Know Your Physio

HOLIDAY TIPS: How to Prevent Weight Gain Without Dieting, Be More Present, and Conduct a “Past Year Review”

• Andrés Preschel • Episode 150

Share episode

The holidays are here, and while they are meant to be a time of joy and connection, they often bring along digital distraction, fear of overeating, and anxiety about the impending New Year.

In this short and sweet episode, Andrés Preschel breaks down the three most important themes for navigating the holiday season intentionally. You’ll learn how to optimize your physiology to enjoy family meals without the guilt, how to create a digital barrier to ensure you are truly present with your loved ones, and exactly how to execute a "Past Year Review" to set yourself up for massive success in the year ahead.

Discover your science, optimize your life, and enjoy your holidays.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

1. The Gift of Presence (Digital Detox Strategies)

  • Why you should delete social media for the last week of the year (less than 2% of your life!).
  • How to use "intervention" tools to break the dopamine loop and stop doom-scrolling.
  • Tools mentioned: The One Sec app and Shift technology.

2. Preventing Holiday Weight Gain (Without Dieting)

  • How to enjoy potlucks and home-cooked meals without "dieting" or counting calories.
  • The Pre-Meal Protein Primer: Consuming 20-30g of lean protein (Greek yogurt, whey, lean beef) 30–60 minutes before a meal to suppress Ghrelin and boost GLP-1 (satiety).
  • Fiber & Bitters: Why eating handfuls of dark leafy greens (arugula, spinach) before your meal slows gastric emptying and reduces glucose spikes.
  • Food Sequencing: The correct order to eat your food to manage insulin response (Fiber/Protein first, Carbs last).
  • The Postprandial Stroll: How a 10–15 minute walk after dinner pulls glucose into the muscles without insulin.

3. The "Past Year Review" (Strategic Planning)

  • Why New Year's Resolutions often fail and what to do instead.
  • A step-by-step guide to Tim Ferriss’s Past Year Review exercise.
  • How to use the 80/20 rule (Pareto's Law) to identify the people and activities that bring you peak joy—and how to schedule them immediately.
  • Creating a "Not-To-Do" list to eliminate the negative triggers from your life.

🎯 Apply for Health Optimization Coaching
🔗 https://coaching.knowyourphysio.org/video1729359042808

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Andrés:

Support the show

Speaker: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Know Your Physio podcast. I'm your host, Andrés Preschel, physiologist, neuroscientist and evidence based health coach, helping you discover your science, optimize your life. And in today's episode, I want to cover the three most important themes for the holidays, in my opinion, which are being present with your loved ones, preventing unwanted weight gain, and reflecting on the past year and preparing for the new year intentionally and strategically. So I'll keep this episode short and sweet so you can go back to spending time with your loved ones. The first tip here is listen, this is a tough one, but it goes a long way. Deleting all of your social media. Yes, deleting all your social media. No social media for one week. It's just one week out of the entire year. That's less than two percent of your entire year. I guarantee it's going to go a long way. You're not going to miss out. It doesn't matter what your friends are doing, it doesn't matter what you post on your story, it doesn't matter what you show people. Believe me, the most important thing you can do the last week of the year. Think about symbolic. This is to delete social media so you can be present, make memories and actually spend time with your loved ones rather than being on your phone around them. Okay, something else that you can do here is you can download a series of apps that help limit phone use or screen time. These apps include the one app which I have set up on my phone. It's great because it has a I mean, a few different settings and features, but I like to use the interventions for Instagram, for example. So every time I go on the app, there's like a five to fifteen second intervention. For example, I have to follow a dot on my screen with my finger or I have to. I'm prompted to do like a four, seven, eight breath. Basically it it it the intervention is there to help you pause to acknowledge what you're doing so that you're going on the app consciously, not unconsciously, which I think we're all guilty of. And to create a a certain barrier of entry. And as your brain learns to associate this unconscious habit with a barrier of entry, you know an inconvenience. You'll be less motivated to go on Instagram for that quick dopamine. It works like a charm. You can also set this up to have blocks in the beginning or the end of the day. Um, I have it on a Shabbat block, so every Friday to Saturday evening for twenty four hours I can't use any apps. Um, aside from the essentials, like, you know, my messenger, uh, my maps, my clock, etc.. Um, another great software that you can use if you want to be even more strict is called Shift the shift app. And you have to actually look this up on Google or go to their website And you download your software to your Mac or Windows, you plug in your phone and there's a series of steps you have to take so that you can't, like, delete an app like one, for example, to bypass it and, you know, doom scroll. Um, I did find a feature, I think it's a beta feature on the one app where you can actually delete the app, and it works for me, so I didn't have to end up using the shift technology. Um, and I've been very happy with one second. General. Uh, there's a like I said, there's so many features. These are the ones that work for me. And oh, and there's also a really sweet one where there's like reminders once you're actually scrolling, like, once you get past the intervention and you're within the time frame that you're allowing for social media abuse, let's say, um, it'll have reminders every like, you know, three, five, fifteen, ten, fifteen minutes. It'll remind you, hey, you know, you've spent X number of minutes on this app, are you? You know, are you sure you want to continue using it? Um, that's a great little feature as well. Okay. Moving forward, preventing unwanted weight gain without feeling like you're dieting. I just made a great deal about this on Instagram. Kept it very short and sweet. But I want to elaborate a little further on this podcast. So there is a way to prevent overeating without actually changing what you're eating during the holidays. Like who wants to diet during the holidays? That's depressing. You want to enjoy your family's home cooked meals or, you know, your friends, uh uh uh, potlucks, right? You want to just enjoy great food guilt free with your loved ones, right? There's a couple of tips where you can still get away with doing that without overeating these delicious foods and therefore gaining weight. So what you want to do is you want to experiment with a pre meal Pre-meal protein primer. So thirty to sixty minutes before you have your holiday meal, have about twenty to thirty plus grams of protein. And ideally, you know, lean protein. So this could be something like, um, some cottage cheese or Greek yogurt, or maybe a protein shake or some lean beef or turkey or chicken. Um, maybe you could do some egg whites, maybe a couple hard boiled eggs, which are not the leanest, but, you know, you get the idea. And so you have this before your meal. And what this is going to do is it's going to suppress ghrelin, which is your principal hunger hormone. It's going to increase GLP one and pyy, uh, which are satiety hormones. And you're also going to have the chance to blunt the glucose spike from the holiday meal itself before it even happens. So you're going to show up hungry to your meal, but not ravenous, and you're going to help stabilize blood glucose, which prevents overeating later in the day. Another great tip here is adding fiber and bitters before you sit down so you know before you. And you can do this with the protein, by the way, but ideally at some point before you eat. It can be as little as, you know, 30s before eating or, uh, thirty to sixty minutes before the meal with the protein. You want to add one or two handfuls of dark leafy greens like arugula, spinach, or kale, maybe a couple glasses of water in before the meal because the fiber is going to slow gastric emptying. So the actual digestion of food like carbohydrates, therefore lowering the demand on the pancreas to create insulin and lowering that postprandial glucose response, preventing overeating later and keeping you satiated throughout the day. The bitters in these dark, leafy greens are going to stimulate digestive secretion, so this is going to help reduce bloating. Um, Um, you know, also improve satiety and, uh, give you better portion control. Um, I mean, let's keep it simple. What I do is I'll just have two handfuls of arugula and just stuff them down before I eat. It's great. Um, and then, uh, you want to eat in a certain order. So once you actually have the holiday meal in front of you, believe it or not, the order of the, uh, macros, if you will, the food items, um, has a meaningful impact on the post-meal glucose and insulin response. It's gonna, uh, support the satiety signal and reduce rebound hunger later in the day. So you want to have the fiber and protein first, carbohydrates last. It's that simple. So let's say you have, I don't know, call it like, um, some rice. You have some roast chicken, um, maybe some carrots, some dark leafy greens. I mean, look, in this case, you would get, you know, you'd have the carrots and the leafy greens first, then you'd have the chicken and the rice last. Um, that's the that's the main idea here. So at the end of the day, if you combine these strategies, you're really you're not eating less food. You're just eating strategically and preventing overeating. So you know you're not going to be losing weight. That's not that's not the most likely scenario is not going to be losing weight. But you're going to prevent overeating the delicious food in front of you so that you're not feeling like a fat blob. January first, and regretting the lovely time you had with your family. Um, after you have that meal, by the way, you want to go on a postprandial stroll? If you've been following me for a while, you know exactly what this means. This means walking after you eat. So go for a ten or fifteen minute walk. And what's going to happen is with the muscle contraction in your legs, you're gonna pull glucose out of the blood without insulin, and it's gonna flatten the postprandial glucose curve and reduce fat storage and next meal craving. So it's awesome. All right. Moving to our third category, which is the reflection on the past year and strategic and intentional, uh, preparation for the following year. I'm going to suggest doing Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Workweek for Our Body, for our chef, etc., uh, world leading podcast host and investor and brilliant, brilliant guy that I admire a lot. Tim Ferriss past year review. All right, so the past year review is really simple. It takes call it fifteen to forty five minutes, could be a little less or a little more depending on who you are. And it goes like this. You grab a notepad or a piece of paper and you create two columns. So you draw a line through the center of the page, and at the top left you write out positive in all caps. And on the right, negative. So now you want to go through your calendar from last year looking at every week. In my case this is Google Calendar. And just to quickly rabbit hole for a second. Great advice for folks that have trouble with time management and folks like me. I've got ADHD and this has done wonders for me in my life. Aside from the professional commitments that you probably are already putting on a calendar, add in the personal commitments. So, for example, I've got my workouts scheduled in my calendar, I've got my meals scheduled in my calendar. I even have scheduled free time where I can do whatever I want guilt free in my calendar. And what this does is it's an added layer of commitment. When you actually go out of your way and put this in there. I mean, there's just so much neuroscience to back this up. You would not believe it. When you go out of your way and deliberately add this in. You are committing to that habit, and it allows you to visualize how you're spending your time throughout the week ahead of time, and prepare for the week ahead without having to figure it out as you go. So I typically do this. I typically fill out my calendar every Sunday. I spend maybe thirty minutes doing this, and I've got all the meals, all the workouts laid out. Honestly, for a lot of them, they're just weekly recurring events on my Google calendar. And, uh, yeah, I plan the rest of my life around that, you know? And it's it's a great way to find that balance and maintain it as you go. So anyway, I've got everything on my calendar, so this exercise is pretty easy and straightforward for me. If you don't have everything on your calendar, I mean, obviously you can go by memory. Uh, you can go by your, uh, your, your photos, your, your camera roll. And this will help you with the next step, which is for each week of the past year, you want to jot down on your pad or piece of paper the people or activities or commitments, people, activities, commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month and put them in their respective columns. Once you've gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask what twenty percent of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks. So we'll pause here for a second, but I'll repeat the last step before you continue. Jot down the people, activities, or commitments that trigger the peak positive or negative emotions. Put them in their respective columns. You can pause here. Once you've gone through the past year. Look at the notepad list and ask what twenty percent of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks. So we're applying Pareto's law. Typically I have about twenty to forty items on the positive and maybe ten to twenty on the negative. And my friends family clients typically have about the same. But you do you you might have the opposite. It's just the reality for some people. And that's perfectly fine. All right, next step. And this is the easiest one. But also the it's the it's the funnest one. Based on these answers. Take your positive leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now. Book things with friends and prepay for activities, events, commitments that you know work. It's not real until it's in the calendar. That's step one. Step two is to take your negative leaders and put not to do list at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of the new year. These are the people and things that you know make you miserable. So don't put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO or other nonsense. And that's it. If you try it, let me know how it goes. And just remember, it's not enough to remove the negative that simply creates a void. Get the positive things on the calendar ASAP, lest they get crowded out by the bullshit and noise that otherwise fill your days. Good luck and Godspeed. Directly from Tim Ferriss. So that's my advice to help you be as present as possible. Prevent unwanted weight gain while still enjoying the delicious holiday food that you'll, uh, have access to at home, wherever home might be for you, and reflecting this past year in a meaningful way. And prepare for the year ahead. Let me know what you guys think. If you have any more suggestions, let me know and I'll add them to our newsletter for the month of January. Give you a sweet little shout out. All right guys, thanks and happy holidays. Happy New year. We'll talk soon.