This holiday season, people will party hard and eat like there’s no New Year’s resolution they can’t accomplish. But the sad truth is that those resolutions are most often unachievable or bound to fail. Whether the goal is better overall health or losing more weight, the key to success is prevention and/or damage control.
Pre-holiday preparation
It goes without saying that planning a diet before the holidays is a good idea. What I usually do is comparable to a bootcamp—cut down on processed foods and train at least four times a week.
Nutrition
Cut out all processed foods. Just keep it simple—lean, quality meat, veggies, and a healthy source of fat at every meal. Don’t overthink this one, and don’t count calories. Just split your dish into those three staples, and you’ve got yourself a meal. Now, do this four times a day for ladies and five times a day for guys.
Training
I’ve always used planned overtraining for the holidays, and it has always worked. However, it takes more than just two weeks to obtain the best results. Four to six weeks of all-out training is the optimal timeframe, but if your deadline is two weeks, you need to kill it for those two weeks—even if it means training twice a day. Procrastination has a price.
If, like me, you don’t have much time and prefer the old-school ways of bodybuilding, this is the best option. It’s the “all you can eat’’ kind of workout. You can split it in many ways—train one or two body parts a day, or even pack in two sessions a day.
