It’s everyone’s favourite time of the year when people finally have an excuse to role-play their superheroes and dress as revealing as their heart’s content!
Halloween has always been a season of festivities and parties as autumn comes to an end and we have much bounty to celebrate for from the late harvests.
Now, I’m not here to tell you not to go out and enjoy yourselves on this most debauchery time of the year, but if you do and you are concerned whether your liver can handle all the excess sweets, sugary drinks, and booze, then read below for 3 tips on how to prepare yourself for the onslaught!
Tip #1: Keep up with your exercise workouts
This is probably the best advice you can take to prepare for a binge night. Having a consistent and regular exercise routine is always the best strategy for lifelong health. The point to note here, is we are NOT doing a workout to burn off the extra calories after a night of bingeing. That paradigm is not effective. Rather, by keeping up with your exercise routine and hopefully doing strength training, not only will you be keeping your body fit and sexy for whatever costume you decide to go with, but working out drastically improves your insulin sensitivity.
I’ll write another blog on the technical details of insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance, but for now, know that there are tons of research now that links high insulin levels with modern day lifestyle diseases. And the biggest culprit of high insulin levels is a high refined carbohydrate diet – in other words, sugar.
By doing strength training, you will have more muscle which increases your insulin sensitivity (good thing!). The opposite is also true. The less muscle you have, the more insulin resistant you are which means all the sugars you eat, will have nowhere else to go, but your fat cells!
And muscle takes time and handwork to build. So best to keep up with a workout routine that continually focuses on building muscle!
Tip #2 – Do a HIIT workout right before going out to party
I know I just wrote above that doing a workout to burn off calories is not effective, but what I’m suggesting here is not about ‘calories in v.s. calories out’ type of argument (which is flawed) but rather the focus is on insulin sensitivity again.
When you do a HIIT workout, and assuming you push yourself to a very high level and not just cruise through the workout, then you’re going to be aggressively cleaving a lot of glycogen from your muscles and liver. In other words, you will burn up any glucose you have stored from the sugars you’ve consumed. This allows for more sugars to be stored again in your muscle cells and when you go out to party, the sugars will have a buffer before they get converted to fat.
Tip #3 – Drink A Lot Of Water
Not only will it keep your stomach a little more full so you don’t overeat and drink as much, but at least when you do, you won’t be dehydrated. Water will help with hangovers, digestion and loss of water from dancing – and it’s a cheap and easy solution!
There you have it – it’s not rocket science, but it will definitely help you if you remember these points as we head into he Halloween party weekend!
Happy Halloween! MWUAHAHAHAHAHA! （evil vampire laugh)