admin
Last Updated on January 7, 2021
Don’t let family feasts ruin your muscle gains. Try these tips to stay lean throughout the holiday season.
During the holidays, all good intentions of trying to keep your health and nutrition on track is a lot easier said than done, especially when there is a feast of stuffing, gravy, and warm buttered rolls coming for you hot from the oven. The holidays are for merriment and only come once a year but it is important to realize the cost of snoozing your alarm from your daily exercise routine and enjoying an extra serving of mashed potatoes and small slice of pumpkin pie. These extra servings might seem innocent, but these indulgences come at a cost. Don’t let poor eating habits carry on into the colder months. The accumulation of these pounds unfortunately won’t melt as fast as the snow in the spring. Here are my five ways to lose weight after holiday eating, that I even follow myself.
Cut Out The Sweet Stuff
Research shows that sugar intake can be addicting and can lead to an unhealthy cycle of cravings and binges. This is largely due to the insulin spikes that accompany foods with high sugar content. Insulin drops blood sugar and causes storage of extra calories as fat, and causes a sugar crash later, making you irritable, sleepy, and is responsible for “food coma”. The sugar crash also causes further sweet cravings in order to raise your blood sugar level, but inevitably results in another crash, causing a snowball phenomenon which can be hard to escape from. With those many holiday parties ending in sugar cookies and other sweets, ’tis the season of high levels of sugar and fat! After your last holiday dinner, make a vow to eliminate ALL desserts for four to ten days. Although it wont be easy, this amount of time will cause any cravings that your body has begun to experience to be relinquished. While cravings decrease, your body will begin to prefer naturally sweet foods, including fruit and vegetables.
Shrink Your Stomach
Did you know that your stomach is “elastic”? Meaning it can shrink or enlarge based on the amount of food you consume? This is one of the major reasons for failure of weight loss surgery, as even a surgically created tiny stomach can adapt over time to accomodate larger amounts of food. Scary, huh? Well, the opposite is also true. If you eat less, over time, your stomach will shrink to feel fuller on smaller amounts of food, making you eat less calories, and keep weight off. Try it. While eating at home or out at a local restaurant, take 1/3 off your plate. Reduce all temptation to finish your entire plate by putting some aside. Either put it in a container or ask your server for a bag to go and save it for lunch the following day. By doing this, you can shrink your stomach after a season of over-eating and subtract hundreds of calories from your daily caloric intake.
Comments
0 comments