Maybe Cheating on Your Diet is Just What You Need
The panic over weight gain starts at Thanksgiving, the best American holiday, for a number of perfectly acceptable reasons. Falling on a weekday, and marked by inactivity and sloth, with three meals’ worth of calories wrapped into one, the day is a gilded front door to gluttony that starts off a season of less than restrained eating. Maybe you diet again in January? Or feel guilty before?
It’s a distraction that discourages dieters or even derails them. We don’t all fall off the wagon, but the guilt — “I am doomed to a month of eating more cheese than I should” — is common enough to cause dread.
Though we do have options. Dieters with goals can deny the holiday and treat Thanksgivingdinner like a Thursday, forgoing sauces and sides for lower-macro lean proteins and vegetables. They can fast intermittently, skip breakfast, and eat unrestrained. Some lifters pack another meal in before, show up full, and peck. Others lift heavy that day and then gorge.
Excerpted from Inverse
