Here comes the eating season …
Get a jump-start on burning calories before New Year’s
If you have a mouth and a palate, this is your season. Feasts, banquets, parties and dinners at friends’ homes seem to continue without a stop. There’s even a controversial, but popular belief that most folks will gain about five pounds over the holiday season.
That belief is controversial because actual research shows that most people gain only a pound or two. But those few pounds may still add girth, because much of it can be stored as fat. Fat doesn’t weigh that much when compared to muscle or bone. So even though the scale doesn’t reflect a significant weight gain, it may be a little more difficult to f asten your shirt or your jeans. You may even notice a slight increase in the muffin top hanging over your belt line or perhaps more of a gap between shirt buttons.
Of course, everybody follows up by making a resolution for the new year to lose weight and “get in shape” (which is a vague and meaningless phrase). But what if you didn’t have to do that? What if you didn’t feast first and then afterwards, struggle to boost your metabolism to burn off the residue of the feasting you did?
What if, in f act, you began to boost your metabolism right now, so that any calories consumed would be burned off before they could be stored? The result would be that you could use your resolution creativity for more worthy matters and not head to the gym in a kind of resolution panic in January.
Starting to run or spin or do resistance work mere weeks before the turn of the year will be a task requiring concentration during what’s left of the busy holiday season. But think of it this way: while many of the people you know will be concentrating on sucking in their gut at work or in social occasions, your gut will not have expanded. The work you have to do to make that a reality isn’t really very hard.
Here’s the science: The results of your exercise doesn’t stop at the moment you stop your activity. Your body continues burning calo- ries, sometimes for several hours, according to many studies, and also reported in an article on the popular website Livestrong.com. At the same time, you don’t need to spend hours exercising to rev up your fat burning system. Livestrong author M. Gideon Hoyle writes, “You can get some benefit from aerobic activities even if you can only exercise for 10 minutes at a time. You can get the benefit of strength-training exercises in workout sessions that last only 20 or 30 minutes.”
However, one fact not mentioned in the Livestrong article is how important it is to do a warmup before starting any activity. Even five minutes of rhythmically flexing and extending your joints before exercising will help prevent microtrauma (tearing of single muscle fibres) and even more serious injuries.
More science: The lingering effect of exercise makes it clear that you should definitely do a workout on a day when you can expect to consume a lot of calories. In fact, a fairly short, but high-intensity exercise session done just before starting to get ready for an evening out will still be burning calories as well as building muscle even as the appetizers are being served.
If you train your body to be accustomed to burning off calories rather than storing them as f at, you’ll be one of the few people who have lost girth at the beginning 2018, perhaps even going down a size or two. Then you can make a resolution to buy some new — and smaller — clothes.