Worried about weight gain on holidays?
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the one day at a time podcast. Now today's topic, it's summertime. You're going on holidays or vacation wherever you're from. Vacation if you're in The US, holiday if if you're in The UK or maybe Australia, something called holiday as well.
Speaker 1:So the main concerns around holidays and weight gain and stuff is, one, do you have to track calories when you're on holidays? The answer is no. But if you want to and it makes you feel better, then you could do it easily with voice logging or photos, fine. The second question is like, am I going to gain a lot of weight? Am I going to ruin all my progress?
Speaker 1:And like what is realistic? Like what's actually going to happen to my body fat? So we have to remember when we're talking about gaining and losing, we are talking about gaining fat and losing fat. Your total body weight will go up and down a lot day to day no matter what you do. So we have to think, my weight goes up and down pounds, pounds every day.
Speaker 1:What I'm really asking is, does my weight actually go up and down in pounds in terms of fat mass? And the answer is no. So you're either losing, maintaining, or gaining on fat mass. If you're hitting your targets, you're gonna be losing on your fat mass even if your total weight doesn't come down. Right?
Speaker 1:We know this. But when you go on holiday, what happens? What is, like, what is actually possible to gain on holiday when you're looking at gaining fat? So I built a tool that I want you all to use if you wanna if you wanna use it, that is, that goes off one of the key recent studies on overfeeding. So there's a study done on overfeeding in terms of calories, but split into overfeeding in fats, overfeeding with carbs, and overfeeding with more of a higher protein diet.
Speaker 1:And And then they looked at like what percentage of the weight gained was actually fat and what percentage was like muscle lean tissue stuff like that. Because not all the weight you gain is gonna be fat and the same as not all the weight you lose is gonna be fat. But we know one of the key elements to making most of the loss you do to be fat is protein. And we know that one of the key elements to make and make sure the less of the gain you make is fat is also protein. But how much protein?
Speaker 1:Why? When? Do you know what I mean? When doesn't really matter, but why? So I built this tool and let's go through it step by step.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna create a fictional person. Let's go from weighing pounds. Okay. Let's go. You've dropped down to a hundred and eighty pounds and a hundred and eighty pounds is eighty one point eight kilograms and a 180 pounds is what's that stone?
Speaker 1:12 stone eight. Is it? I think so. Anyway, let's kill the stone. It's it's just complicated.
Speaker 1:Okay. 180 pounds. Estimated average daily steps during holiday. So you should want to move a bit on holiday. You shouldn't just go and lay in a sun lounger and get burned.
Speaker 1:Classic British style. But, like, when you go away to a beautiful place or whatever, go for a walk, man. Go around. Look around places. Visit the small towns.
Speaker 1:You know, if there's a little hike to be done, do that as well. I know you wanna relax, but part of relaxing is also moving the body and not just being a slob on on the sun bed, isn't it? Because what's the point in that? So, yeah, let's say you do 8,000 steps a day. Just say let's go with 8,000 steps a day.
Speaker 1:And then we go for holiday plans. Okay. So it's gonna ask you how many days are you gonna holiday? So I'm gonna say you're gonna holiday for two weeks. Big boy.
Speaker 1:You're gonna holiday for two weeks and you're gonna go all inclusive. So I'm gonna ask on this tool how much how much more food are you gonna eat as an estimate? So are you gonna be eating more light treats and indulgence in that? Are you gonna eat like a bit more than now that you're eating? Are you gonna eat more than now for sure?
Speaker 1:Are you gonna consistently extra eat in? So, like, maybe, like, your meals are gonna be larger and you're gonna snack more. Are you gonna be eating a lot more than now? So, like, heavy indulgence, like, you will eat whenever you wanna eat and you'll drink whenever you wanna drink. And the fourth option is total all out feasting.
Speaker 1:So a complete holiday mode. This could be two weeks all inclusive, eating everything and anything and drinking everything and anything, doing that for two weeks. So let's go with all out mode. And your dietary approach is gonna be standard, of course. You're not gonna be thinking much about protein and stuff.
Speaker 1:And you can then pick where you're gonna go on holiday, and I'll explain why this is important. So let's say you're gonna go on holiday to lovely Spain. Right. So here's the results. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let me have to reload it. Sorry. So you're gonna go to lovely Spain on an all inclusive holiday and you're gonna get your score. So I'm gonna put my email in to get my score. Right, so here's your estimate.
Speaker 1:Your estimated maintenance for someone around one hundred and eighty pounds and moving moderately through holidays 2,646 calories a day. Over fourteen days at an all you can eat surplus, your total extra intake in total for the fourteen days is gonna be 37,000 calories. So this means your average calorie intake per day is equivalent to about 5,292 calories. Alright. That's an all inclusive all you can eat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that if you think that's high, is realistic stuff. And then it gives you what 5,200 looks like in Spain. So it looks like you have a Spanish omelet in the morning, some toasted bread. For lunch, you can have paella.
Speaker 1:You know, it's a classic Spanish rice dish with chicken and stuff like that, salad. Then for dinner, you're gonna have a grilled seafood platter, fresh fish, shellfish, roasted vegetables, some drinks. For drinks, might have sangria, other drinks. Then you might eat chorizos and chocolate and stuff like that, and that's 5,200 calories. You might be thinking, no way.
Speaker 1:But on holiday in restaurants and you're eating the lawn, all you can eat about that and all the drinks you're gonna have is gonna add up. Right? So what does this mean? How much fat are you gonna gain if you went all out, all inclusive, fourteen days in Spain on a hill. This is like upper level.
Speaker 1:Total fat gained estimation on a standard diet is 6.8 pounds, Right? But here's an interesting fact. If you were to eat a high protein diet on holiday, your gain wouldn't be 6.8 pounds, it would be 5.2 pounds of fat. So this is 6.8 pounds of fat. High protein means the gains will be 5.2 pounds of fat.
Speaker 1:So you reduce fat gain by 1.5 pounds just by eating more protein. Right? And this is based on the overfeeding studies on trial called PROOF, so you can look it up. But let's have a look now though at what would happen if you just if you if it was more obvious, you know, hey, Scott. I'm actually not gonna just be, eating all day every day in terms of, like, all you can eat for two weeks.
Speaker 1:But I am gonna eat more. I'm gonna consistently be eating more, but it's gonna be, like, moderately more. Like, I know I'm gonna go over my maintenance, but I'm gonna enjoy myself, but I'm not gonna be, like, eating until I'm over, You know, when I'm satisfied, I'll stop type of thing. I'm not gonna keep eating for the sake of it, like, to make the most of my money. Do know what I mean?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna just gonna eat a lot more, but I'm not gonna be laying down like a slug and in pain. So let's see what happens there to how much fat you can estimate to gain. So if you were doing that type of holiday where you are eating more, you're gonna gain 1.72 pounds of fat, so about three and a half thousand calories a day on average. That's a much better outcome, isn't it? Sorry, that's over ten days.
Speaker 1:It'll actually be a bit more. So, yeah, you're looking at about two pounds of fat gained. Right? But then if you're looking at if your protein's higher throughout the holidays, 1.3 pounds to 1.5 pounds of gain. Now hopefully it's not confusing for you guys, but what I want you to realize and this tool will also give you high protein foods in your place you go on holiday.
Speaker 1:For this example here, it gives you the top 10 highest protein foods per 100 calories in Spain. Jambon Iberico, Salmon Gero, Tortilla Spanola. Yeah. It just gives you a top 10 list if you want help in terms of like picking what to eat and stuff like that. So what's the purpose of this tool and why am I doing it?
Speaker 1:And I'm trying to stress you out. Am trying to make you worried? Am I trying to make you guys think, oh my god, do I have to track my calories in holiday and stuff? No. I'm not saying you track your calories in holiday.
Speaker 1:What I'm saying is if you use the tool and you go off the research and overfeeding studies, it's actually quite difficult to gain about two pounds of fat in two weeks. You have to be consistently eating more food than you are now by like a significant amount and you're gonna be doing that for the fourteen days in a row and then you might gain two to two and a pounds of fat. But if you've got your head screwed on and you think, you know what, I know some foods are higher in protein, and I am gonna make sure that I am eating protein foods because protein foods are nice. They're gonna be meat based most of the time. Then And I'm gonna do that when I'm on holiday as well if I can.
Speaker 1:Maybe I do a half the days. That's gonna reduce the fat gain potential. And then I come back from a two week amazing holiday. I haven't worried too much about food. I have been a bit moderate, but I have been eating over well.
Speaker 1:My maintenance is for sure. I come back and I've gained one pound and a half of fat. You say, Oh my god, that's disaster. No way. How many holidays you go on a year?
Speaker 1:Some of you go on a lot of holidays, most people will go on one big holiday, maybe not even one holiday, but a big holiday a year. To say it's one holiday a year, maybe two. Or one family holiday a whatever it is. Say it's one main one a year. And not to be morbid like, but a lot of us have got 20 summers left in our lives, 30 summers left in our lives, maybe 40 summers left.
Speaker 1:It's not many summers left in our lives we have. And we don't wanna be looking back going, oh my god, I sacrificed two weeks in whole. I overanalyzed everything. I just didn't wanna gain that one and a half pounds of fat, which you can lose in a week or two when you're back, which is nothing. Right?
Speaker 1:So it's nothing to reclaim back. But you don't want to be on holiday worried, stressed. Your stress causes you to hold on to more water retention. The stress causes your hormones to go to whack. Then you start feeling agitated, then your anxiety goes up.
Speaker 1:You don't want to be this person. The process, this entire system of philosophy of what we're doing a parapal and we did a turtle and the weight management stuff is the weight management stuff is just the gateway to improving your overall health because we know that for us to be at our optimum health, we need to reduce our weight, have a better more muscle mass or better muscle mass. So basically better body fat percentage. So then that enables us to then bring down our stressors, increase our daily activity, get outside a bit more, do activities to stimulate the mind cognition, which is resistance training, keeping muscle. We're doing all of these things for what?
Speaker 1:For what? So you can tell someone you've lost two pounds. Obviously not. Obviously not. We're not doing any of this for like an actual measurement number.
Speaker 1:We're doing it so we live the fullest life we can possibly achieve, basically. We don't wanna waste our life in ill health. And I know sometimes ill health is you can't stop it. There's things outside our control. But for things inside our control, not only do we increase our likelihood of living longer, we increase our actual quality of life.
Speaker 1:So there's no point you increase in the quality of your life. Say now you've been using Parapal for the last six months and you've lost 25 pounds. You've improved your health. You've improved hopefully other factors in your life. You don't want go into holiday with the old mindset that traps you into thinking that everything's based on your weight in the holiday because no one cares about your weight on holiday.
Speaker 1:No one's thinking about your weight. You're not gonna think about your weight in years to come, but you will remember the energy and the vibes you give off and the stress you had and the argument you had as as a result and how you felt you regret not letting go of all of these societal pressures that we have on ourselves. Because if I picked you up and dropped you on your own in the middle of an island and said the human race is no more, you won't be worried about your weight. You won't care about it. You'll just be on the island, do what you want.
Speaker 1:But we care about it because obviously there's a societal pressure on it. We can't ignore that. Obviously, that's the case because we want to look better. We want to dress how we wanna dress. We wanna feel confident.
Speaker 1:We want to be that person who's confident in us and get out there. Of course, we do. We can't say that's not a factor. But the main factor we do this weight loss journey is that we are healthier and we become ideally happier, and this enables us to live a healthier life with ourselves, with our friends, with our family. Do know what I mean?
Speaker 1:It's like all encompassing in that sense. So whilst I've built this tool and I've walked you through that it's actually quite difficult to gain two pounds of fat on a two week holiday. But if you went on a two week all inclusive and literally did sit down and just drink in pina coladas and eating food all day, yeah, you can look at you're gonna gain five, six pounds of fat from that. But even five or six pounds for an all you can eat, all out eating every single day can be rectified in six to seven weeks after that. So you could go on the two week trip of your lifetime and you just want to eat and eat, drink everything.
Speaker 1:Fine. There's no problem. You take six to seven weeks of work afterwards and you say to yourself, no problem. But the point of this is to have a healthier mindset going into the holiday season, as in the people when you go on vacations and holidays, as in summer, not the holiday season of Christmas. We wanna have this healthier lifestyle approach.
Speaker 1:So hopefully that's that. I'll stop rambling on now because I think I've got my point across hopefully. But yeah, back to kind of like the comments I've seen on day six stress podcast and how high stress caused people to keep their water retention high and then they've less stress and their water retention dropped and like the whoosh effect happened and stuff like that. Managing your stress is one of the key parts of things. So you don't want to be getting trapped by this kind of weight loss journey, making yourself more stressed for it.
Speaker 1:You will lose weight at a consistent pace if you hit your targets and that's that. You just leave it go. Time that will on and fix it for you as you have some consistency and patience. But what time doesn't necessarily and consistency that doesn't fit is the stress element, the psychological part. If you keep catastrophizing, making huge problems over small things, like oh my god, that on the pack says 98 calories, but the app said 96 calories.
Speaker 1:I can't believe it. No way. It doesn't matter like that measurement. There's no perfection in tracking. So if it's tiny bit off, fine.
Speaker 1:You you're logging food to build awareness to then make behavior change. That's the main thing. But obviously, we wanna be as accurate as we can with food logging and technology is gonna keep getting better. But unfortunately, food labels can be 10 to 20% off legally. So we're never gonna get it down to an exact number ever.
Speaker 1:But that's not the purpose. The purpose is to be free from this conditioning, free from food prison, free from the stress of all this stuff we've been told for ten, twenty, thirty years, and weight will come off slowly over time, but we improve our elements in our lives. And we enjoy our time away, and you can decide what you wanna do. Empower yourself. If you wanna track, you track.
Speaker 1:If you don't wanna track, don't track. If you wanna think, I'm happy to gain five pounds of fat over two or three weeks all inclusive, do it. And then don't be in the middle. Just go bam bam, job done. So hopefully this is useful for you guys, anyone holding.
Speaker 1:But I'll be seeing you all soon in the next episode covering some new research studies that are quite exciting actually. See you back here tomorrow.
