Fast before Thanksgiving binge bad idea?

Enjoy your holiday meal, plan for good choices, don't eat yourself sick, and get back on plan the next day.

Prolonged fasting then overeating will just make you miserable both before and during the holiday. (And probably make your bf miserable as well.)

"Binge" is never a good idea. Fasting is a subject of much debate, I won't comment here.

It may be too late for this Thanksgiving but plan ahead for the next feasting day, and try not to have a ton of leftovers, if you cannot resist them. There will always be feast days in your future life (well, I would hope so) so try to learn how to deal with them.

Eating a little less in the run-up to say, Christmas Day, or a birthday, is a good plan, followed by getting back on track to normal eating the next day. Make sensible choices, give away left-overs or bin them. You are not a dustbin, treat yourself well.

I wouldn't do that. I especially wouldn't have done it during weight loss: On reduced calories, it's hard enough to get good overall nutrition and keep energy level up (so NEAT and exercise performance stay high) . . . without adding in long fasts.

I admit my bias: I don't personally like fasts because I'm a hedonist. But I also don't think they're universally a great weight loss or health strategy, in objective terms.

During weight loss, I handled holidays or other special planned eating-more occasions this way:

• Maybe eat a small bit less each of a few days beforehand, maybe 100-150 calories under goal, at most.
• Get in my regular workouts, and plan so that the holiday and its prep had minimum impact on that.
• Go with minimal eating before the holiday meal, such as a very light breakfast. Ditto for after, if the holiday meal was mid-day.
• Be reasonable at the holiday meal: Eat some of every food that was delicious, keep it to one plate, one dessert, and enjoy/savor every bit of it. Skip the meh stuff, unless I needed to eat a few bites to honestly compliment Aunt Pearl on her casserole or something.
• Log it by estimating, but don't freak out when it's over goal. It's just data. Data doesn't have emotions. 😉
• Go back to my regular healthy routine immediately after.
• If I was less hungry the day(s) after, eat a little under calorie goal accordingly, but not deprivation level. (Don't want to try to "make up for it" and merely set up a future round of deprivation-triggered over-eating.)
• Expect a big scale jump the next day, and maybe being up some for several days to a couple of weeks. It's not mostly fat regain, it's water retention and more waste than usual in the digestive tract, NBD.

To me, the big lesson available here is to find and practice the habits that will facilitate staying at a healthy weight long term. That - not just weight loss - is the major goal or mission. "Lose weight fast" is a trap, and IMO a bad idea for many reasons. There will be many holidays in the future. Learn how to handle them and be happy at the same time.

These days, now getting into year 10 of routinely maintaining a healthy weight (after about 30 pre-loss years of overweight/obesity), I've even relaxed a bit more than the above suggests. I've learned that I can be pretty indulgent on a holiDAY meal. As long as I just get back to my normal routine, don't let it become a holiMONTHs lifestyle, everything will be fine.

The scale will be up for a couple of weeks, yeah. (If I weren't menopausal, hormonal weirdness might make it a bit longer.) It's not a big deal. As long as the majority of my days are what I need them to be - as is my routine autopilot habit at this point - everything will be fine longer term. I've proven that many times so far to my own satisfaction. (It took a few repeats to reach that level of calm, TBH. 😆)

You will need to determine what's the best strategy for you, personally. That may be fasting, or some other approach different from what other people do. Personalization is key.

However, I'd encourage you to think about how to use this holiday as an experiment, a learning experience, about what's going to work for you as a long-term, permanent approach to holiday eating. No matter what you choose, take a dispassionate look at it later, assess the pros and cons, decide how this did/didn't work for you, and adjust your plan for next time accordingly.

Best wishes, and happy Thanksgiving!

Re workouts on Thanksgiving - I love my nearby SoulCycle turkey burns - I do an indoor cycle and then dinner later.. kudos on your holiday workout!

re fasting- if you are going to workout on Tday - I wouldn’t fast too much. Eating lighter maybe the way to go.

It’s personally refreshing to read about someone not wanting to overindulge on a holiday.

Enjoy! 😉

I want to change focus slightly by looking at a couple phrases from the OP:

• "I don't want to make the mistake of thwarting my efforts by fasting and then feasting and it backfiring by eating so much after a fast as if my body will hold onto the excess a bit easier after a fast."
• "I try to do my really long walks on my 24 hours fasts right before it's time to break the fast to get maximum fat burn."

Whether there's some scientific merit to these ideas is debatable, but even those who believe they are true will likely admit the impact is minor. It's like talking about the magic "2-hr protein window" to maximize your body's intake of nutrients following a weightlifting workout. Could there be some degree of actual benefit? Sure. Is it likely going to mean the difference between success and failure? Absolutely not.

Professionals doing fitness for a living, whether athletes or photo targets or actors, can debate about the utility of magic windows to avoid or indulge. But for the 99.99% of the rest of us, it's our actions during our lives which make the true impact, whether we are over or under calories over the course of several weeks, not on a single day or doing something different once after a prolonged period of something else.

Your body won't magically transform a single large meal into a pound of body fat, regardless whether you fast before, exercise before, or do nothing of the sort. Your body won't magically burn an extra pound of fat because you exercise at the end of the day instead of at the beginning (or vice versa).