3 Ways Thanksgiving WON'T Ruin Your Fat Loss (No Matter What You Do) | Ep 405
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Worried that Thanksgiving (or any holiday) dinner will undo months of fat loss progress?
It won't, and the math proves it.
One day or even one week of holiday eating cannot physiologically derail your results when you understand how your body ACTUALLY responds to overfeeding.
Learn why your body's built-in safeguards protect you from rapid fat gain, how strategic refeeds during the holidays can actually support your fat loss goals, and why the mental reset matters more than the calories.
You'll discover the one calorie reality check that eliminates holiday anxiety, how metabolic flexibility works in your favor when you eat MORE carbs, and the critical psychological skill that separates long-term success from yo-yo dieting.
This evidence-based approach to nutrition during the holidays will help you build muscle and lose fat sustainably... WITHOUT the stress, guilt, or compensatory behaviors that actually cause problems.
Whether you're strength training over 40 or just want a healthier relationship with food, this episode gives you the framework to enjoy Thanksgiving and stay on track with your physique goals.
Timestamps
0:00 - Why Thanksgiving can't ruin your fat loss progress
2:08 - The 3,500-calorie reality check for weight loss
4:31 - Why your scale weight jumps
6:05 - How your body handles overfeeding and carbs
8:13 - Strategic refeeds for metabolism and performance
10:55 - Avoiding compensatory behaviors after holiday meals
12:15 - How to adapt to your choices and biofeedback
14:40 - Managing leftovers and the long holiday weekend
17:07 - Weekly energy balance for sustainable fat loss
19:55 - All-or-nothing thinking vs. psychological flexibility
22:45 - 3 tips for holiday eating (not what you think!)
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Philip Pape: 0:01
Alright, Thanksgiving is tomorrow here in the US. You might have seconds on your turkey, that third slice of pie, and you get stuffed and you convince you've just undone months of fat loss progress. But look, you haven't. I'm gonna show you exactly why one day or even one week of holiday eating cannot actually derail your progress. You'll learn why your body's built-in safeguards protect you from rapid fat gain, how strategic refeeds can support your goals, and why the mental reset matters more than the calories. If you're worried about Thanksgiving ruining your physique, you need to hear this. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape. And if you're listening to this when this comes out, Thanksgiving in the US is tomorrow, Thursday. If you're listening to Afterward, everything I tell you today still applies to any holiday or even week of holiday-like activity that could be travel or vacation or anything like that. And I see the same anxiety always popping up when it comes to the holidays. Now, Monday's episode, we talked about developing your flex framework. Today is going to be a completely different concept we're talking about. And that is the mindset around the holidays and how this can help you if you if you're aware of it. Because I, again, I see the anxiety on social media, I see it in my inbox, I see it on our groups and in our programs. People asking, how do I stay on track? Should I make up calories? Should I fast the day before Thanksgiving? How do I calculate macros for this and that? And they're kind of trying to apply the full-on, what we talked about, optimal approach to these holidays that doesn't necessarily work. But I think you're asking the wrong questions because Thanksgiving isn't a fat loss problem, nor is it part of your fat loss plan. It's a mindset problem, like any holiday, any time off, anything that gets off of your goals or plans on purpose or otherwise. And today I want to walk you through three specific reasons why one day or one week of holiday eating cannot physiologically, not just mentally, but physiologically it can't ruin your progress. And this is gonna help you psychologically. Stay with me, okay? We're gonna cover the math. I know how much all of you love math, but seriously, I think I think math is the universal language of the universe. And it's important to understand it, but you don't have to do the math. We're just gonna cover it basically, and you'll see a tick, some techniques that I use with clients that really helps connect the logic with the emotional side of the brain and really help push through some of these issues and reframe them. So the logic and the math behind why a single calorie, high calorie day isn't gonna equal fat gain, which this also correlates to fluctuations on the butt on the scale, by the way. How your body responds to overfeeding. So, yeah, let's say you do eat a ton of calories on Thanksgiving, what happens, and why the psychological piece is probably the most important part of all this, anyway. All right, so let's start with some math because numbers tell a different story and help us take a step back, especially when there's a lot of anxiety. And I see it all the time. So to gain one pound of fat, you need 3,500 calories above your maintenance calories. So if your maintenance calories are 2,200 and you ate 5,000 calories in one day, like Thanksgiving, that is 2,800 extra calories, which guess what is not even a full pound of fat. Now, most of you are probably gonna eat, this is just an average, 3,500 to 4,000 calories all throughout Thanksgiving. If you include alcohol, yes, alcohol, I know people are gonna drink. If you include all the pies and desserts, calorie-dense foods, all the snacking, the appetizers, going from one place to another, eating all day. You've got the parade. I've got to eat my breakfast, then we watch the Macy's Day parade, then we have lunch, then maybe later on we have our dinner. You get it. So even those of you who are like lighter eaters might be able to pound down, you know, 3,000 calories or more. For those bigger folks who eat a lot, could eat a lot anyway, 35 to 4,000 the average. And some of you, yeah, might hit five, six, or I do know a few of you that are gonna hit seven or eight. That's extremely that's an outlier though. But even at 5,000 calories, if you are right now in a fat loss phase and you're eating 1,800 calories, you're still only 2,800 above maintenance for one single day out of 365 days. And the scale might, in fact, it probably will jump three to five pounds Friday morning. Maybe it's less if you're smaller, but let's just say it does. Let's prepare for that. But it's not fat. It's glycogen, it's water, it's food volume. Every gram of glycogen holds three grams, three to four grams of water. We need a carb-heavy meal, which Thanksgiving generally is, with all those desserts, all that sodium as well. You're gonna store water and you're gonna store a heck of a lot of it. That's it. That's it. Especially when you combine it with the math, I just reiterated a couple times about the 3,500 calories for a pound of fat. And remember, when you're in a calorie deficit, you're generally eating below your maintenance. If you eat a whole bunch of food one day, it's not like you're eating all those calories above maintenance. You're just eating some amount of calories of maintenance and making up the difference for your deficit as well. You know what I mean? So over the next two or three days after Friday, assuming you return to your normal eating, the water weight disappears. And if you're tracking your weight every day, which I generally recommend for people, at least early in this process, part of the learning phase, you'll see that. You'll see it go way up, then you'll see it go down and back down. And that's kind of cool to see because then it validates that it's not fat. I at least I hope it does. For those of you who are skipping weighing in on weekends just because of the fear of seeing the scale go up, you're missing out on an opportunity to learn about it. We also know there's studies that say tracking seven or weighing yourself seven versus five days tends to have better outcomes for weight management. So just think about that. All right. So that's the simple math on the 3,500 calories and the overeating piece, just to put that in perspective. Now, what let's talk about what happens when you overeat on a single day, besides the calories, right? Because your body's not just a calorie calculator, it's a very adaptive system. So when you dramatically increase calories and you just binge the heck out of food in one day, especially from carbohydrates, I'm gonna shock you now, but several things are gonna work in your favor. Okay. So this is this is called non-delusional positive reframing. This is reality, guys. Okay, first, your metabolic rate is gonna go up, probably a little bit, through adaptive thermogenesis because you're burning more calories, digesting and absorbing food. You probably have more energy. I'm not gonna say that your meat goes up because you may be sitting around all day, but we do know that following a large refeed, sometimes your expenditure can go up a few hundred calories, according to some studies. Because you have more energy, you start to move around a lot, you kind of make up for make up for the slothiness on Thanksgiving. So that's just kind of an interesting little side tangent. Second, if you're in a fat loss phase, and this is the more important benefit, really, a strategic refeed can probably benefit you psychologically, if nothing else, but sometimes there's a little physiological boost as well. I don't want to overstate it. Like we used to think that, oh my God, you're gonna jack up your leptin and you know, all this stuff gets recovered well beyond where it was before. Not like that. But when you've been in a deficit for several weeks and your leptin's low and your metabolic rate is lower, and you're hungrier, your performance is suffering, and then you have a re feed, like a high calorie, high carb day, aka Thanksgiving, it's gonna temporarily boost some of that stuff up, right? It's gonna temporarily bring your leptin up, tell your body, hey, we're not starving today. And that can also improve some things like your metabolic rate, reduce your hunger, improve your training performance. It's not on the net gonna vastly improve those things. We know that, according to the evidence, but it will give you a temporary boost. And mentally, it's super helpful. And I've talked about in the past having a weekend diet where kind of the opposite of what that sounds like, where on the weekend you stop dieting and you go to a full refeed. That some evidence shows potential increase in muscle mass retention when you do that. So there's little benefits to this. So, in other words, think about the positive of having a refeed and using the holidays for that. It's the same reason I tell people on that go on vacation during fat loss. Use the vacation as a maintenance refeed, as kind of a D load from your diet. Okay. So in that case, Thanksgiving could be this thing planned in that you supports your fat loss, especially if you've been in a long deficit. Look forward to it. The third thing here is the I'm gonna call it metabolic flexibility. I'm still not super comfortable with that term. The idea that you have divided energy systems. So when you eat a huge amount of carbs, your body's gonna shift to burning more carbs, right? And less fat short term. Just like when you eat more fat, like on keto or something, it burns more fat, but you have more fat. So at the end of the day, energy balance is really what matters, right? Fat storage and fat release on your body comes down to energy balance. But, you know, when you have all these carbs coming in, of course, you're going to have an immediate source of energy, you're gonna refill your glycogen. Some people find like a really great training session the next day after Thanksgiving. And again, that just ties into this whole thing of Thanksgiving being like a carb up opportunity, potentially, and you can do a reframe. So, from that perspective, just enjoy it. Let your body have the refeed and then return to normal Friday, right? The worst thing you can do is try to make up for it by slashing calories Friday or even pre-slashing calories. Some people like starve themselves earlier on Thanksgiving. Don't do that. Cause then you're just gonna, you're gonna make up for it anyway, and you're not gonna feel as great because you're probably gonna shovel in more calories because you feel like you can handle them, and then you just feel terrible, right? Digestively, right? Or you're trying to do some extra punishing workout or fasting or like go for extra walks or runs that you don't feel like doing just to force it. Don't do any of those behaviors. These cause problems. These cause problems. The Thanksgiving meal doesn't cause the problem. So just enjoy it. Try not try not to take stress off your plate if you're listening to this the day before or even the day of Thanksgiving. Now, if you're the type of person that likes to bounce these types of questions off of others and figure out like, how do I structure Thanksgiving in reality? Because I can't just, I can't tell you specifically this is what you need to do. This is, I was thinking about this. This is one of many of these cool scenarios come that I've seen come up lately where Fitness Lab, that's my new app that came out, where people are saying, Hey, I I went into that to the coach tab and asked it about my Thanksgiving plans. And it was so cool because it asked me about my specific situation and helped me, you know, move my training sessions around the right way, or think about how to plan for the food, or even come up with like really good recipes for Thanksgiving that align with my goals. Right. And that's the adaptable piece of it. So I did want to give a little plug because Fitness Lab is out now, and and this is the last time you're gonna hear an episode before the Black Friday discount ends on Black Friday, November 28th. That's 20% off. So if you're looking for that, we're not gonna have another, I don't know when we'll have another discount. You shouldn't like count on those. That's the whole point. So go to fit, go to wits and weights.com slash app. Um, if you haven't heard about Fitness Lab, it's my new AI coaching app. It's designed to adapt with everything you're doing. It accounts for your biofeedback. Hey, how's your hunger? How's your stress? How's your sleep? What's your schedule look like? When do you train? What equipment do you have? You know, how's your hormone situation? Like it learns all of that. And the more that you talk to it every day and feed it information, the more it learns and says, hey, let's try this, let's try this. And then when Thursday hits, you know, you could maybe upload a picture of the meal and say, hey, take a look at this and analyze it, or don't even use the app on that day because it is a holiday, right? But the whole point is Fitness Lab adjusts to you. It takes all of these different data points, not just metrics data like most apps, but a lot of qualitative data, which I think is where it fills in a gap of apps that doesn't apps that don't exist today. It fills in that gap. So again, right now through Black Friday, Fitness Lab's 20% off. Go to wins of weights.com slash app. If you've been listening to the podcast, you're like, I really need help implementing my fat loss plan or my holiday plan or like my flex framework or anything else, but I can't hire a coach. This might be what you want, what you need. And it goes beyond workouts and nutrition. Like there's plenty of apps for that. It does the intelligent coaching, the interpretation. It meets you where you are. It can handle all your corner cases, all your different situations in life and builds momentum even during chaotic weeks. So go to witzaways.com/slash app, 20% off through Black Friday. All right, let's talk about the more realistic scenario about holidays and elephant in the room, Thanksgiving and Christmas and everything else, although they are just one meal. Oftentimes I say they're just one meal. For many of you, it's not just one meal because we have something called leftovers. Now, I don't like to waste food. I also like to make a lot of food at once because it's more efficient. So we have a lot of freaking leftovers. Okay. So Thanksgiving may become a four-day weekend where you have leftovers Friday, right? You have the turkey sandwiches. You might also have social events and meals out because you have Black Friday and you have it it kind of feels like a time off. You know, a lot of you get a four-day weekend or whatever, and you just kind of let go that weekend, which is cool, right? And so what happens if Thursday leads to Friday to Saturday to Sunday and you're over calories every single day? Have you ruined your progress? Still no. Still no. Let's walk through why. All right. Fat loss happens over time, week to week, month to month. It's not day to day. Obviously, you're burning and storing fat every day in small amounts, but anything meaningful is not gonna happen until it accumulates over time. If you're in a 500 calorie a day deficit, that's 3,500 calories a week. That's a pound of fat loss, right? And that takes some effort for people to do it that way, just like it would take effort to do it the other way. And it takes time. Okay. Now, sometimes it's not intentional, like over consuming, but it's still gonna take time. So if you have four days at or above maintenance and you're in a fat loss phase, what are you doing? Well, you're just reducing your deficit, but you're not erasing the deficit for the week unless you're dramatically over every single day, which is possible, right? Depends on how, if your deficit is very conservative, you could definitely blow through it. But it's almost like you've, I hate to put it this way, it's like you're you've banked some deficit anyway because you've been in a deficit. Okay, so let's say you're eating 1800 and your maintenance is 2300. That's a 500 calorie day deficit. That's 3,500 calories a week. That's a pound a week. And then Thanksgiving, you eat 4,000. Friday, you eat 2,800. Saturday, you're back to 2,000. Sunday, you're still at 2,200. So you're still overconsuming, but you know, not as much as Thanksgiving. And now you've added 2,000 calories over four days. Well, guess what? Over seven-day period, now you are still in a deficit of 1,500 calories instead of 3,500 calories. So you've lost just a little bit less fat that week. Big deal. You haven't even gained fat. You've actually just slowed progress a little bit temporarily, and then the next week you're right back to your normal deficit, losing fat again. Right. That's why I tell clients and I talk on the show, think in weekly and monthly trends and averages over time, not daily, you know, daily numbers and even not sometimes weekly, depending on what we're talking about, what metric we're talking about. Okay. Well, one week is not gonna define your progress. And even so, one week you might be surprised that you were still in a deficit. And then the average over the next four to six weeks is ultimately what's gonna smooth out reality, what's doing. Now, obviously, if you four or five days a week you're overconsuming massively, that's gonna catch up, but that's not what we're talking about. So, for many of you who've been dieting for a while, a week at or near maintenance actually might be beneficial. We kind of alluded to this already: a psychological break. Your body recovers from a chronic deficit, you come back the next week refreshed, your performance improves, you're back on track, you're ready to go, right? Helps with the adherence as well. The alternative is trying to stay very strict in your deficit during Thanksgiving week, being miserable, feeling deprived, potentially binging because you restricted, and then feeling like you failed when you could have just enjoyed the food in the first place without any of that stuff. That's you know, all that stuff is far worse than just accepting this week as a little different and being okay with it, right? Your body cares about that long-term average energy balance. We're going back to logic and math and numbers. So one week of eating more surrounded by months of a consistent deficit, it's a blip. And that's we're talking about fat loss and a deficit. If you're, if you're listening, you're like, look, I already decided not to even try fat loss during the holidays, then you're probably even better than fine because it's going to be closer to what you've been eating anyway, just a tiny bit over. All right. So now the last piece here is the psychological side, always worth talking about. Because the biggest threat to progress isn't Thanksgiving. It's the all or nothing thinking that we tried to address on the last episode by coming up with a flex framework. So go check that out if you missed it already. And that's the framing where you say, well, I already blew it Thursday, so I might as well keep eating poorly all week and I'll start fresh on Monday, or maybe I'll start fresh January 1st. And this causes problems, long-term problems. It's the relationship with food. And your relationship with food is ultimately what matters with your food. It's not the macros that matter. The macros are a lagging indicator, are a metric. If you view Thanksgiving as a dangerous event to survive or control, you're setting up stress, anxiety, and behaviors that work against you. But if you view Thanksgiving as a single meal to enjoy fully without guilt, and then you move on, that is psychological flexibility. And that is a skill that will predict long-term success. Okay. I've worked with hundreds of clients. I've talked to thousands of you through the podcast. And those who maintain results, not even for years, but even for months, believe it or not, are not the ones who adhere perfectly, who have perfect compliance. That might be surprising to you. It's not. It's the ones who learn to handle the imperfect weeks where the adherence dropped and sometimes dropped significantly what was still there, and they didn't spiral out because of that buffer. They ate Thanksgiving dinner, they enjoyed it, they woke up Friday, went right back to normal. And even normal might still be a little bit over for a few days, but then, you know, gradually back to your routine. No compensatory behaviors, we call them. You're not compensating, you're not making up, no weeklong binge, just back to normal. Right. And that's the skill we're building. So tomorrow, if you're listening to this Thursday on Wednesday or whenever Thanksgiving is to you, is an opportunity to practice that skill. So if you're worried about spiraling, here's what I want you to do. Okay, I'm gonna give you three tips. First, plan Friday. Don't plan for Thanksgiving. Plan for the day after Thanksgiving. What are you gonna eat and train? What does your structure look like? Write it down, have a plan for Friday. Because Friday should be more or less a normal day. Maybe you're gonna go out to dinner or whatever. Most people aren't because you're kind of like a little hungover, a little stuff from Thanksgiving, even if it's a food hangover, if you know what I mean. That's the first tip. Plan for Friday. The second tip is I want you to practice self-compassion. Now, this is this is a little more complicated. This requires a little work. If you eat more than you intended, if you feel uncomfortable or you feel guilty, you know what? That's fine. Because you know what I'm gonna say next. You're human, you're a human being. That the response is what's important. And so we don't want to respond by punishing ourselves. I want you to acknowledge what happened and then choose your next action with intention. That's it. And this goes for any day for the rest of your life. Where you did something that you didn't intend to do, you acknowledge it and then say, okay, that happened. Now this is what I'm going to do next. That is what's in your control. So Friday morning, I eat my normal breakfast. Maybe I go to the gym and I move on. The third tip I have is to disconnect your self-worth from your adherence. You are not a good person because you stayed on your diet. I don't want to hear that language. And if I hear that language, it's okay. I understand there's an education, a teachable moment there. But I'm saying analyze yourself right now. Do you use that language? Oh, I was good this week or I was bad this week. I hear it all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, I hear it all the time. I was good because nope, nope, doesn't have a place here at all. You're not bad because you had three slices of pie when you intended to have one or none. Your value has nothing to do with your macros. Nothing at all. Right? What are we doing? We're building a healthy, strong identity, person, physique, health, all of that wrapped in one of our human mind and body that we can maintain for decades, for decades, until the day we die. And that requires a relationship with food where holidays are part of life because they exist and they are. They're not threats to your identity. So I hope that hits. I hope that hits with you and that's helpful. So I'm not going to give you the here are your 10 tips to do for Thanksgiving, blah, blah, blah. Everyone's different. You do it how you want to do. I would say enjoy, you know, Thanksgiving, whatever that means to you. And then try to get back to your normal, normal on Friday. But even if it's not the normal, normal and it's a suboptimal or a minimal or even a bailout, go check out our flex flame work from last episode if you don't know what I'm talking about. Then you're still gonna have momentum, right? And then remember the scale is probably gonna go up Friday and Saturday. It's okay. If you weigh yourself, it's kind of cool and experiment to see how it does that and then how it comes back from the water weight dropping. If you have leftovers, awesome. Work them into your normal meals. You've got food now you can plan around. Leftover turkey is the best. It's protein. You can fit that in your macros, right? Right? Leftover pie, it could be a little trickier, but just portion it into small slices. All right, get a little plate so it looks nice and big. Have some Friday night if you want, have some Saturday night if you want. You're gonna get tired of it probably. Log it, move on. It's fine. Plan for it, right? One meal, a few days of different meals is not gonna, is not drama. It doesn't require drama. Guys, don't be dramatic. Just return to normal. So holidays are never the problem. The problem is this rigid, unsustainable approach that everybody is selling and in the industry talking about how dangerous the holidays are, that you have to survive the holidays. But to me, survival sounds like not very fun. I don't want you to survive. I want you to just be. I want you to be, be happy with yourself, trust the process, trust your body, trust that one meal can't undo months of consistency that you've put in place. And that's what I wanted to cover today. Okay, three reasons why Thanksgiving will not, no matter what you do, ruin your fat loss. Number one, the math doesn't support it, right? Because it just, you would have to just eat gobs and thousands of gobs of calories to even tick, move the needle a tick. Second, your body is very metabolically flexible. It might appreciate an overfeeding. That is the epitome of a holiday meal. And then third, the psychology and the skill of enjoying a meal and moving on is a really important thing to learn. And it's definitely way more important than trying to ever be perfect or perfect adherence because that is what predicts long-term success. So eat the meal, be with your family, enjoy yourself. Then Friday, go back to whatever it is you were doing before. And of course, be grateful for whatever you're grateful for, the people around you, the food on the table, the fact that you have a body capable of incredible things. You've worked hard this year. I don't care how much progress you've actually made, you're listening to this podcast, you are trying to learn, you are trying to practice skills and grow. You're building strength. Maybe you've lost fat, maybe not. That's not the end goal here. It's the process of showing up consistently. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'll talk to you next time.
