Holiday Survival

By: Michael Beiter

Our community is about to get a holiday survival guide and Christmas recipe pack.

We've been scheming with our clients for the last month or two on how to navigate this time of year, food and fitness-wise.

Along with sending many helpful resources, we teach three easy techniques to use on their own or combine to mitigate excess fat gain around the holidays.

The first is banking, the second is fasting, and the third is depleting.

Strategy one and two are nutrition based, and the third is exercise based.

Banking is simple; it means you plan to undereat for a few days to save up for overeating proactively, or you undereat deliberately for a few days after the big meal retroactively. Either way, you're looking at calories, protein, carbs, and fats.

Fasting is also simple; choose a window of 18-36 hours to fast before or after the big eat. This way, you'll either be sensitized to a sizeable incoming meal because you've been deprived, or you will have plenty of time for digestion and assimilation before you consume more food. Both are good situations.

Depleting is an exercise strategy where you deliberately do more volume than usual. We tell our people to squat for 90 minutes straight. The idea is that you will expose your body to such a novel exercise stimulus that all the extra crap you eat around the holiday will get sucked into recovery rather than stored as fat.

We have a standing practice of over a decade of deprivation workouts on the morning of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

You will be acceptable to combine two strategies, but don't do them all.

With practice, these have become go-to methods for dozens of clients that get them through the end of the year without gaining weight - making them a statistical minority.