By Roland Semprie, BA, B.Sc.

The holidays are always a time of overindulgence when it comes to food and drink, and of less consistency when it comes to exercise. You have family obligations, end-of-the-year work stress and too many parties that require your presence. But, there are a few things that you can do to ensure your holiday cheer leads to a guilt-free New Year, and once you adopt these holiday strategies, you will realize they can be applied anytime during the year.

Continue to exercise. During this festive—and stressful—time of year, exercise tends to be one of the first things to get dropped from your daily regime. All of a sudden, the time you were making for exercise is very difficult to find. What you need to do is choose to not let those scheduled workouts end. There are many reasons why you can justify not continuing to exercise (none of them valid), but only one reason why you should continue—to keep holiday weight gain in check. Not only do you need to continue to exercise throughout the holidays, you need to exercise with more intensity than usual because this is the time of year when you tend to ingest more calories.

This is a great opportunity for you to adopt a new style of training—the change in workouts will help keep you motivated because it will be new, challenging and fun. You can try Muay Thai boxing, cardio hip hop, cardio salsa or a bell ringer session, which is a combination of weights, machines and cardio, moving to a different station at the ring of a bell. You can also do some snowshoeing, hiking or rock climbing. Briskly walking (so as to elevate your heat rate) walking and/or running up and down stairs and skipping are also very good forms of exercise that can easily be done outside of a gym, especially if you need a change of scenery while in holiday mode. See your Truestar Exercise Plan for more at-home workouts to fit into your holiday schedule.

Burn more calories than you ingest. You have attended your eighth holiday party in three days, with more to come over the next 20 days, and you are already feeling the effects of eating and drinking too much. With no end in sight, what do you do? As long as you remember to burn more calories than you ingest, you will be doing yourself huge favor. The best way to burn more calories than you ingest is to exercise with the required amount of intensity that would begin to burn those calories. For most people, that would be a 20 to 30% increase in intensity, more than already put out during a regular workout.

Don’t let yourself get hungry. During the holidays you need to eat smaller, more frequent meals, so that by the time the holiday party gets started, you are not ravenously attacking the goat cheese prosciutto rolls topped with foie gras before inhaling the crab cakes and the rum and eggnog. By eating those smaller, more frequent meals, you allow your body to continue to burn more calories throughout the day. Eat something (a protein with a fruit or vegetable) every two or three hours to satiate those pangs. The objective is to not allow yourself to reach a state of hunger, because then, your body does not care what you put in it and neither will you. As a result, you will, most likely indulge in whatever is the most convenient form of food and drink, in front of you.

Stay hydrated. Just as your body tells you you’re hungry, but giving you hunger pangs, your body will tell you that you are dehydrated by being thirsty. To stay hydrated throughout the day you need to keep drinking water, at least eight 500 ml bottles (4 liters).

Make better choices. Over the holidays it is easy to let your guard down and overindulge in food and drinks that are loaded with calories, sabotaging all your hard work prior to the festive season. But, there are better options on the holiday table that you can enjoy; instead of the cakes and cookies, try the fruits and vegetables. See the Truestar 80/20 Rule for more information on making wise food choices.

Even if you’re careful about the foods you eat, there can be some real surprises swirling in the bottom of your glass. Festive drinks are full of excess carbohydrates and calories and can really contribute to holiday weight gain—especially when your workouts have been compromised. Check our list of popular holiday drinks to learn how long it takes to burn it off on a treadmill—you might change your mind when reaching for that rum and eggnog (40 minutes), margarita (42 minutes) or vodka cooler (35 minutes). Conversely, new, lower carbohydrate, low-calorie beer is extremely low in carbohydrates (2.5 grams) and calories (88).

The payoff
This attitude, coupled with a properly programmed and intense exercise regime is the perfect way to enter the New Year in relatively the same shape as you left the previous year—guilt free, stress free and free to step up to your New Year’s resolutions in high gear.