Build Your Winter Momentum Now
Holy crap, it’s August.
My clients are already counting the days until their kids go back to school. My summer nights are ending a little earlier. The itch for sweater weather and college football is getting stronger.
I love this time of year.
Soon, Iowa will put on its annual show: cooler mornings, changing leaves, football Saturdays, warm food, holidays, and the brief stretch when walking outside doesn’t feel like entering either a sauna or a meat freezer.
Unfortunately, all that beauty can hide what the next several months tend to do to our health routines.
Sleep gets weird.
Movement drops.
Food gets more complicated.
Then January arrives and people act shocked, as if winter broke into the house and rearranged everything while they were asleep.
It didn’t. Winter sent a save-the-date months ago.
We’re About to Lose Six Hours of Daylight
In Des Moines, the longest day of 2026 gave us about 15 hours and 12 minutes of daylight. The shortest will give us roughly 9 hours and 9 minutes.
That is a loss of just over six hours.
The clock on the wall will keep demanding the same workday. School will still start when school starts. Clients, meetings, practices, deadlines, and grocery runs will remain stubbornly attached to human schedules.
Our biology is more interested in the sun.
Light is one of the strongest signals controlling our circadian rhythms. It helps regulate when we feel alert, when melatonin rises, when sleep becomes easier, and when our bodies expect us to be awake.
Modern life allows us to overpower some of those signals with indoor lighting, alarms, caffeine, and glowing rectangles held six inches from our faces. But overpowering a signal isn’t the same as eliminating it.
Research comparing sleep timing across seasons and societies suggests that human sleep remains responsive to changing light-dark cycles, especially around winter sunrise. Industrial societies, meanwhile, stay largely chained to clock time throughout the year.
That creates friction.
Your body is responding to a changing environment while your calendar pretends nothing happened.
Add the end of daylight-saving time, darker commutes, holiday travel, late football games, alcohol, kids’ breaks, and a work schedule chopped into pieces by midweek holidays, and sleep can become unstable quickly.
You may stay up later because the evening is social. You may struggle to wake because it’s dark. You may get less morning light, more artificial light at night, and less consistency overall.
Then poor sleep starts leaning on everything else.
You’re hungrier. You’re less interested in cooking. Exercise requires more negotiation. A couch, blanket, and television suddenly make an airtight closing argument.
Movement Loses Its Free Assistance
Summer gives us movement without always announcing it as exercise.
We mow. Walk the dogs. Go to the park. Attend outdoor events. Work in the yard. Take longer evening walks because the sun is still out and the air doesn’t hurt our faces.
As daylight and temperature fall, many of those little bouts disappear.
This matters because total movement isn’t limited to formal workouts. It also includes walking through the neighborhood, standing in the yard, wandering around an event, doing outdoor chores, and all the other unremarkable activities that never earn a gym selfie.
A systematic review involving 26 studies and approximately 9,300 people across 18 countries found that physical activity was generally highest in summer and lowest in winter.
This pattern appeared across countries, health conditions, and methods of measuring activity. Winter didn’t make everyone lazy. Winter changed the environment in which activity had to occur.
That distinction matters.
If your current movement depends on favorable weather, long evenings, and the desire to be outside, you don’t have a winter movement plan. You have a summer movement plan that you hope survives winter.
Hope is lovely. It is also not gym equipment.
Food Season Starts at the Iowa State Fair
In Iowa, the seasonal food gauntlet starts before the leaves change.
The State Fair offers nearly anything you can imagine fried, coated in sugar, impaled on a stick, or subjected to all three. You can wash it down with a beer priced like it was financed through a mortgage lender.
Then football starts.
Tailgating rolls directly into Halloween. Halloween rolls into Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving expands into several weeks of work parties, family gatherings, religious celebrations, and school breaks, then Christmas hits. Roll it back: dinners, travel, leftovers, family, peopling.
Done yet? Nope. Here comes New Year's!
You briefly regain consciousness in January before the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day arrive.
I tried to find a defensible count of the “food holidays” between October and February. There isn’t one, because it depends on which holidays, cultural traditions, sporting events, birthdays, office parties, and family gatherings you include.
The exact number doesn’t matter.
The point is that food exposure stops being occasional. It becomes atmospheric.
There is a commonly repeated claim that the average tailgater eats more than 4,000 calories before a football game. That isn’t what the research showed.
In the actual “Tailgate Study,” researchers brought 18 men into a controlled setting, maintained their blood-alcohol levels for five hours, provided an abundant buffet of hamburgers, chips, cupcakes, and other highly palatable food, and encouraged them to eat. They consumed an average of 5,087 calories.
That was an overfeeding experiment, not a representative survey of football fans. We shouldn’t pretend every tailgater consumes 5,000 calories.
Still, the study demonstrates what most of us already understand: put alcohol, calorie-dense food, several hours, social permission, and an endless buffet together, and a human being can consume an astonishing amount without ever sitting down for a recognizable meal.
One tailgate isn’t the problem.
Neither is Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dessert, or a beer while watching football.
The problem is what happens when exceptional eating becomes normal eating for four or five months.
Research using daily weights from nearly 3,000 smart-scale owners in the United States, Germany, and Japan found that body weight rose around major national holidays. Across the three countries, participants were about 0.5 percent heavier shortly after Christmas than shortly before it. They tended to lose some of that weight, but roughly half remained months later.
The participants weren’t a perfect sample of the population. People who buy Wi-Fi scales and weigh themselves regularly are a particular breed. But the seasonal pattern is believable and consistent with earlier holiday-weight research.
People generally don’t gain ten pounds from one dinner. They gain a smaller amount through repeated disruptions, lose some of it, retain some of it, and repeat the cycle next year.
Accumulation is quieter than catastrophe.
That’s why it works so well.
Momentum Is More Useful Than Motivation
None of this means you should approach fall like a five-month emergency.
I’m not suggesting you decline Thanksgiving, smuggle chicken breast into the State Fair, or perform burpees during halftime as punishment for eating chili.
That would be a miserable way to protect your health.
The goal is to enjoy the season without allowing every seasonal change to dismantle the systems that help you feel well.
The best time to prepare is now, while you still have daylight, energy, and relatively normal weeks working in your favor.
Momentum matters because behaviors become easier once they are already moving.
A person who is sleeping consistently, training regularly, walking most days, and eating reasonably in August has something to flex when October gets chaotic.
A person waiting for October to become disciplined is trying to wait for something that will never happen. Start now.
You don’t need a flawless routine. You need a routine with adjustable settings.
Look at Sleep Before You’re Exhausted
What currently helps you sleep well?
Which parts will become harder when mornings are darker, evenings fill up, and your schedule changes?
Protect the most important anchors now. That might be a fairly consistent wake time, morning light, a caffeine cutoff, a darker bedroom, or a limit on how many late nights you stack together.
You don’t need perfect sleep through the holidays. You need a way back to normal after the inevitable interruptions.
One late game should remain one late game. It doesn’t need to become six weeks of sleeping badly and wondering why you’re hungry, irritable, and negotiating with yourself over every workout.
Give Movement Somewhere Indoors to Go
Decide what movement looks like when it is dark, icy, windy, or offensively cold.
Not theoretically. Literally.
Where will you do it?
What equipment will you use?
How long does the minimum version take?
At my house, I use a treadmill with a small sun-emulating light nearby. I also have a 1986 spin bike in the basement that has survived longer than I have. It works perfectly when I need a quick heart-rate bump or somewhere to burn off restless energy. Oh yeah, I always have my bodyweight too. I have yet to meet anyone who has mastered their own body, so it always works when we drop for push-ups, sit-ups, or squats.
A gym membership can solve this problem. So can a walking pad, a few dumbbells, exercise bands, a bodyweight circuit, mall walking, or ten-minute movement breaks spread throughout the day.
The best winter option is the one that remains available when your preferred option disappears.
Build a floor: the smallest amount of movement that keeps you connected to the habit.
You can always do more when life allows it. The floor protects you when it doesn’t.
Keep Ordinary Meals Ordinary
You do not need to “be good” through the holidays.
You do need to remember that not every meal between the State Fair and Valentine’s Day is a holiday meal.
Keep breakfast normal. Keep buying protein, fruits, vegetables, and the boring foods that make you feel good. Eat enough during the day that you don’t arrive at every gathering starved and ready to consume the serving table.
Plan for the foods you genuinely care about. Skip some of the forgettable crap that happens to be nearby.
Most importantly, return to your usual eating at the next reasonable opportunity.
No punishment. No starvation. No attempt to burn off Christmas with a twelve-mile run performed in a state of panic.
Just return.
The skill isn’t avoiding disruption. The skill is containing it.
Build the Routine Before You Need It
Fall and winter are not enemies of health.
They bring some of the best parts of the year: football, warm meals, holidays, family traditions, quiet mornings, colder walks, lights in dark neighborhoods, and the first day you can wear a sweatshirt without immediately regretting it.
Enjoy all of it.
But respect the environmental change that comes with it.
Over the next several months, daylight will shrink, weather will become less cooperative, schedules will fracture, movement will require more intention, sleep will receive mixed signals, and rich food will appear with the reliability of junk mail.
This is predictable.
That makes August more than the last full month of summer. It is your chance to build enough momentum that your health doesn’t depend on winter behaving itself.
It won’t.
Build something flexible enough to take the hit. Call if you need help :)
