Santa’s job isn’t easy.
He spends an entire year preparing to deliver BILLIONS of presents all over the planet… all in one night. This requires him to run a full time toy factory, manage a staff of dozens of elves, and keep up a reindeer farm. Plus he has to answer millions of personal letters from his fans, do thousands of “mall gigs”, collect money for charities, and appear on hundreds of commercials, TV shows, and movies every year. Sometimes it seems like he has to be in two or more places at the same time. Can you imagine the stress he must be under? Talk about cortisol production! And he manages this on a diet of almost exclusively cookies, milk, and candy.
Obviously Santa loves his job very much, but his obsession with work overshadows his neglect for his own personal health. Well, it turns out Santa is more sensitive than he looks. One quiet Christmas Eve a small child surprises Santa while he is delivering his gifts and confronts him with an innocent question. Sometimes it is the smallest things that motivate us to change our lives… as the brief video below demonstrates. Although his fragile ego may have been shattered, Santa did commit to making some major changes in his jolly life. Here are the 4 key principles he follows to transform his body and his life… you can use these same principles to stay lean over the holidays:
Santa took action and transformed himself and he wants you to do the same! One of the biggest mistakes people make over the holidays is to throw their nutrition and fitness routine out the window, figuring they will get back in shape “in the New Year”. Statistics show, however, that many people ending up keeping most of the weight they gain every Christmas and the cumulative effect can really add up over the years. The key is to avoid excessive weight gain during your holidays by following Santa’s Top 4 Holiday Fat Loss Tips (as demonstrated in the video above):
1. Set the Right Mindset:
If you want to make any lasting change in your body, or even in your life in general, you need to get your mind right. Before you can change anything you need to be committed. Motivation is fleeting… commitment is for real! I’ll be honest, if I only exercised when I was motivated to do so I would probably skip 60% of my workouts. But I made a commitment to myself (as well as my clients and my family) to take care of my body and to stick to my training and nutrition plan. There are several things you can do to help condition yourself to stick to your commitments. Here is one of my previous articles that discusses this in greater detail:
=> How to Train Your Brain for Faster Fat Loss Results!
2. Nutrition:
You gotta get your eating on track before your body will transform. This can be challenging during the holiday season, with so many large family dinners, tons of delicious food, lots of treats, egg nog, and a few bottles of ‘good cheer’. Now, Santa wouldn’t suggest you pass on any of the tempting food and drink you will be offered over the next couple of weeks; the suggestion is simply to keep your portions under control. If you can monitor the size of your portions and the number of servings you have, you should be able to enjoy everything in moderation without over-indulging. However, if you expect to be a glutton on a certain day there are some things you can do for ‘damage control’. Check out my blog post below for some great tips on eating big and staying lean!
=> How to Manage Your Cheat Meals to Avoid Gaining Fat
(you need to see my Epic Cheat Meal video on this post!)
3. Strength training:
In order to turn your body into a fat-burning machine you need to make resistance training the foundation of your exercise routine. Strength training exercises help to manage your insulin and blood sugar, increase your metabolism, and can stimulate the release of fat burning hormones. Remember to plan a few quick resistance training sessions over the holidays. This doesn’t need to be time-consuming… keep your workouts short and intense and focus on big compound exercises. A sample home workout might look like this:
(4 Rounds of 10 Reps per Each Exercise)
4. High Intensity Interval Training Cardio (HIIT):
If you use cardio, make sure it is high intensity interval training cardio! This means brief sessions with alternating intervals of high and low intensity. For example, perform 30 seconds of fast, challenging cardio (ie: on a stationary bike, or skipping rope at a quick pace) alternating with about 1 minute of slower lower intensity cardio, then repeat. The entire workout doesn’t need to last any longer than 15 minutes. In fact, sometimes I just do 10 minutes after my Strength Circuit and that takes care of my HIIT workout.
