So, you had a big meal during a holiday party. We’ve all been there.
How can you bounce back quickly, and then use this information for the next time you have a big celebration coming up?
Here are the top 7 ways that you can bounce back from these meals and not feel so guilty afterwards.
These have been the biggest game-changer to let me go on vacation and enjoy meals without having to worry about the scale being way off when I get back.
Don’t Weigh
This one has two different meanings. One: don’t weigh yourself, don’t get on the scale the next day.
I always like to give myself a little bit of time when I know I had a heavy-consumption day.
The other part is: don’t let it weigh on you. Don’t sit around feeling guilty, asking “Why did I go back for seconds?”
You’re human. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Did you enjoy it? Yes.
Don’t just keep doing it and eat cake for the next 3 days, but you had a day where you got to enjoy something.
Don’t feel guilty, because you have a gameplan. I’m going to show you how you’re going to come back from it.
Planning
We want to start planning our meals. Not the big one, but everything coming after it.
You might have a holiday weekend or gathering where you’re eating big meals on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. In that case, you’re going to want to plan for the next week.
What often happens is we have a big holiday meal at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and we don’t have a game plan for the next week.
This snowballs into another bad choice of food because your metabolism and appetite are cranked way up.
When you go shopping for the week after your big meals, you want to be shopping for healthy foods and snacks.
Veggies and hummus are going to be on that list for me. I’m going to plan a salad for lunch and dinner, and keep the carbohydrates out of my diet.
There are tons of videos and recipes on www.drlivingood.com that can give you some good ideas of how you can plan your meals after.
Environment
Your environment is the biggest predictor of what happens post-meal. During Christmas time, if you have cookies laying around, and leftovers filling up the fridge, being in the kitchen will trigger you to eat more.
You’ve got to control the environment, because if you put something healthy out, like a bowl of apples, you’ll be more tempted to eat an apple.
Unhealthy food can’t be in sight. You have to stow it away so it doesn’t make you make a bad food decision.
You might waste some food in the process, but you need to get rid of the junk.
During Halloween time, I throw out the candy that the kids collect and I give them something healthy, so it’s out of sight.
They’re not tempted by it if it’s gone, but if I leave it hanging around, they’re going to want a piece every single day.
Set up your environment to help you make good choices.
Detox
If you feel like you need it, you should detox right away. One of my favorite ways to detox is through a juice cleanse.
This means I’m only drinking juice for one day.
I drink low-carbohydrate green juice, whether it’s a greens powder or an actual green juice from a brand like Suja, which has a low-carb version that has 10 grams or less of carbohydrates.
You can also juice your own vegetables or go to a juice shop and get some, as long as it’s low-sugar and low-carb.
Just drink that for 1-3 days for an easy way to bounce back really quickly.
But the detox is actually step 2. Step one would be to load up on glutathione in your body through supplement forms.
You want to take glutathione with some antioxidants like broccoli or Brussels sprouts.
Then, in the afternoon or evening, you’re doing a detoxification with activated charcoal and fibers.
So step 1 is to suck up all of the toxins that you took in, and step 2 is getting it to the digestive system and out of the body.
I utilize this process a lot during the holiday season to keep my body primed to keep toxins out of my body.
You can also just try doing the juice cleanse by itself.
Create A Calorie Deficit
If you’re going to eat a 3,000 calorie meal (and it doesn’t take a lot to get there!), we need to create a deficit before and after the meal.
I would highly encourage you to skip breakfast if you know you’re going to have a big meal.
This is on day one. On day two, you’re going to want to skip it again. I would encourage you to half-size your lunch that day if it’s going to be a big dinner.
You want to create a calorie deficit early in the day so that you can enjoy the larger meal later in the day.
I’m not big into counting all of my calories. I don’t even want to think of what my Thanksgiving calorie intake would look like.
Don’t let that exact calorie count weigh on you. Just know that your hunger hormone is going to go crazy the next day, prompting you to eat more.
But despite that, we need to back it down the next day, which brings us to the last tip.
Rotational Fasting
Rotational fasting gets your body out of the mode of constantly eating, and into a mode of abstaining from that eating.
To do this, you start curbing your consumption slowly the week after the meal. Have a half-sized breakfast, normal lunch, normal dinner. You also want to try for lower carbohydrate intake.
The next week, you can skip breakfast, and just have lunch and dinner.
The week after that, you can skip breakfast and half-size your breakfast and lunch, and then during the final week, you can do a full-day fast.
Once you’ve implemented this process for a while and your body is getting used to it, you can start this immediately after the meal.
If I’m eating a lot over the weekend, I know I have to crank up the detox and cleansing on Monday.
I like to utilize intermittent fasting by cutting out breakfast, cutting out lunch, and having a light, healthy dinner.
Then after that, I might also throw in a day where I’m not having any meals and just have some juices.
