Can you believe Thanksgiving is a week away?
I have to admit this is my favorite holiday. I mean when else do we get the 3 Fs? Food, Family (Friends) and of course FOOTBALL! I know my Mom is Thankful for not having to plan Thanksgiving dinner around my beloved Eagles this year.
Well along with the football comes the food. We know we are going to eat a lot, and probably not all of it is the best choices. Here are some tips to survive the holiday from a health stand point.
Listen to Aaron above. It’s Thanksgiving, a holiday based around gorging ourselves. We had a whole year to mentally prepare for this day. You can survive one day of eating bad and a ton. Go into the holiday knowing this and don’t feel guilty about it. As long as you don’t eat this way all year around you should survive. RELAX AND ENJOY!!!!!!
Trying to consume less calories from dinner. Then i suggest you don’t be like me and eat fast to and try to break your record of number of plates of food ate last year. If you are trying to do that then I suggest that you eat your meal slowly. There is a delay between our stomach and brain letting us know when we are full. If you don’t feel like loosening your belt after dinner it’s probably best you stop eating once you feel 80%. That is usually enough to let out brain catch up with our stomach to let us know we are actually 100% full.
Here are a few methods you can use to slow yourself down. First chew your food 10-15 times. Also put your fork and knife down between bites. Chewing slowly and putting down and having to pick up your utensils may only take a few seconds but when you combine the time it takes to do those things throughout the meal it will add up.
You can lose weight at the dinner table! If you plan on getting a workout in before your meal plan on doing High Intensity Interval Training. HIIT training has been proven to be a great way to burn calories for hours and even days after the workout. Going 100% effort and resting is a lot of work on our energy systems. It causes us to burn fat to generate energy faster, but also allows us to keep burning calories long after to repair tissue and repay the oxygen debt caused by exercise. This will help you make room for that extra serving of sweet potato pie.
Ways to HIIT it
Tabata 8 rounds of :20 seconds of work followed by :10 seconds of rest. I typically like to pick 4 exercise and perform all 8 rounds of 1 exercise before moving on to the next. Another way to do this is super set two exercises for 16 rounds.
Another way to HIIT it is to pick 5 exercises and make a circuit. I like to pick an exercise that will have a press, pull, squat, hinge and floor work. Keep rounds between :30-1:00 min long and rest for half the amount of the work time between exercises. I like to typically do 3 rounds of the 5 exercises.
You can use this feast to help pack on muscle. The next day we will be on such a calorie which overload our muscles with glycogen (energy) from he huge meal making heavy strength training ideal. Heavy strength training is great for using all the glycogen in our muscles due to the intensity of the lifts. Lifting like this and manipulating our energy systems make our muscles hungry again and use the excess glycogen to restore energy in the muscle and not as triglycerides (body fat).
What do you look forward to most about Thanksgiving? Do you do any exercise before you eat some turkey? If so we would love to hear some of the things you do. Let us know in the comments section below.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!!!
The Home Trainer Blog 
Good article
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