Health & Fitness, Holiday, Lifestyle
5 Tips for Keeping Fit & Healthy Throughout the Holidays
The holiday season is quickly approaching, and we all know how easy it is to let your health and wellness take a back seat to holiday sweets and treats. With an endless string of parties and temptation on the horizon, we thought it’d be helpful to arm you with some tips for staying healthy and fit throughout the holidays.
Try intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting is a buzzy term that simply means eating within a specific window of time. By packing all of your calories for the day into a few hours, you have a better shot at avoiding overeating. This is especially helpful for holidays like Thanksgiving where a single meal can add up to an entire day’s worth of calories. Most people try to eat between noon and 6 p.m., but the specific time slot is up to you.
Make a mental meal plan
The best part about the holidays is that they are predictable. Friends and family often serve the same dishes or treats, so you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting into when you attend a party or holiday event. Before you go, make a mental inventory of what you’ll allow yourself to indulge in and what you’ll avoid. Pre-planning will help you stay on track and avoid getting carried away.
Track your calories
The biggest rule of the holidays is knowing it’s okay if you overeat. But, you should still have an understanding of your total intake so you can get back on track the next day. Track your calories with a fitness tracker like My Fitness Pal to keep yourself in check. This is also a great way to test yourself if you’ve been estimating the calories in your food. That cookie you thought was 150 calories might end up being 300.
Find time for physical activity
It’s really hard to out train a bad diet, but you should make time for some sort of exercise, especially the day of a big party or event. If you train in the morning, you’ll get your metabolism going and add a few hundred calories to your allowables for the day, which means you’ll have more wiggle room when you’re presented with tempting treats.
Drink a lot of water
Most of the time what you think is hunger is actually thirst, so a surplus of water can help you curb cravings and prevent overeating. I suggest drinking a few glasses of water before heading out to a holiday dinner or party to fill your stomach and give you a better chance at making it through the night without overeating. If you’re the type of person who needs a nudge in the right direction, this smart water bottle by HidrateSpark can help. It tracks your water intake throughout the day and can even remind you when it’s time to drink.
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