Every year it’s the same story. The holidays show up with parties, travel, treats, and a calendar that’s packed from Halloween through New Year’s. Workouts get skipped, meals get less predictable, and by mid-December a lot of people have decided to just write off the rest of the year and “start fresh in January.”
There’s a better way to look at it. What you do during the holidays matters less than what you did the other ten months of the year. And if you haven’t been doing much lately, the holidays are a great time to start.
Think of It Like Your Retirement Fund
Nobody builds a retirement account with one giant deposit. It’s built with steady contributions over many years. Some months the market is up, some months it’s down, and some months life gets expensive and you can’t contribute as much as you’d like. But because you’ve been investing consistently, one rough month doesn’t send you into a panic. You have a cushion.
Your health works the same way. Every workout, every walk, and every balanced meal is a contribution. When you make those contributions consistently throughout the year, you build a cushion. Then when the holidays come around, you can make a withdrawal without it hurting you much. You can enjoy the meals, skip a few workouts when you travel, and not feel like you’re losing everything you’ve worked for.
The opposite is also true. If you haven’t been contributing, that same week of parties and travel feels like a big deal, because there’s no cushion to absorb it.
This goes against how most will view exercise unfortunately. If you are looking for instant gratification from results, you will be disappointed. Wealth rarely comes overnight and the same goes for health. Those small seemingly insignificant health deposits you are making have a much bigger impact than you are giving it credit for.
What the Research Says
The weight gain is small, but it tends to stick. A classic study in the New England Journal of Medicine followed 195 adults through the holiday season and found the average gain from Thanksgiving to New Year’s was less than a pound. That’s well below the 5 to 10 pounds people often assume. In fact, participants overestimated their gain by more than 3 pounds. The catch is that the weight didn’t come off on its own. A year later, participants were still carrying it, which is how small gains add up over the years. The people who were more physically active gained less.
The takeaway isn’t to panic over the holidays. It’s that the weight doesn’t go away on its own, so what you do after the holidays matters, and so does the baseline you’ve built beforehand.
Your fitness has a cushion too. Research on detraining shows that strength tends to hold up for a few weeks when you stop training, while cardiovascular fitness fades faster. In one trial, women who trained for 12 weeks and then cut back to just one session every two weeks for three months kept 90 to 95% of their muscle, strength, and aerobic gains. In other words, a busy few weeks won’t undo what you’ve built.
There’s a caveat. Most of this research is on people who have been training consistently, and beginners and older adults tend to lose fitness faster. That’s one more reason the investment matters. The more you’ve built, the more flexibility you have.
Good Months and Bad Months
Not every month is going to be a good one. There will be travel, illness, busy seasons at work, and holidays. The goal isn’t a perfect year. It’s a year where the good months outnumber the bad ones.
A bad month doesn’t erase a year of consistent effort. What matters is that you keep contributing, and that you get back to it when the rough patch is over.
Your Holiday Game Plan
If you’ve been consistent this year, here’s how to protect your investment without giving up the fun.
Set a minimum. Decide on the least you’ll do in a busy week, such as two shorter workouts and a daily walk. On the weeks when you can do more, great. On the weeks you can’t, you still have a floor.
Pick your moments. Go all in on the meals and events that matter to you, like Thanksgiving dinner or your grandmother’s cookies. You don’t need to eat every treat in the break room just because it’s there.
Don’t skip meals to “save up.” Going into a big dinner starving usually backfires and leads to overeating. Eat normally during the day and enjoy the meal.
Get back to normal at the next meal or workout. Skip the punishment workouts and the extreme January reset. Just return to your routine.
Not Working Out Right Now? Why Not Start Now?
If you’re not exercising regularly, don’t wait for January. The holidays are one of the best times to start.
Here’s the key: don’t go in thinking about losing fat. Go in thinking about building the habit. The goal for the next several weeks isn’t a certain number on the scale. It’s showing up consistently so that by January the habit is already in place, instead of starting from zero.
Keep it small. A 10-minute walk after dinner, or two short strength sessions a week, is plenty. Make it something you can do even on your busiest day.
Research on habit formation shows why starting early helps. In a well-known study that followed 96 people, it took a median of about 66 days for a new daily behavior to feel automatic, with a huge range from person to person (18 to 254 days). Missing a single day didn’t materially affect the process. So you don’t need to be perfect over the holidays, and starting now gives you a head start. When January arrives, you’re building on something instead of starting over.
The Takeaway
Consistent contributions all year give you a cushion, and that cushion gives you the freedom to relax and enjoy the holidays. If you haven’t started contributing, now is a great time to begin. Start small, focus on the habit instead of the scale, and let January be about building on what you’ve already started.
Do you know the best time to plant a tree?
10 years ago.
Do you know the second best time to plant a tree?
Today.
Enjoy the holidays. Do the best you can, and don’t let a few busy weeks convince you that you’ve lost the year.
Want help building a routine before January? Come set up a free session with us at San Diego Premier Training to learn how we can help.