TLDR: Gird for the Bird

Too Long Dad Recap

The Holidays are here. For most of us, these days off will be almost the same as all the other days since March, just with fewer Zoom meetings (but maybe a few more zoom family calls) and colder weather.

Below are my top 5 for surviving Thanksgiving (and Christmas and Easter) without too much impact to your physique.  Like most fitness and nutrition advice, the tips fall under the heading of “no shit” or Captain Obvious.  But execution is where folks fail, so stay strong.

1. Skip Breakfast – Treat Thanksgiving like any planned cheat day.  Maybe eat less the day before.  Either skip breakfast or stick to lean protein in the morning.  You don’t have to be extreme and fast 24 hours ahead of time (which I might do), but adjust before the big day and consider skipping that first meal.
2. Avoid Empty Calories – Try to avoid swallowing several rolls slathered in butter.  Focus on the Turkey, Ham or whatever.  This may seem to run counter to the tip below where I say to relax and let yourself go, but if you’re into health and fitness, you know how to eat to get the most bang for your buck, even if you are being relaxed. 
3. Take Your Time – Don’t load up that first plate.  Make yourself have to get up off your ass and reload the plate each time, or at least reach across the table.  Try to pace yourself, there’s no rush whatsoever.
4. Double your activity level – Be that guy who is out there running on Thanksgiving morning, even if it draws the ire of lazier folks as they sit on their asses.  It doesn’t have to be a long cardio session.  It could be anything that accumulates steps (as long as it’s not burpees) including: 
   • Driveway basketball
   • Long walk around the neighborhood
   • Wide receiver routes in the backyard
   • Walking lunges down the street
   • Circuit of pushups, pull-ups, squats, sit-ups
   • Heavy garage gym leg session
5. Relax – I’m probably among the top 1% most neurotic when it comes to tracking food intake.  But Thanksgiving is a food-based holiday, and if you feel like enjoying a big family meal with your family, try to tone down the food focus for the day. 
   • I’ve heard it said that what matters is what you do January to November, not what you do in the holidays.  To an extent that makes sense, but you can certainly blow up all your progress if you just let yourself go completely, because “Holidays”.  But for a half day feast on Thanksgiving, don’t sweat it.

Bonus Tip: Be Tolerant – Try to maintain your cool when others give you shit about your food focus or fitness focus.  Try to be tolerant when folks talk about how great Peloton has been for a friend of theirs, or how great the keto diet worked for them.  It’s fine if they don’t understand how the law of thermodynamics works or that calories matter more than whether something is organic or not.

I made a video just before Thanksgiving last year where I discussed some of the issues that you likely encounter during the holidays when you are around folks who aren’t familiar with how seriously you take food and fitness.  Check out the video below.

Things I Watched This Week

I spent quite a bit of time reviewing footage and editing my latest YouTube video and prepping for the one that drops next week. Between that and the Crown on Netflix, there wasn’t much time left for other fitness or food related viewing.

This morning I posted a video about the Anniversary celebration I came up with.

I did re-watch the video Ethan Harold made where he goes through his Anabolic Apple Pie Recipe. My older son who tends to share my cheesecakes and pumpkin pies is eager for me to make this apple pie recipe, so I’ll give it a shot this week. Let me know if you try it, link is here.

Things I Ate This Week

• I baked a cheesecake and a pumpkin pie on Sunday, because I had some extra time and all the ingredients, I also made some protein muffins that I enjoyed in the car while driving my kids around to various things this weekend.
  • Recipes for those were all from Remington James Fitness, but I wrote about the cheesecake recipe here.
• Friday I did a food challenge where I ate only protein bars for the whole day, with the twist being that my kids chose the bars and were looking for the ones I would not enjoy eating.
  • Ended up eating 12 bars for 2,655 calories total and had a ton of fun doing it, video will be up next Sunday.

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Other than the protein bar challenge, I was pretty good about hitting the calorie target early in the week. The results showed up on the scale. Just a few really adherent days early in the week were good enough for a final whoosh lower in bodyweight to sub 160lbs.

I hit sub-160lbs for 3 different weigh-ins this week. I think I’m done being in a deficit at this point. Focus from here is to re-establish my maintenance calorie level and build from there.

Recipes Not Required

I talk about these fun recipes I’ve gotten into lately. But eating well and getting lean doesn’t require fancy recipes. Maybe I’ll put together a post and video with tips for eating well without having to make any kind of crazy recipe.

If you can stand eating the same plain foods daily, which I can in normal times, then you can hit your target calories and feel full while losing weight.

• One of the easiest, but not the cheapest ways to get a bunch of lean protein is to get a family pack of skinless chicken breasts, put them on a big tray and cook them at 350 until done. 
  • You eat a couple of those a day, with some lemon pepper and mustard and it doesn’t get much easier or leaner than that.
• Other easy things if you can stand the blandness are boiled eggs, nonfat Greek yogurt, baby spinach that you can throw vinegar into and eat out of the bag, quick oats with protein powder, overnight oats with water and protein powder, low calorie wraps with egg whites and fat free cheese.

Things I Lifted This Week

Another round of high rep sets of squats, deadlifts, overhead press, bench press and pull downs, spread across 5 days of training in the garage. I am feeling great about it, enjoying the volume and the pumps.

• Push, pull, legs, push, legs is the basic split. Deadlifts and squats two days a week, with one of those days being an accessory movement.

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Its Sprints Again

As part of the Protein Bar Challenge video, I did a workout that was cobbled together from many recollections from folks on Twitter of workouts that were forced on them by a coach or drill sergeant as punishment. The workout included:

• Max time wall sit (I got 2:30)
• Lap around the field
• 20 hill sprints, no rest other than the jog down
• Lap around the field
• Bear crawl across the field and back
• Hold feet off the ground for max time (I got 2:00)
• Max time jumping jacks

The workout wasn’t too bad, and I’m ready to get back into doing a few sprint workouts every week. Who doesn’t want to look like a sprinter?

Finally, I hit more than 15,000 steps, 400 walking lunges daily. Also, added in some cardio treadmill sessions.

Dad Report: Dad vs. Poker Brat

No real insightful or inciting dad stories this week, so I’ll share a favorite pre-dad memory.

Thanksgiving is a time for family gathering. But one of my fondest Thanksgiving memories happened in 2003 when I played poker with World Series of Poker Champion Phil Helmuth. 

I was studying abroad for a semester at Oxford in the Fall of my senior year of college. At the time, poker was a passion of mine. I was never very good. But I was reading books like Positively Fifth Street, books about Jack Binion and the Horseshoe, history of World Series of Poker books, etc. I played with my friends all the time in the summers and holiday breaks from school. I had played at the Horseshoe in Vegas, at Foxwoods and other casinos.

So when I got to Oxford, there was club day where all the campus clubs had booths recruiting members. I joined the Rugby club team and the poker club. The poker club hosted a weekly cash game at one of the colleges at Oxford. The week of Thanksgiving, world famous poker champion Phil Hellmuth came to speak at the Oxford Union.

The poker club invited Phil to the weekly game. He showed up to the game. There were only two tables going that night, so a total of like 14 players. Phil joined the game. He wanted everyone to have a chance to play against him, so we set up the tables so he could play at both tables at the same time.

Pics or It Didn’t Happen

Like I said, I’m not a very good poker player. So, unlike the experts, I don’t have a photographic memory of all the hands I ever played. I have no recollection of any of the individual hands or if anyone took a huge pot off of him. I just remember it being pretty magical to play with someone I’d seen so often on TV and in clips of his big wins.

He signed a dollar bill of mine, which I will try to find. I took a picture with him, but that’s buried on some hard drive that’s lost or corrupted at this point. But I have the memory and the story, which is going to have to be enough!