NOT ALL CALORIES ARE FAT GAIN

Not all summer holiday food= fat gain.

Have you absolutely gone wild during your annual summer holiday and are now feeling like crap?

Not all is lost – just because it’s likely you’ve eaten and drank a LOT more than you’re used to over the past few weeks, it doesn’t mean all of the calories you’ve eaten are destined for body fat storage.

For a start, your body still needs calories to live on your holiday. Whilst you may be a little less active, you still need calories to keep your heart going and your brain working.

Secondly, in the same way your body can adapt to low calories by down regulating various metabolic processes, the same will often happen in the other direction via NEAT and/or Adaptive Thermogenesis (increasing your metabolism).

You may have noticed your heart rate increasing or body temperature rising as a response to the extra calories.

The extent of the response is often quite individual with some people ramping up metabolic rate quite aggressively with others being more moderate but either way, your body will typically respond positively to an increase in calorie intake.

Not enough to completely counteract the extra calories mind, but there will probably be some offset.

A classic study from Levine et al. (1999) fed participants 1000 calories over their maintenance caloric needs for 8 weeks and found that some subjects increased energy expenditure via NEAT by up to 692 calories (others weren’t quite as lucky).

If you are one of the lucky ones then there’s every chance you didn’t put on as much body fat as you think, considering the total intake.

So, the chances are, you probably did gain some body fat over the summer but that’s only a problem if you don’t know how to get it off (which you don’t necessarily need to do immediately).

Whilst there is some research to suggest that gradual weight gain across the years is due to holiday weight gain that is never lost, if you have the discipline at some point to get it off, then it’s only temporary.💪

Hope you had a banging summer!