4 tips to staying healthy and fit over the Christmas holidays

There is also an effect that alcohol has on how you digest your food. Alcohol is a separate energy source to usual food containing protein, carbs and fats, and it contains its own calories. As you drink alcohol, your body senses it in your system and turns it into your primary energy source. As you drink, you burn the alcohol as fuel. Doesn’t sound too bad, until you eat hot chips at the end of the night and all the now unnecessary calories from fat and carbs are stored as body fat. I’m not saying it’s good to eat anyway, but at least you’d usually burn some of it off as you eat it.

It could make a big difference in how you look and feel come the New Year. Stay hydrated!

2. Keep Training

Training increases your daily calorie expenditure, meaning that more of the calories you eat over Christmas will simply be burnt off. If you stay in an energy burning state you’ll get away with eating more of the wrong things, having a massive impact on how you’ll look come January. You can of course tone it down in and around the key festive days, but try to maintain your fitness and muscle structure over the season by getting to a gym when you can (and maybe doing nothing anyway).

You can leave it to have to pick up the pieces in January, or maintain your health and fitness by attending maybe 1 or 2 fitness classes a week.

3. Train like you Eat

The one thing that can be said about Christmas feasts are that they can support the growth of muscle. You should know by now that muscle is the main variable in your metabolism, so adding some muscle in December will really help you stay lean and increase your fat loss efforts significantly come January.

I wouldn’t expect everyone to take it to this extreme, but some gyms actually allow you to train on Christmas Day and offer 24-hour access during this time!

By training muscles hard and burning all their stored carbohydrates you can eat loads of chicken, turkey, ham and stuffing guilt free. The proteins contained in the meats are helping regrow the muscle fibres you've just trained. The high GI carbs in the potatoes and stuffing etc are used to replenish my lost glycogen stores, instead of hanging around the body waiting to be turned into fat. It takes any guilt out of feasting, and actually serves a purpose. It’s a Christmas Miracle.

For more tips and ideas to keep you fit this Christmas, please contact the expert contributor for this article.