The ACTUAL Effects of overfeeding this Christmas

by Nov 28, 2016Fat Loss, Healthy Lifestyle

What damage can you REALLY do to your progress this Christmas?

I have spoken to a lot of people recently who have a DEEP FEAR about the upcoming Christmas period and it’s potential to de rail all your progress.

So let’s first agree what we mean by “the Christmas period”

To me the overeating and indulgent Christmas period lasts for a few hours on Christmas eve and then the whole of Christmas day and is all finished on boxing day.

To some people though the “Christmas period” has already begun and it will finish sometime in January.

Mince pies every night, mid-week drinks, office parties and events are already happening and there’s no control.

For those of you who are intent on continuing to make progress over Christmas however, you’ll be pleased to know the effects of overfeeding over short periods is less catastrophic.

One study took male and female obesity prone and obesity resistant people.

They ate an Isocaloric (the right number of calories to maintain their body weight) for day one followed by either 3 days on the same diet or an overfeeding diet which took their calorie maintenance and multiplied it by 1.4.

The macronutrient split for each diet was protein 20%, fat 34% carbohydrate 46%.

The results showed that for both male and female, obesity prone or resistant; the people’s body weight didn’t change significantly for either the isocaloric or the overfeeding period.

The increased energy intake was matched in all cases by an increase in resting energy expenditure. In other words the amount of energy your body utilises without exercise goes up.

The biggest increase in energy expenditure was in night time resting energy expenditure in the obesity prone group. So you could say you’ll burn it off in your sleep!

So if you, like me, want to enjoy Christmas (those two-three days toward the end of December) you can be assured that doing that is not quite as catastrophic as you may think.

So keep up the training, keep up the progress on your nutrition and “bookend” your Christmas period to a couple of days and you’ll be absolutely fine!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3770765/

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