Managing Health and Fitness During Vacations, Holidays, and Busy Seasons

Different times of the year can bring new challenges for people to stay on track with their health and fitness goals. For some, the winter holidays can seem like one gathering after another while for others summer time can be difficult due to things like cook outs and vacations. These difficult periods of time can change depending on the season of life you’re in and what your social group prioritizes. There are a few things we work to educate people on about these situations. First, things like a holiday or travel should bring you happiness and excitement, not anxiety. These are special moments with the special people in our lives, your current fitness habits aren’t worth ruining these moments. Secondly, we need to build a healthy structure and process around these periods of time. We often create associations from our habits. For some people, vacation means binge drinking alcohol and eating junk food for a week straight. Then we wonder why we feel the need for a recovery vacation instead of feeling recovered. For many Americans, the period of time between Thanksgiving and New Years is often associated with loosening your belt one hole. If we create a better system, it allows for a better narrative so we can not feel derailed every time something pops up on the calendar. Here’s some strategy tips that have helped many of our clients. 

Keep Exercise the Same - If you’re traveling to see family or taking a vacation, aim to keep your exercise routine as close to normal as possible. If you train Monday,Wednesday,Friday work to stick to it. Most towns have some fitness option ranging from corporate gyms like Planet Fitness to independent gyms like Showtime Strength & Performance. This creates an opportunity to work with a different coach or modify workouts you’d normally perform. Creativity is key with these workouts. They might not help you become a pro athlete, but they will help regulate your appetite and keep your consistency towards your goals. I enjoy finding small gyms during travel so I can learn from other coaches how they run sessions and use different exercise variations. If nothing is available, there are an endless number of bodyweight exercise routines on Youtube to try. The exercise piece seems to be most helpful in being a catalyst for other good behaviors. After a good workout, you’re more likely to eat a healthy meal to promote recovery than a milkshake. 

Hydration - Properly hydrating during the day can help you eat less of the sugar snacks and limit your alcohol consumption. Both of these will reduce the number of extra calories and help to promote better sleep. Most of the time when we reach for another snack or beer, we could sub a glass of water to satisfy our craving. A simple strategy would be to have a glass of water between each snack and or drink. So it could look like this : Alcohol, glass of water, treat, glass of water, alcohol, glass of water etc. Our stomach only has so much capacity and the increase in water will help us stay hydrated and signal to our brain that we’re not hungry or thirsty. Staying hydrated could be one of the easiest ways to manage calories without feeling restricted or missing out. 

You Create the Time Frame - Many people struggle from November to December 31st with their nutrition habits. They tend to struggle because they’ve framed that period of time as a wash for their healthy habits. A mentor of mine once told me “Things last as much time as you give them” and she was right. If we assume that every meal in that period of time needs to include desert and leave us feeling stuffed to the brim, it probably will. Weddings, holidays, vacations are one off occasions. We don’t need to have our Thanksgiving meal every meal leading up to the holiday or the week after. Give these events time frames and build structure that feels comfortable to you for management. If you’re on vacation, try setting nutritional guidelines for meals. When we travel to the beach, we like to order fresh fish from the market to cook ourselves. This gives us food options not normally available to us and we control the nutrition that goes into the meal. Then maybe the next night we will go out for a dinner. This is balance to enjoy moments. 

Protein Load your Day - The Protein Threshold Theory is the idea that the body may drive increased food intake until protein needs are met each day. With that idea, it makes sense for us to front load our days with protein rich meals before going out to the big game or the family gathering. Even if you’re someone that generally doesn’t eat in the mornings, it might be a good idea to switch on days you know could become trouble with nutrition. This could look like this :

Breakfast : Eggs, Bacon, Yogurt, Vegetables, Fruit

Snack : Protein Shake and fruit or mixed nuts

Lunch : Salad with Chicken Breast

Rest of day : Food that’s available still trying to have protein focused meals. 

With the above example, you could still have 75-125 grams of protein before ever going out the event that could cause nutritional issues. 

This framework will allow you to start seeing these special moments in time as opportunities to create lasting memories instead of increasing anxiety. Each time is a chance to practice these things into routine. Perfection isn’t the goal, rather being aware and making the effort to see small changes. Over time this will have a dramatic effect on your progress and perception. We have to be realistic with ourselves and understand that we can’t continue to start and stop sensible eating and exercise habits every time a life event pops up, but we can continue to work on improvement. There is no date we have to be perfect by, rather we have a lifetime of building and adjusting our habits based on the season we’re in. 

‍