The holiday season plays a big role in our weight calculations, with many of us — often already packing on the extra pounds — overeating in the last week of the year before resolving to lose all those extra pounds in the new year.
The smarter decision is to start your weight loss journey a few months before the holiday season – allowing you to take a cheat day or two during the holidays.
In the rest of this article, we'll look at some simple steps you can take to lose weight gradually, safely and successfully in two months. It's a much better approach than trying to force yourself to lose a lot of weight in a short period of time.
And the holiday season has a built-in reward that makes it worth it. The best part of this strategy? You'll start the new year with your fitness goals already achieved, and this locked-in success will give you the confidence to focus on all your other goals and the confidence that comes from achieving success.
So let's start with a quick review - what are you less into?
Before you begin, it's important to understand that while there are some basic principles that apply across the board, everyone is unique in terms of how well they do certain things.
You need to evaluate where you stand on the following metrics.
Sleep and recovery
Are you getting enough quality sleep? If it's consistently less than six hours a day, you need to push it to at least seven hours. Losing sleep will throw off all your other efforts (caloric restriction, exercise) for naught. It's a good idea to invest in a sleep monitor like the Fitbit Charge 5 to help you track your sleep relatively accurately.
The same goes for stress reduction – if your job is stressful, work on several five-minute de-stress breaks throughout the day to practice mindfulness.
If you're already training hard, look at how to manage your breath in your post-workout cool-down (you warm up before exercise and cool down after, right?) to optimize recovery.
Eating habits
The single most important factor after recovery (sleep, stress, training) is how much you eat (and what you eat).
Whatever diet you want to follow—paleo, O MAD (one meal a day), intermittent fasting, keto, low-carb, flexible macros, or whatever—you'll need to master two things:
Consistency
Follow the protocol with 90% accuracy for the next two months. For example, if you practice intermittent fasting, I would like you to spend the first week doing IF on a 16:8 protocol before switching to 18:6 in the second week.
Starting in week three, I would ask you to experiment with a 24-hour fast once a week with a weekly cheat meal to build on the discipline and allow for regular rewards and opportunities to get your metabolism going. In short – start simple, build discipline and then repeat the complexity.
Selection of meals
Speaking of simplicity, the secret to weight loss is to replace choice with contentment. The surest way to lose weight is to eliminate the decision-making process about what you eat. Choose a few healthy meals (per meal) of what you really like to eat and repeat them week after week. You don't have to decide between options you don't like - choose foods you could eat three to four times a week.
A few repeatable meals could be the difference between meeting your goals or losing analysis paralysis this year.
Caloric deficit
And with all of this, the basic principle will be maintaining a caloric deficit.
For a gradual two-month program, I usually recommend starting with a moderate deficit – no more than 250 calories/day – so that your body can easily stick to it in the beginning. A higher deficit is possible (and we'll get to that later), but starting small will help you build discipline.
After the first few weeks, you can increase the deficit to 500 calories/day (depending on whether you see results or not), but the key is always to be consistent over the two-month period.
Calorie restriction is a lot easier than you think. For example:
If you have two cappuccinos a day, switch to black coffee for a 200+ calorie deficit.
If you enjoy two 16 oz cans of soda, switching to a sugar-free soda will put you in a 300 calorie deficit.
Regular snickers? Skipping snacks will often put you in a 200-400 calorie deficit, depending on how heavy a snicker you are.
You could easily achieve a 100-200 calorie deficit by cutting your meals by 25%.
As you go along - you'll realize that a 250-500 calorie deficit can be really easy to build into your eating habits without giving yourself any trouble.
And after the first few weeks, you can practice going from a 250 calorie deficit to a 500 calorie deficit, but play around with that number in that range to see what works best for you.
Exercises
If you're already working out, that's great - we can look at ways to get better at it.
If you are sedentary, adding 15-30 minutes of exercise a day along with the calorie deficit prescribed above will give you a big boost on your weight loss journey.
Exercise is all about consistency and simplicity - do activities you enjoy and can do regularly (preferably daily) for at least 15 minutes (and up to 30/60/120 minutes a day). There is no real upper limit other than what you have time for. And you really don't need to run for two hours a day unless you're training for a sport.
Here's a handy list of exercises that will burn lots of calories per minute - pick a couple that you like (and can learn/master) and you can alternate between them or do them together on a daily basis.
Don't fall into the trap of "off" exercise days at this stage - you can change the activity, but you'll rarely need to take a "break". If all else fails, a 30-minute walk will work just as well as 5-10 minutes of jumping rope—if only in terms of helping you stay consistent.
What you'll notice when reading the exercise calories burned above is that in most cases, exercise will only help you burn 150-300 calories, or maybe 400-600 if you go out for an hour.
In contrast, eating 300 or 600 calories doesn't take as much time or effort.
Use exercise as a boost, not a substitute for your weight loss.
What to expect
If you follow the principles mentioned above, you can easily lose a pound to half a pound per week. Weight loss may be faster at first than it tapers off, or it may be slow at first and accelerate later.
The important thing is that you consistently work towards your goal - and soon you can enjoy the holidays and end the new year much closer to or achieving your fitness goals.
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