Pete Wright:
Every November the wellness internet issues a weather warning. Somewhere between the first slice of pie and the last New Year’s Eve cocktail, you’re gonna gain five pounds, maybe ten. Brace yourself. You’ll see the post telling you how many burpees it takes to burn off a dinner roll. You’ll see holiday shred challenges everywhere. You’ll see a guy with a ring light tell you to do fasted cardio on Thanksgiving morning so you can earn your stuffing.
This week we’re going to check the forecast. And you know what? It turns out researchers have actually weighed people all the way through the holidays. And the real number is a lot smaller than the internet needs you to believe. And there might be a catch hiding right inside it that you don’t see coming.
So today we’re getting into what the holidays actually do to your body, why the scale lies to you the morning after a big dinner, whether you can really burn off the piece of pie, and how to get through December without losing the habits you have spent all year building. I’m Pete Wright, he’s Srdjan Injac, and this is Build for Health.
Do you have a dinner roll budget? When you hit the big meals, you’re like, just give me a pile of bread and onions.
Srdjan Injac:
No, I don’t. I’m a meat lover. I love meat.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Mm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, then you don’t have to worry so much about it, right?
Srdjan Injac:
No, no, I actually love holidays.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, you’re in good shape.
Srdjan Injac:
I love holidays. I don’t know why people have problems. For me, it’s better than just the normal regular days, because I have more options. Now I have all this amazing food I can pick from, and I didn’t have to make any of it.
Pete Wright:
You didn’t have to make any of it.
Srdjan Injac:
I didn’t have to make any of it.
Pete Wright:
I see what it is.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, I go and it’s all there in front of me, and I can pick whatever I want, and I pick the best stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
So all those rolls, mashed potatoes and cakes, I don’t know, this just doesn’t really do it for me.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about what you see in the gym. What are your clients saying to you about the holidays as we gear up?
Srdjan Injac:
Oh man, they freak out. I have to explain everything to them, because I know every year people are like, maybe you’re a hundred and sixty-five pounds before Thanksgiving, and then three days later you’re a hundred and seventy. And you immediately think, oh my God, again, five pounds of fat.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That feels like a lot.
Srdjan Injac:
Well, that’s probably not what happened. Your body weight and your body fat are not the same thing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Okay, the number on the scale includes fat and muscle and water and glycogen.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Food is sitting in your digestive system, all this stuff. So during holidays, several of those things can increase very quickly without you actually gaining any pounds of body fat at all.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So this is what happens. People need to know water weight versus actual fat. Probably the biggest thing I teach people is that you can gain several pounds on the scale very quickly, but gaining several pounds of body fat requires a substantial calorie surplus. You have to eat so much food. Holiday meals tend to contain much more sodium, carbohydrates, more than someone’s normal meal, normal day.
Pete Wright:
Oh yeah. If they’re doing it right.
Srdjan Injac:
And both of those things can cause the body to hold additional water. So when someone wakes up two or three pounds heavier after a Thanksgiving dinner, a significant portion of that increase can simply be water. So that’s why you shouldn’t immediately respond by starving yourself right away or doing two hours of cardio, thinking you’re gonna burn all that stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Give your body a few days of just normal eating, hydration, movement, sleep, and that scale weight will often disappear on its own.
Glycogen is also something that people don’t think about. When you eat those carbs, some of those carbohydrates are stored as glycogen in your muscle and liver. And it’s stored along with water. So if you’ve been eating relatively moderate and suddenly you have those rolls and mashed potatoes and stuffing, dressing, all those desserts and other carbohydrate-rich foods, your glycogen stores can increase, and the water stored alongside them increases too. And that’s actually not necessarily a bad thing. If you train the following day, you might notice that you have a really good workout, because your muscles are well fueled now. So the problem is that someone sees the higher scale weight and assumes all of it…
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Oh my God, it’s fat.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
And there’s literally more food inside you. So if you normally eat three meals…
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
And suddenly you have Thanksgiving dinner and dessert and leftovers and snacks and your drinks, of course. There is physically more food moving through your digestive system.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
That food holds weight.
Pete Wright:
Go ahead, weigh your food before you eat it and see how that lines up.
Srdjan Injac:
Exactly. Literally. The food has weight.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
All right. So people freak out very easily. Now, I can talk about what it would actually take for you to gain those pounds of fat. Many people don’t understand how much it actually takes and what it takes.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
They assume that every pound on the scale is a pound of body fat, and that’s not how the body works. So let’s actually put some numbers behind this and look at how much overeating it would potentially take to gain one, three, or five pounds of actual body fat.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
So I don’t know if you heard, you probably heard that one pound of body fat equals about 3,500 calories.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Srdjan Injac:
Okay, that’s a useful…
Pete Wright:
Let’s pretend I’ve heard that.
Srdjan Injac:
That’s a useful estimate.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
You can Google it. You can find that’s kind of what it’s saying. It gives you a little equation.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But I want to make something clear. The human body isn’t a perfect calculator, okay? Weight gain and weight loss doesn’t happen according to that exact 3,500-calorie equation. Your metabolism, activity, digestion, body composition, and other factors all affect what happens with excess calories.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But the 3,500 number is useful just now to demonstrate how much sustained overeating we’re talking about here. So let’s start with one pound. Using that rough estimate, gaining one pound of fat requires 3,500 calories above your maintenance needs. So the important words here are above maintenance.
Pete Wright:
All right.
Srdjan Injac:
Okay. So if your body normally requires 2,500 calories that day and you eat 3,500 calories, you didn’t really eat 3,500 extra calories. You ate approximately a thousand calories more, because it’s above your maintenance. A thousand calories above your maintenance.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
Because 2,500 was your maintenance, you hit 3,500.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Srdjan Injac:
So you’re only a thousand calories above the maintenance. Now imagine Thanksgiving. Let’s say your maintenance calories are around that 2,500, but between breakfast, Thanksgiving dinner, dessert, drinks, you ate 5,000 calories. Now that’s a huge day of eating.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
That’s a lot of food, right? But your calorie surplus would be approximately what now? 2,500 calories.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Srdjan Injac:
Not 5,000, using that rule, right?
Pete Wright:
Right.
Srdjan Injac:
And that wouldn’t mathematically equal one full pound of fat yet.
Pete Wright:
Okay, we haven’t eaten a whole pound of fat yet.
Srdjan Injac:
Because it’s 3,500. No, not yet. It would still be about a thousand calories short.
Pete Wright:
That just sounded so disgusting. “I want to sit down and eat a pound of fat.” Yeah, you’re not doing enough to gain a full pound.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. So let’s talk about three pounds of fat.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
That means your surplus above maintenance would have to be 10,500 calories.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So that would equal above 6,000 calories every day for three days. So that’s a tremendous amount of food.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
If you think about five pounds, I mean, you have to be about seventeen thousand five hundred calories above maintenance.
Pete Wright:
Right. That is an extraordinary amount of holiday food over a short period.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. So if you put that into perspective, if someone normally maintains their weight at around that 2,500 calories and somehow averages 5,000 calories every day, that’s approximately a 2,500-calorie-a-day surplus. And using that simplified math, it would take roughly a week of doing that every single day to accumulate that 17,500-calorie surplus.
Pete Wright:
That’s extraordinary.
Srdjan Injac:
Exactly. Yeah, so don’t freak out.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Okay. Well, let me ask you this. Do you know how many calories, let’s just say an American Thanksgiving dinner, right? We got the full thing, the turkey and the stuffing and the gravy and the rolls and all the whatnots and the pies. Do you have an idea of how many calories roughly that is? Spoiler, I do.
Srdjan Injac:
I feel like at least five thousand. I really do think they eat close to five thousand.
Pete Wright:
Okay, well, get this. This is really interesting, because there is a famous figure, the 4,500-calorie figure. The Calorie Control Council did some sort of measurement, and they said, including all the drinks…
Srdjan Injac:
Oh.
Pete Wright:
And the snacks before and after the meal, all of that lands at about 4,500 calories. And drinks are high sugar, right? Often, if you’re having cocktails, that kind of a thing. But a recent survey by an actual weight loss company put the dinner itself at about 2,092 calories, based on what people said they planned to eat in an interview scenario. So I think that’s mostly a joke, not a data point.
We’re not going to take that as settled science, but I think it’s fascinating. And I think this is true for me. I imagine a giant meal, but my participation in it is not actually gluttonous. I’m not an animal when I get to a feed trough. I eat like a human being, and there just is a lot of food to choose from. Leftovers for days is the rule around here.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. Yes.
Pete Wright:
So I wonder how much people overestimate the fear of overeating when they really are generally approaching a normal meal.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. I mean, I know I’ll snack all day on things that are on the table, because they’re there the whole time.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
You’ll have the meal, but because it’s there, I’m not even hungry, but it’s there. So I’ll just grab it, eat it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yep, yep.
Srdjan Injac:
And I know it’s not the best for me.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Srdjan Injac:
And my calories are just gonna go through the roof, and all that stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But I know that just one single day, that meal, or even the whole day, even two meals, the entire day, is not gonna affect me. Next day, of course, I’m not gonna step on the scale. I know I ate more. I know there’s more food in me.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I got it, universe.
Srdjan Injac:
Why would I even step on the scale in the first place?
Pete Wright:
Right. Okay, right.
Srdjan Injac:
I’m just setting up myself.
Pete Wright:
That’s rule number four. Don’t weigh yourself over the holidays.
Srdjan Injac:
No, don’t. Because you know what the number is gonna be. It’s not gonna go down. Definitely not gonna be the same.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So…
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, so this is my big question for you. I don’t know. We get to the new year and people come into the gym. They’re just more interested in the new year, making change in their lives, and they’re just off of a set of holidays where they think they’ve eaten way too much. Maybe they have, whatever. Can you lift off a pie?
That’s the mentality, right? I had my sins of eating and now I pay the penance by going to the gym. Can you really run off a piece of apple pie? How do you approach that when people are like, well, I was very bad and now I have to… the internet is telling me I have to make change.
Srdjan Injac:
See, don’t think about that. This is what you should do the day after. Nothing extreme. Don’t fast all day because you feel guilty. Don’t run ten miles to punish yourself, just to slash your carbs because the scale went up. Okay. Just go back to normal. Go back, get your protein back where it normally is. Drink your water, get your fruits and vegetables, get your steps, go for a walk, get back into the gym, get a good night’s sleep.
Give your body several days to normalize before you decide what actually happened to your weight. There’s an important flip side to this conversation. I’m not saying holiday calories don’t count. You absolutely can gain meaningful body fat over the holiday season.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, season.
Srdjan Injac:
But that’s more likely to happen when Thanksgiving turns into six weeks of overeating rather than just one night, one meal.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Because you enjoy the one Thanksgiving dinner. So one meal isn’t usually the problem. One day is not the problem. It’s when we say, well, it’s the holidays. And every day from Thanksgiving until January.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So enjoy the Thanksgiving. Enjoy the Christmas dinner. Have the dessert you’ve been waiting for. What matters much more is what you do between those celebrations, between those days. Okay.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
The scale does mess with your head. So I would actually recommend that some people do not, like I said, weigh at all, not look at that number. You already know what happened. So the holiday should be something that you enjoy.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Fitness should make your life better. It shouldn’t make you afraid of Thanksgiving dinner.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
At the same time, enjoying the holiday doesn’t mean that you’re gonna abandon every habit that you’ve built so far. You’re not gonna ruin a year of progress between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The bigger danger is convincing yourself that because you weren’t perfect for one meal, there’s no point trying again until January.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Srdjan Injac:
You have that holiday season. So enjoy the meal, all the holidays, but then wake up the next day and go back to being the person you were before that dinner.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. There’s an interesting study that I came across researching before this conversation, and it really supports exactly what you’re saying. Most people go in and they say, hey, I think I’m going to gain or have gained five to ten pounds over the holidays. And this is a meta study that the National Institutes of Health did that really supports, you know what, most people gained an average of about one to one point four pounds over the course of a rigorous holiday without any change in their activity. And after, they ended up thinking they gained, and maybe the scale said they gained five pounds, but it all came down to about a pound that was actual weight gain, right?
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, see? Yeah.
Pete Wright:
But the problem is that pound is the pound that stuck around. It never moved out, right? So they did gain weight. And I’m kind of curious from your perspective. Is one pound a year a big deal? And you need to talk to me once like I’m 25 and once like I’m 55.
Srdjan Injac:
No. No, they probably gained that one pound because not just from that one dinner, but they had leftovers.
Pete Wright:
Right, sustained calorie intake, yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So they did the same thing the next day. And the next day. Remember when we put those numbers, it was like, okay, well, those three days and maybe you gained that one pound.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Srdjan Injac:
In those three days you probably don’t gain three pounds, because it would have to take much more food.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So you gain that one pound. And that’s fine. I always say, you didn’t get fit from one healthy meal, and you’re not going to lose all your progress from one unhealthy meal. What determines the outcome is what you repeatedly do. So go back to what you did before that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Go back to normal. Do everything you did before then, and all those pounds that you lost… just go back to that same routine and the weight will go down. You’re gonna lose those.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But enjoy it. Don’t be afraid of it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
You will lose that pound. It’s just not gonna happen overnight, right?
Pete Wright:
Right. It might not even happen in December.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, might not till after January, which is true.
Pete Wright:
Right. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But you enjoyed your holiday season. You gained that one pound. No big deal.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It’s only one pound.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, I really like that you say it this way, because I think the more important thing than thinking about weight is, if you have the privilege of celebrating some sort of culturally resonant event that involves food with people that you love, you should take advantage of that. And don’t let, oh my God, the fear of the gym get in the way of what is otherwise deeply heart healthy, right? Of getting through the holiday season with joy.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. I mean, I’ll gain probably some pounds till January, ’cause I look at it as, hey, it’s my off season.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
I’m not gonna be going out anywhere with my shirt off, so I’m gonna get ready later.
Pete Wright:
Well, the weather gets colder. You’re practically hibernating.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. Need some insulation, keep myself warm, right?
Pete Wright:
You’re like a bear.
Srdjan Injac:
I gotta stay warm. It gets really cold when I come in the morning and I’m freezing, and then I’m like, oh my gosh.
Pete Wright:
I love it. I know, and you’ve already ripped off and burned the sleeves to all your shirts. What are you supposed to do?
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. The muscles don’t keep you warm, believe me. It’s freezing. It’s not good. So during the winter I’m like, you know what? I wanna be warm. I wanna be comfy.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So yeah, just enjoy it. Don’t worry, that one pound, it’ll be fine.
After January, after those holidays, you’re gonna get back on track. You’re gonna do everything right. We talked about recovery and protein intake, all that stuff, and your body’s gonna go back to normal and you’re gonna lose and burn those calories. You didn’t lose your muscle mass. You didn’t lose your metabolism, just because you gained that one pound.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So everything is still there. You didn’t lose your progress. Like I said, one pound doesn’t mean everything’s gone. You build those habits over time. So one unhealthy meal, like I said…
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It’s not gonna do that much damage.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. So it’s okay. Go ahead and gain a pound. It’s fine. Just don’t lose the habits.
Srdjan Injac:
Exactly.
Pete Wright:
You’re fine.
Srdjan Injac:
Exactly. Don’t lose the habits.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.
Srdjan Injac:
And in between, remember what happens in between. Those are the things that matter. So don’t just be like, well, it went up next morning three pounds, screw it, I’m just gonna wait till January, and all that stuff. No. Just go back to normal, and then Christmas comes and then enjoy the Christmas and New Year’s Eve and all that stuff. And you’ll be okay. That one pound might even be gone by January.
Pete Wright:
So this episode drops, I mean, we’ll be cresting into November. Here in the United States we’re moving into the Thanksgiving season, for whatever that means for the rest of the world. Your holiday schedule may vary. When does your official eating season begin? What is your first big event?
Srdjan Injac:
Well, I’m gonna have a nice little party here for Halloween. And I don’t know if you remember last year.
Pete Wright:
Right. Oh, do I.
Srdjan Injac:
And people were always talking about it. It was like, oh my God, he actually had pizza.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
I was serving pizza. I had four or five different types of pizza over there. I’m like, eat it.
Pete Wright:
It was good pizza too.
Srdjan Injac:
Enjoy it. Oh my, yeah, I get the good stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
I’m gonna cheat.
Pete Wright:
You did get the good stuff.
Srdjan Injac:
I’m gonna cheat right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And it was really dark too. So you could eat without people judging you.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That’s important.
Srdjan Injac:
Nobody will know. They can’t see you.
Pete Wright:
They can’t see you.
Srdjan Injac:
You can say it’s only your first slice when it’s your fifth, maybe.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So I’m like, eat it, enjoy it.
Pete Wright:
All right.
Srdjan Injac:
One day, it’s not a big thing.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
I’ll eat it with you.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It’s okay.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
I just don’t want people to be afraid of food.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So yeah, that’s kinda when I start.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so it starts Halloween.
Srdjan Injac:
And it’s coming. Yeah, where I had all kinds of candy and chips and all the bad stuff. I think I even had a soda in my fridge. I’m like, screw it, enjoy it.
Pete Wright:
Man, dude knows how to party. That’s what we’re saying.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Thank you. Thanks for the guidance. This is good.
Srdjan Injac:
Of course.
Pete Wright:
This is an episode of sanity. You’re okay.
Srdjan Injac:
Yes, you’re okay.
Pete Wright:
The muscle will wait. Don’t lose the habits. You’re going to be in good shape.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. Like I said, next morning you actually might have a good workout. If you go work out, your muscles are now fueled.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Those are what we call refeed days. When you’re so good for so long and you’re clean, sometimes on purpose I’ll have a really good cheat meal, what we call a cheat refeed.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
And you refuel your muscles with all that glycogen and all that stuff. You wake up and you feel stronger, you feel fuller. So you actually have more energy and you get the workout. So that’s why I say, after that day, don’t step on the scale. Go to the gym. You’ll feel great. You’re actually gonna have a really good workout.
Pete Wright:
I love it. No, I love it. I had not made that connection. That feels like November 1st is going to be a banger. I can’t wait.
Srdjan Injac:
Oh yeah.
Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Hey, thank you. This has been great. Everybody, thanks for hanging out and joining us for this conversation.
Don’t fear the holidays. You’re gonna do fine. If you have any questions about training or recovery or how to make strength work for you in your life, we want to hear them. Head to the show notes and use the link to send us your questions for the coach. And don’t forget to subscribe and share. This is how we grow stronger together. On behalf of Srdjan Injac, I’m Pete Wright. Thanks for listening to Build for Health, and we’ll catch you next week in the gym.
