might feel like you’re working hard enough to do so, and you might up to a point, but the perceived effort is partly a function of energy availability, which is why everything feels harder on a diet.
Doing sprints, pushing marathon and CrossFit WOD times, and pushing max deadlifts should not be part of a well-designed fat loss program—again, it’s a matter of energy, which affects performance and the subsequent repair response, both of which are downregulated.
On the weight loss side of things, if you’ve been struggling to make progress, the headwinds are probably going to blow harder for the next couple of months, and if you still want to sail these rough waters, I understand, but don’t aim for optimal, ideal, or perfection. Instead, go with the lowest hanging fruit.
Maybe have a slower rate of weight loss.
Consider incorporating diet breaks, which is, hopefully what it sounds like—a period of a few days or even a week or two where you stop the energy deficit—especially around the more food-centric social times—and then return to maintenance energy levels.
Likewise, consider incorporating refeeds and/or doing so more frequently. Refeeds are like diet breaks but are limited to a day or two during the week, which can be consecutive days or not.
There’s plenty of flexibility here.
We can also flip some of these strategies to help us maintain our bodyweight. Don’t think of all your calories on a day-to-day basis. Think of them as a total for a week. If we have a couple of days that are a little, shall we say, indulgent, it might be good to deliberately lower our food intake for a day or two somewhere else in the week, which also helps to make us feel better and reduce any stress about those higher-energy days.
Still, don’t use this strategy as a license to go crazy with food. You don’t want to develop any cyclical compensation patterns, like really overeating one day and then severely undereating and/or overexercising the following day (a pattern that I’ve fallen into many times throughout my life). You can indulge a little, and then just pull back a little bit for the following couple of days.
Just remember that any extra food will cause transient increases in scale weight due to the extra literal food in your digestive tract, as well as the increase in water retention due to the likely extra sodium and carbohydrates from that extra food. Also, remember, this extra food leading to bodyweight bumps are not increases in body tissue. It’s transient. It too shall pass.
As fun as the holiday season can be, it’s also important to note how a little bit of extra food can affect our health over the long-term.
According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the average American gains just under 1 pound during the holiday season. While this might not seem significant, research indicates that this weight is often not lost as the seasons change. In fact, it can account for more than 50% of the total weight gained throughout the year. When holiday weight gain is not reversed, it can contribute to a cycle of gradually putting on extra pounds over a person’s lifetime. This can increase the risk of various diseases, including diabetes and heart disease. [1]
All that is definitely no bueno.
So how can we lessen the chances of weight gain during the holidays?
As we covered, consider increasing your exercise activity. In addition to the extra energy we’ll be putting out, there’s the energy for the damage repair, but an important part of all this is that when we’re out of the house, we’re also not snooping around the kitchen, the fridge, the pantry, and the cabinets for some snacks and treats.
Another important strategy is self-monitoring, the easiest of which is daily bodyweight checks. One studied described that “individuals who remain engaged with self‐monitoring behaviors (self‐weighing) and use cognitive strategies focused on prioritizing which foods to eat have better weight control outcomes during the holidays” [2].
Bodyweight checks are the easiest method for self-monitoring, but another useful kind of self-monitoring is to track your food intake with a food-tracking app, where you are purposefully trying to stay within a calorie target range. There are free ones like MyFitnessPal and Cronometer (both of which I’ve used but have no affiliation). There are others that you can pay to use, like MacroFactor, Carbon, and the RP—Renaissance Periodization—Dieting app (again, no affiliations), and the fact that you pay makes it so that you have some skin in the game, so you’re also more likely to be consistent with this monitoring.
Another strategy that I use all the time is called pre-loading, where you basically start with some food that is not the most energy-dense part of the meal and/or loading up on low-energy density (LED) foods even before getting to the meal. You don’t want to start the meal with cookies but rather something like a portion of fibrous veggies for an appetizer. A preload like this is the least palatable and energy dense part of a meal, but it’s got a lot of bulk, so you can get some stomach volume with the fewest calories.
One systematic review and meta-analysis “revealed that we can restrict the energy intake by consuming an LED preload” [3]. You’ll naturally fill up and start feeling satiated even before getting to the principal meal or dish, leading you to consume less without even trying. So, if you’re going out for a big holiday meal, start with a salad or some hot soup, or both. Better yet, or in addition to these, have a couple of handfuls of some baby carrots before you leave your house.
Likewise, food order can help us naturally reduce our energy consumption during meals. This may not necessarily be a preload, but it’s still being aware of not starting a meal with the most energy dense food items. The fitness and dieting space often promotes beginning meals with veggies and protein foods because they are naturally more satiating. We can blow through plates of breads and pastas before they even have time to stretch our stomachs, let alone start hitting our bloodstreams, but veggies and proteins start physically hitting those stretch receptors almost immediately.
And here’s an oldie but a goodie: as kids, many of us are told to chew our foods. That part, I’ll leave to you, but the nugget there is that by chewing we take longer to eat. Thus, try to take longer to eat. Take sips of a drink throughout. Remind yourself to put down your utensil to use your napkin. Let yourself be the speaker for a minute or two. Go slow enough that it lets the food hit your stomach, then your blood, and then your brain. No scarfing allowed.
Another strategy is to try and keep mealtimes regular. We train our brains and bodies to expect food and meals at certain times, and if we stray too far outside of these windows, our appetites will ramp up and we’ll be more likely to overdo it.
So, some strategies to help us navigate this time, helping us to enjoy the festivities and not waddle out of it:
First, unless you really need to, it’s not a great time to try and lose weight.
It is a great time to increase exercise activity due to the extra energy you’ll likely have at your fingertips.
Likewise, maybe target some athletic, fitness, or strength goal.
Think of your available calories not just on a day-to-day basis but also on a weekly one, where it’s okay to borrow from some days, leading to increases here and there while others are slightly reduced.
Self-monitor regularly, checking bodyweight throughout the week. If you see any large upward trends, it’s a good idea to pull it back a bit.
Consider tracking calories with a food tracking app.
When eating, try to use preloading strategies.
When eating, start with the least energy-dense food items and work your way up the density ladder so that you end the meal with the most palatable food instead of starting with it.
Be cognizant of your eating pace and rate. Take it on the slower side.
Keep mealtimes regular. Appetite will increase if we wander too far from expected mealtimes.
The holiday season is a special time of year, and we should all be able to enjoy it, but we don’t have to gain any weight from now until January. With a couple of key strategies, we can indulge and come out on the other side weighing the same. We might even be able to improve and increase some of our physical performance.
And a great thing is that these are weight maintenance strategies that we can implement in little snippets at any time of the year.
If you go from now to January, and you’re scale weight is basically the same, consider yourself leveled-up.
