Situational Overeating - Will It Cause You To Gain Weight?

With the holiday season just over, many of you are looking back thinking that you should now spend this week putting in extra time at the gym and watching your diet a little more closely.

You stepped on the scale - you saw the damage.

And now the price must be paid.

But, is this really accurate? Did you really gain weight?

Understanding Situational Overeating

When you have an incident of situational overeating, as in the case of a Thanksgiving meal, you likely took in a great deal more calories than you needed and thus you saw a weight gain.

What many people overlook however, is just how hard it really is to add a single pound of fat in one day.

Considering the fact you'd have to add 3500 calories to your daily maintenance calorie intake (which for most people is 1500-2500 per day), and you'd have to consume between 5000-6000 calories of food.

For you non-calorie counters out there, that is A LOT of food - more food than many people could theoretically eat.

Furthermore, when the body is faced with a period of high calorie eating, it actually will start to speed up the metabolic rate, trying to burn off some of these excess calories as heat, or turn the increase in carbohydrates over to the muscle glycogen stores, helping refill them if they are at all depleted.

Therefore, the weight gain you are truly seeing the day after a very large meal is more than likely due to water retention from eating so much salt or increased muscle glycogen storage from the carbs you had taken in.

So, don't stress too much if you found you gained weight after the holiday meal. Your body will be doing whatever it can to return you back to where it was earlier and you should be able to continue on with your fat loss program just fine.

It's when there is consistent overeating above maintenance that you really will experience big problems with fat loss.

.