I started two dietbets on 12/26-28 knowing what I was in for over the coming week. Running a nearly week long dance festival for >700 people could be a minefield of bad eating choices for some, or for me some years, but this year I treated it as a kickstart.
I was working 18 hour days for a week, on my feet the whole time. The first two days I never left the hotel that was the site of the festival and discovered that I had taken 25,000 steps each day, which my Fitbit claimed as 11 miles ... 11 miles just from the back and forth within 1/4 square mile!
I subsited on coffee and protein vitamin shakes as I was so worked up that I was afraid that anything I ate would upset my stomach. Friends kept trying to feed me, but I realized that food would just annoy my stomach and slow me down. Fight or flight and an adrenaline high had truly kicked in (and it is not like my body doesn't have enough resources to burn). While it might seem unhealthy, I believe that this is what we are actually built to do. We store fat so that in times of high stress our bodies have resources to use without wasting energy on digesting food. It wasn't a tiger chasing me, but keeping 700 people happy for 7 days can still do the trick.
So by the end of the week I was down over 10 pounds. I knew some of it would bounce back on when I went back to normal eating habits, but when I went for my first real meal I ordered two carne asada tacos and found I could only eat one. Yay for systemic reset!
It took me a week of sleeping 12 hours a day to bounce back, during which my only exercise was walking the dogs (and that veeerrrry slowly) but at the end of the sleeping (and being too tired to make anything to eat but soup) I am still down 6 pounds.
So today it was back to the gym for the first time since before the holidays trying to convert the kickstart into a sustainable program. I wouldn't want to do it that way everytime, but since I already had the crazy event to run I might as well capitalize on the stress and adreneline to help my body in the best way possible. And my body didn't let me down, it did what we evolved to do and used its stored resources to Fight or flight though the event.
And to make it all better, the event was a HUGE sucess and I am still riding the emotional high. Hopefully I will be able to keep the positive energy flowing and avoid some of the after event depression that settles in some years (it is a little like empty nest syndrome).