Holiday meals are delicious, but they can also be metabolically challenging.

Fortunately, small, well-timed behaviors—post-meal movements, short bursts of activity throughout the day, and simple tweaks to the order in which you eat—can materially reduce post-meal glucose and help keep your energy, mood, and metabolism stable during the holiday season.

Today's newsletter is an evidence-forward, practical playbook on some simple changes I've discussed across my content (and that I've personally used) that have an outsized impact on your blood glucose levels and hopefully your long-term health. And they're things you can start today that have immediate benefits.

Post-meal walking

A simple post-meal walk might be the highest-leverage strategy for blunting a large glucose spike. 

Walking in the first 10–30 minutes after a meal consistently outperforms pre-meal exercise for reducing post-meal glucose excursions. Pre-meal movement is still great for overall insulin sensitivity and fitness, but the highest-yield window is right after you eat.

A 2023 meta-analysis of 8 randomized crossover studies found that post-meal walking, but not pre-meal walking, significantly reduced postprandial glucose levels in healthy participants and those with impaired glucose control. The key was starting exercise as soon after a meal as possible. The closer the walk was to the end of the meal, the larger the reduction in glucose.[1]

This is also the easiest (and potentially most social) strategy: Head out for a brisk walk 10–20 minutes with family and friends after finishing a large meal and walk for 15–30 minutes. If you can't leave the house, walk laps around the kitchen, up and down a hallway, or up and down the stairs (5–10 minutes of easy climbing is also excellent). And if a single 15–30 minute walk feels hard to fit in, break it into 3 x 5 minute walks in the first hour after eating. It seems to be nearly as beneficial as a single, longer walk.

Of course, any movement is better than none—if a pre-meal walk is the only thing that fits your day, it still helps your overall insulin sensitivity and energy. But if you have a choice, use your “movement budget” in the hour after the meal, not before it.

Exercise snacks

Big holiday meals are often accompanied by a lot of rest and relaxation. Prolonged sitting can disrupt endothelial function and impair insulin sensitivity, making blood glucose responses to meals worse. 

This is where breaking up prolonged sedentary time as you lounge around at holiday parties is beneficial… and there are many creative ways to do it.

Short, repeated vigorous movements (“exercise snacks” or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, aka VILPA) sprinkled across the day improve overall glucose clearance, often better than a single longer walk. That's likely due to the frequent, potent stimulation of GLUT4 transporters that enhances glucose uptake into muscles, especially when the movements are more intense or structured like exercise.

The literature is really strong here:

• In lab settings, breaking up sitting every 30 minutes with just 1.5–3 minutes of walking cuts post‑meal glucose by ~15–20%: 3-minute low-intensity walks reduce glucose by around 18% while 1.5-minute moderate-intensity walks cut glucose by ~17%.[2]

• In a lab trial where people did either 2‑minute walks or 15 chair‑stand "snacks" every 30 minutes, post‑lunch insulin exposure dropped by about 30% compared with just sitting, even though the meals were identical. Although glucose levels weren't affected, the total insulin load to handle the meal was less.[3]

• A 2025 meta‑analysis concluded that 2–5‑minute exercise snacks (including walking and resistance exercise) every 30 minutes throughout the day are a powerful, time‑efficient way to smooth out post‑meal glucose and insulin levels. More frequent (every 30 minutes) and brief (3 minutes or less) exercise snacks were more effective than longer but less frequent snacks.[4]

My preferred exercise snack is body weight squats. I do them for 30 seconds several times during the day. Not only is it a great way to manage glucose, but it also wakes up your brain!

Food ordering

The order and composition of what you eat can blunt the rise in blood glucose. 

Start with protein, vegetables, and fat/fiber-rich foods, and delay the highest-glycemic items like starches and sweets until after you’ve eaten the lower-glycemic components. 

Put simply: have protein and veggies 10–15 minutes before higher-glycemic foods.

Multiple trials, including a 2025 continuous glucose monitoring study in healthy adults and crossover trials in type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, show that eating vegetables and protein first and starches last can reduce post‑meal glucose peaks by ~40–50% and substantially lower overall postprandial glucose exposure, even when the meal itself is identical.[5][6]

Fiber is your friend here. It modulates absorption kinetics in the digestive system such that beginning a meal with fiber-rich items slows glucose appearance. Even if you don't eat foods in a specific order, adding fiber to whatever you're eating will significantly slow glucose appearance and postprandial glucose spikes. It's why I add it to all of my smoothies (in addition to the benefits for gut health).

Final thoughts

This wasn't an attempt to make your holiday meals any less enjoyable. 

Eating food with friends and family is often an incredible source of joy and bonding for many people. And if any of these strategies make holiday gatherings more stressful, by all means don't use them. It's always important to remember that a few days of eating more and moving a bit less won't derail your fitness or health goals.

However, I think most of these tiny habits can be implemented without much hassle (or without anyone really noticing). They are low-investment but high-return.

Many people, including myself, feel good when they can "indulge" a bit at the holidays while also knowing they're doing something small to stay healthy. And given that managing blood glucose plays such a key role in our acute mood and energy levels as well as our long-term health, I think it's something valuable to protect and control when we can. That's what these three strategies are all about.

So I hope you can pull one or two of these glucose-control strategies to test and use at your next holiday gathering or during your normal day-to-day routine. They're useful anywhere and everywhere. And backed by strong science and rooted in biology.

You'll be happier having done them—and likely healthier too.

Warm regards

— Rhonda and the FoundMyFitness team