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Tired of stressing about holiday food choices and being told to "just control your portions"?

Learn how the engineering concept of Entropy reveals why fighting against holiday chaos usually backfires. Instead, discover how to build a robust system that can handle any amount of disorder while still making progress.

By understanding how entropy affects your fitness goals during Thanksgiving, you'll transform holiday nutrition from a source of anxiety into an opportunity for growth.

Main Takeaways:

• Why fighting disorder creates more chaos (backed by thermodynamics)

• How to build flexible boundaries that maintain progress without perfect control

• The power of quick system recovery vs restriction after holidays

• Why periodic entropy makes your fitness system more resilient

Why Fighting Holiday Diet Chaos Always Backfires (An Engineer's Guide)

The usual holiday nutrition advice makes one critical mistake: it assumes you can maintain perfect control. But as any engineer knows, entropy (disorder) always increases in any system. Instead of fighting this natural law, let's use it to build a more resilient approach to holiday eating.

Understanding System Entropy During Holidays

In thermodynamics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system. Your nutrition plan is a system. When you try to maintain rigid control during Thanksgiving - tracking every bite, avoiding all "bad" foods, bringing your food scale to dinner - you're fighting against entropy. And that fight requires massive energy input that eventually leads to system failure.

The Traditional Approach Falls Apart

Here's what typically happens when you try to maintain perfect control:

• Restriction before the holiday creates unstable conditions

• Rigid rules increase stress and reduce adherence

• Small deviations cascade into complete system breakdown

• Recovery requires extreme measures that further destabilize progress

Engineering a Better Holiday Strategy

Instead of fighting disorder, we need to design a system that expects and accommodates it. Think about how modern buildings handle earthquakes - they're designed with flexible components that absorb shock rather than rigid structures that shatter.

Building Flexible Boundaries

Your holiday nutrition system needs:

• Baseline stability (maintain normal eating patterns before the holiday)

• Core anchors (minimum standards that maintain progress)

• Quick recovery protocols (return to baseline without overcorrection)

• Focus on trend data over daily perfection

Key System Components

Pre-Holiday Stabilization

• Maintain consistent eating patterns

• Keep protein intake stable

• Stay hydrated and active

Holiday Implementation

• Set minimum viable standards

• Focus on protein and hydration

• Allow system flexibility

Post-Holiday Recovery

• Resume normal patterns quickly

• Avoid compensatory restriction

• Monitor weekly rather than daily metrics

Measuring System Success

Success isn't about maintaining perfect control on Thanksgiving. It's about:

1. System stability before the holiday

2. Flexible adaptation during events

3. Quick return to baseline afterward

4. Long-term trend maintenance

The Engineering Advantage

When you understand entropy, you stop seeing holidays as threats to your progress. They become opportunities to test and strengthen your system's resilience. Just like moderate stress makes muscles stronger, periodic controlled chaos can make your nutrition system more robust.

Building Your Holiday System

Start implementing this approach next week:

1. Maintain normal eating patterns through Wednesday

2. Set clear minimum standards for Thursday

3. Plan your Friday recovery strategy

4. Focus on weekly averages over daily perfection

Remember: A well-engineered system doesn't eliminate chaos - it adapts to it.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

As of this episode, thanksgiving is just one week away and I think the fitness industry is obsessed with giving really bad advice when it comes to the holidays, and it usually involves around tracking or avoiding or using moderation or some other very specific way to maintain perfect control during the holidays, which I think misses the point, because you're going to have chaos whether it's the holiday or not. That's life, and the question is how resilient you are against that. So today we're using an engineering lens to show you why fighting against this type of disorder is what usually backfires, and we're going to show you how to build a system strong enough to handle any amount of holiday chaos, which will then actually accelerate rather than derail your progress. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we are using thermodynamics to completely reframe how you think about Thanksgiving nutrition. What the heck am I talking about? Well, in engineering, entropy refers to the natural progression toward disorder in any system. But here's the thing, because well-designed systems can handle temporary spikes in entropy without falling apart, we're not talking about the overall entropy of the universe, where everything is just going to dissolve into nothingness. We're talking about day-to-day entropy, like a skyscraper swaying in high winds or your body maintaining temperature despite extreme weather, and we're going to apply this principle to your holiday nutrition approach. So if you're listening to this a week out from Thanksgiving when it comes out, or in the future leading up to any event, any holiday, any party in fact, where there's a little bit of extra chaos than normal from a food availability perspective, we're gonna talk about the strategy no rigid meal plans, no guilt trips, just a smart system designed to work with reality instead of fighting it.

Philip Pape: 2:10

And before we dive in, I just want to say I'm gathering some more questions for our upcoming Q&A episodes, so if you want to submit your question, you can either send a text message in the show notes or reach out to me on Instagram at witsandweights, or just say hello. You don't even have to ask a question. Just say hey, I love your podcast, or hey, you can do this better in your podcast. Whatever it is, I love to hear from people. So let's talk about what most people do during the holidays and why it fails.

Philip Pape: 2:38

They approach any holiday, say Thanksgiving, like it's a battle that has to be won, and I hear this a lot of times in the framing right. I have a vacation coming up, I have a holiday coming up, what do I do? How do I deal with it? And the premise is that you're trying to maintain some sort of control, and I'm all for being in control of your situation, but there's a level of control we're talking about here that is that's nearing perfection, right? The all or nothing mentality. Or even if it's not all or nothing, if, even if it's just hey, I have a plan and I want to keep sticking exactly to it. And so what do I do to do that? Okay, I need to make sure I'm tracking everything I eat, avoiding or including certain foods, stressing about the portions so that the calories don't go haywire, right? And if this sounds familiar to you, then I think that's the approach that is working against you.

Philip Pape: 3:29

It comes from a misunderstanding of how a system can work and why we use what we call physique engineering on this program. And here's where entropy comes in Entropy E-N-T-R-O-P-Y entropy. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system. How much chaos exists in the system? And the second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases over time. Always right. We fight against this natural tendency. It requires massive energy input. We're talking on the level of cold fusion, the level of stars, and eventually the system breaks down.

Philip Pape: 4:09

So now, this is just an analogy, of course, but think about how this plays out next Thursday, if you're listening to this before Thanksgiving, or just substitute any upcoming holiday or food event, a party, birthday party, heck. You start the day determined to track your food, maybe pre-log your meals, maybe front load your protein, maybe save up on some calories. And then Aunt Susan brings out her famous pecan pie. That wasn't in your plan, or maybe it was, but maybe not quite the amount that you ended up having. Your cousin makes a new stuffing recipe which, by the way, if you have Thanksgiving at my house, you are gonna be blown away, because we make something called the Pape Sausage Stuffing Very simple recipe, but it's full of sausage, it's not bready, it's dense, so good, and it has a lot of fat, it has a lot of calories. So you gotta, you know, kinda think about that if you're trying to think about things. But anyway, it's super delicious.

Philip Pape: 5:04

Someone tops off your wine glass when you're not looking. I mean, come on, it happens, you know, maybe throw a little whiskey in your eggnog. I'm not saying we have to imbibe on alcohol, but these things happen in the holidays, right? The more you try to maintain perfect order, the more chaos creeps in until finally the system fails. And you know what I'm talking about. You are the system. You either end up binge eating and feeling guilty or you become rigid and you can't really enjoy your time because you're trying to make it all work.

Philip Pape: 5:32

Do the macro Tetris, track all the things and this is coming from me, yes, the guy who says we should be tracking and measuring things Absolutely but there is a flexible way to do it. And this is where most podcasts coming out for Thanksgiving and I admit I am taking advantage of the attention to this holiday, but most podcasts on this topic will tell you you just need to buckle down and try harder with whatever their specific strategies are. Now, to be fair, some podcasts will say, hey, just completely enjoy yourself and don't worry about it, and in my opinion, that's probably the best kind of default strategy. If you had to pick one, because it is just one day and generally just one meal, okay, but being that we are engineers here and we know better, and I know you're gonna face situations like this quite frequently, not just Thanksgiving.

Philip Pape: 6:25

Instead of trying to eliminate entropy right, which is impossible, we just want to design a system that expects and accommodates disorder. So think about how a modern building handles earthquakes I was going to say hurricanes, but that's probably too close to home, given all the tragedy we've seen over the last year or so here. But earthquakes Engineers don't try to make buildings rigid, right, they build in flexibility. Have you ever seen a really tall building zoomed in, where they show it just slightly swaying in the wind? You might have even felt it. When you're up high in a building or on a bridge or something like that, the structure actually becomes stronger because it can adapt rather than fight against it. Right, it's not going to break against that force, and your personal nutrition system needs this same kind of intelligence when you design it. We build what's called robust stability. Your system can handle perturbations right, as my kids would have said years ago when we read the Fancy Nancy books that's a fancy word for disruptions without falling apart. That is what we're trying to do.

Philip Pape: 7:30

I talked to one of my clients on this podcast a long time ago and her name is Heather and she talked about actually being in a literal earthquake and her system holding up, her system of training, nutrition and whatnot. And it wasn't because of some obsessive level of tracking, it was because of a flexible level of routine, right, and those are very different concepts. So I'm going to give you four ways to implement this next week for Thanksgiving, and these would apply in general to really anything that comes up that is like that okay, birthday parties, holidays, vacations, anything going out to eat. And the first strategy is simply to plan for entropy. What do I mean? I actually don't want you to say to yourself okay, thanksgiving is Thursday, so I'm going to restrict my calories big time in the days leading up.

Philip Pape: 8:17

Now, I used to advise some form of this strategy. It's called calorie banking and I still think there is an opportunity to shift your calories around in a given week. But I much more prefer that you plan to do that regularly and weekly rather than do it as a last minute strategy, if that makes sense, because when you do that, it creates unstable conditions, which, ironically, amplifies the chaos. It creates kind of a pressure cooker and instead of maintaining your normal eating patterns leading up to the holiday, you're now forcing yourself into this very unstable eating pattern, which may even lead to some binging and way overconsuming on the holiday. Do you see what I mean? And so we don't want any anything in the way we do things to feel unstable or forced. We want to plan it in in a way that is is real to us. Okay Now, if that means that you know every, every weekend, you have a refeed and you increase to maintenance calories and on the weekdays you're in a dieting phase, that's perfectly fine if you plan it in that way consistently and then it becomes your routine.

Philip Pape: 9:26

But we don't want to add to the chaos by, like, cutting calories and going on a fast or not eating in the morning at all and then going crazy at Thanksgiving. It's just really because, think about it Now, you're just giving yourself three or four days of some level of misery. That takes away from the holiday as far as I'm concerned. So that's number one is just plan for entropy. Like entropy is going to exist, allow it in, allow it in, accept it. Okay, accept the entropy and don't try to fight against it.

Philip Pape: 9:55

Number two the second strategy I have out of the four strategies today, is to create flexible boundaries. This is the. This is the bedrock of flexible dieting that we talk about on the show. Whether we talk about minimums or ranges or or boundaries, constraints, whatever you want to call them. We want to have minimum standards that allow us to maintain progress no matter what's happening, no matter how chaos it is, chaotic it is, without requiring perfection, and for a lot of us that's something like hitting our protein targets right. Getting a minimum level of protein. Now, to get a minimum level of protein.

Philip Pape: 10:33

Heading into a holiday where there's a lot of food, it shouldn't be a problem, right, like it shouldn't be a problem to eat more than something. It's when we try to cut and restrict where the problems happen. So, hitting protein targets, getting in your morning walk right. If you like to walk, get in that walk on Thanksgiving. Get in it every day, right. Staying hydrated it's your anchors of order, that's what I'm going to say. Your anchors of order that help your system stay grounded, even when all these other variables fluctuate. And I'm sure you can come up with others, but again, we don't want things that feel unnatural to what we normally do. We wanna have minimum standards and ranges that would allow for us to be successful and hit them even when there's lots of chaos, which was number one, the chaos that we've allowed into our lives.

Philip Pape: 11:19

Number three is to focus on recovery, and what I mean by this is, if we're gonna use the engineering analogy just like a bridge or anything that has force on it applied to it returns to center after done swaying, or if you think of a rubber band, you stretch it, you let go, it comes back to its original shape If you have a clear strategy to get back to your baseline after the holiday, that's a good thing, right? Not by restricting, not by punishing, not by making up, but simply resuming your normal routine on Friday. Now, friday's Black Friday. That may be yet another reason to be a little bit off your routine, and that's okay too, but the goal is we are shifting, we are converging, we are gradually getting back to our baseline as soon as we can, and the quicker you can get there, the less impact the entropy will have. You'll see it in your rear view mirror. You'll move on. No big deal. It is just the noise in the signal.

Philip Pape: 12:15

And number four, the last strategy, is to measure what matters. Okay, and what do I mean by this? If you are the person who is tracking your food and you want to track your Thanksgiving dinner? I'm not going to tell you not to. I'm not going to tell you to track it. Okay, I'm going to say, when we track at all, we are thinking of things over time. We're thinking at weeklies and monthlies. So, because Thanksgiving or a Christmas party are usually a single day or a single meal, most celebrations are right. You're rarely feasting for days on end. Now, maybe if you go on that week-long cruise, it's a different story, in which case I wouldn't even worry about it. I would go to maintenance and just say enjoy yourself and then come back A single day of this entropy, or even if it's amplified entropy, it doesn't define your progress, right? Any more than that. One windy day determines a bridge's integrity, like if we're going to we're going to take this analogy to the extreme right your system works if you're trending in the right direction over time, regardless of this entropy that you've made room for. And so, when we summarize all of this, here's what the people are missing and what a lot of these podcasts are missing about entropy and order.

Philip Pape: 13:24

It's not about eliminating the chaos. It's about building robust systems that can absorb chaos and return to baseline right. Your body does this constantly with homeostasis. It regulates temperature, ph balance, whole bunch of other things. When you view Thanksgiving or any holiday this way, as a temporary increase in entropy that your well-designed system can handle, you stop seeing it as a threat to your progress. In fact, these periodic challenges listen to this these can make your system more resilient.

Philip Pape: 13:58

It's a form of stress that makes you stronger. It's just like moderate stress on your muscles when you lift make you stronger because you have foundational habits and now you're strengthening them over time, regardless of short-term chaos. And every one of these bits of chaos just teaches you a little bit more about yourself and gives you a little bit more resilience, because you come out of it the other end, back to your baseline, you're confident, you know what you're doing and you make progress over time. All right. So the holidays do not have to be a source of stress, at least in this context. There may be other reasons to stress you out having to do with family members or what have you but when it comes to your nutrition, your training, it doesn't have to be a deviation from your goals. It's entropy, it's chaos, it's a little bit off on that day, but it doesn't mean you as a person or with your system has deviated from your goals because you're working with it, you're not fighting against it, and then you could just enjoy the season. Think of next Thursday, think of Thanksgiving or any other holiday. And, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're not in the US, I just totally maybe lost you as an audience. I'm not sure, but think of it as a chance to test your system's resilience, not as a threat to your progress. All right, if you want to learn more about any of these kinds of concepts, follow the podcast, go check them out.

Philip Pape: 15:10

My Wednesday episodes usually get into the a little bit of a nerdy kind of engineering lens. My Mondays are deep dives. My Fridays are interviews. If you didn't like this episode, you'll like another. If you don't like any of them, let me know. Hopefully you love them and you'll follow, and you'll give a five-star rating on a review. If you took a moment to do that, maybe as a holiday gift to me, that would be awesome. I'd be very grateful. And that is it. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, sometimes the best way to maintain order is to embrace a little chaos. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.