If you are trying to improve your body and lose body fat, the holiday season can be a hard part of the year.

You can try to stay on track or at least attempt to minimize the so-called damages. I say – why not enjoy the holidays themselves, family dinners and all, and still progress on your goals. Here is how to do it.

Get in Fantastic Shape Before the Holidays

If there is some time before the big day or event, train and diet or stick to your regime like your life depends on it. Then, you can rest on the special day. You win twofold. First, you are going to feel fantastic in your new fitter bod. Second, if you mess up your diet a bit, you will still have room for that, due to being so strict up to that point.

Reduce you food consumption the day before the holiday. It is simple really. Have a light dinner. Or just a salad. Take the dog for a walk instead of eating one of your meals. You can fast and make yourself a few hot cups of tea or some mineral water with lime juice.

Go Easy With Those Snacks

Save the heavy stuff for dinner. Create some caloric deficit by going light throughout the day. It would be better to slightly under eat cause you are going to enjoy a nice big and delicious holiday dinner anyway. Why not prepare yourself to enjoy it fully. Now, here comes the most important part.

Dieting and holidays – forget about it! On the day of the holiday – no diet, no restrictions, no nothing. Enjoy it. You know, life is way too short for you not to cherish the special events and moments with your beloved people and friends. Plus, Christmas cookies are awesome.

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There’s simply too much fun stuff to do outside of the gym. Life is full of beautiful places to visit, interesting things to do, great people to meet, awesome books to read, etc. It is just too big a sacrifice to only focus on fitness. That being said, you should aim high with your fitness goals. Yes, you can actually train relatively little and get great results.

Full Body Routines To Build Muscle

If you train your body three times a week, you will be training all your muscles in one workout. In order to progress, you will have to do a little bit better (more repetitions) every time you train. You have to focus on Progressive Overload in order to give your body a change.

Immediately after lifting weights (for about 40 minutes), I either Jump Rope or go swim, or both (as I did during the summer). Other great ideas – a pickup basketball game or a session of punching the heavy bag.

Control Your Weight With How You Eat

You can lose weight and stay in shape by working out like a madman every day for 3-4 hours. Or you can train smart three times a week and follow an eating plan that will allow you to eat less. If you eat less, you are going to lose fat. Simple as that. This is what I did.

I read Eat Stop Eat, an ebook written by Brad Pilon. He describes himself as a nutrition professional with over seven years experience in the nutritional supplement industry. Simple and easily achievable results are what I care for. His idea delivers.

Here is the scoop: twice per week, eat nothing between 6pm and 6 pm the following day. You can drink water, green tea and coffee. What this accomplishes is that you have somewhere around a 25% reduction in weekly calories. I got leaner without counting calories and without going hard core low-carb. In essence, this is a form of fasting. The cool thing is I get a sense of heightened perception on days that I fast.

The Action Plan

To sum it up – train three times per week with a full body routine and make sure you progress add a quick jump rope session after that, and also make sure fast 1-2 times per week or (reduce the amount of food you eat in another way) and you should be getting impressive results without spending all your valuable time in the gym.

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