What’s good, team? Hope everybody had a good time celebrating the holidays!?
Now, we’ve talked about December Damage Control a few weeks ago, in which we gave a few tips on how to minimize damage during this period of festivities. But if you’re like us, then we understand that you might have surplussed in terms of calories and your weight might have gone up (and if not, props to you!) So, what should you do if you gained a bit of weight and how do we do it?
You need to understand that most of your ‘gained’ weight is extra food that is still in your body waiting to be digested and… there may be some carbs stored as glycogen and most likely some water retention. We highly recommend that you stick to your current training and nutrition regimen because consistency is more important than instant gratification and quick fixes.
There are multiple ways to get rid of for example glycogen or water retention. For example, we both did a depletion workout to get rid of the glycogen. In that case, you focus more on the endurance aspect of the training instead of strength and hypertrophy. And I (Andries) took a hot bath to get rid of excess water weight. However, these are methods that you should only use if you are advanced if you can mentally handle it well and know that multiple other factors are in check.
In terms of nutrition, creating an intense deficit will cause massive fluctuation in your body weight and cause the infamous ‘Jo Jo’ effect. By ‘Jo Jo’ effect, I also mean that one day you can easily handle the deficit and the other day you struggle and eat more. Eventually, your total caloric intake will be balanced out, but without a deficit. If you’re not familiar with weighing yourself every day, counting calories or calorie cycling, then you should definitely not use this kind of compensating behaviour.
Also, you won’t be able to make progress as usual, because an aggressive deficit will also impair your training performance as well as recovery.
Eventually, you will get rid of the water weight anyway, you will use the extra glycogen during your training sessions and you will get rid of that extra stomach content. Don’t stress out too much, just stick to the original plan and after a week your weight will be back to baseline and you can continue making progress with your training and nutrition!
