top of page
Search

Training Through Diwali: Sweets, Parties and Late Nights

Writer: Shrey Aggarwal
Shrey Aggarwal
3 days ago
8 min read

Diwali falls on Sunday 8 November this year, and for most athletes who celebrate it, the festival runs closer to a week than a day. Mithai boxes stack up on the dining table, card parties run past midnight, and firecrackers keep going long after you'd normally be asleep.

training during diwali

You don't need to skip Diwali sweets to keep training well. Keep your regular meals on festival days, place your harder sessions on mornings after normal sleep, enjoy sweets as part of meals rather than all evening, and treat late nights as easy-training days. One festive week won't undo months of work.


Quick Overview

How do you keep training during Diwali without giving anything up?

Plan the week around your sleep rather than around the sweets. Food is the easier part to manage. Late nights are what cost you training quality, and they're predictable: you already know which evenings you'll be out, whether that's Lakshmi Puja at home, the family card party or a friend's Diwali dinner in London or New Jersey. Put those on your training calendar the way you'd mark a work trip.


Then sort the week into three kinds of day. Normal days get normal training. Festival days get regular meals and a shorter or easier session. Mornings after a late night get an easy run, mobility work or full rest. If a hard session lands on the morning after Diwali night, move it rather than forcing it.


The same plan works for any festive stretch. An athlete in Manchester uses it around Christmas parties, one in Kuala Lumpur around Hari Raya open houses. Only the food changes.


Why do regular meals matter more than the sweets?

The most common festival mistake I see is skipping meals to "save room", then grazing on mithai and namkeen (savoury fried snacks) all evening. Breakfast goes, lunch becomes a handful of chakli, and by 9pm you've eaten plenty of sugar and fat but very little protein or proper carbohydrate. That's a poor recovery day, even when the calorie total looks generous.


Keep the three main meals on festival days and build them the way you normally would: a carbohydrate base (rice, roti, poha, pasta, potatoes or bread), a protein source (dal, paneer, eggs, chicken, fish, curd or tofu) and some vegetables. Daily carbohydrate needs scale with training load, from around 3–5g per kilogram of bodyweight on light days to 6–10g/kg during heavy endurance training (Thomas et al., J Acad Nutr Diet, 2016). A festival day with an easy session sits at the lower end, which is also why there's no need to "earn" your sweets with an extra workout.


Skipped meals tend to repeat across a busy season, too. Diwali runs into wedding season, which runs into Christmas and New Year. Weeks of eating less than training demands is how low energy availability creeps in, even in athletes who feel they've eaten plenty of sugar.


When should you schedule hard sessions in Diwali week?

Put your hardest sessions on mornings after a normal night's sleep, and keep the day after a late night easy. Across 69 studies, sleep loss reduced exercise performance by an average of about 7.6%, with the clearest drops after a full night without sleep or after waking earlier than usual, and in sessions held in the afternoon or evening (Craven et al., Sports Medicine, 2022). Performance fell by roughly 0.4% for every extra hour spent awake before exercising.


That same review found that going to bed late and then sleeping in had much less consistent effects than being cut short at the other end. So a late night followed by a lie-in costs you less than a late night followed by a 5am alarm for intervals. If you were out until 1am, dragging yourself up at dawn for a tempo run is the worst option. Sleeping in and doing an easy 40 minutes later in the morning is the better one.


In practice, most athletes can fit their hard sessions into the early part of the week before the main festival days, and again once the visiting has settled. If you've got a race soon after Diwali, keep the taper as written and protect the two nights before race day above every other night of the week.


Where do sweets fit in an athlete's day?

Have them with or straight after a meal, decide roughly how many you'll eat, and then enjoy them without guilt. Two pieces of kaju katli after dinner makes for a very different day from twenty pieces eaten one at a time between 4pm and midnight, even though nobody counts the second version.


Eating sweets as part of a meal keeps the meal itself in place, so protein and fibre still arrive. It also puts a natural full stop on them. Grazing has no full stop.


Sweets have a sensible place around training as well. A couple of dates or a laddoo before an easy run, or a gulab jamun as part of the meal after a long session, is carbohydrate doing what carbohydrate is there to do. How much of it you need on different days has its own guide. Keep the richest, ghee-heavy sweets (halwa, pinni) out of the two to three hours before a hard session, though, because fat slows digestion.


None of this is specific to Indian sweets. It works the same way for Christmas cake, baklava at Eid or pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.


How should you handle late nights and alcohol?

Treat the day after a late night as an easy-training day, and if you drink, keep it moderate and stop well before bed. Alcohol helps you fall asleep faster, but it disrupts the second half of the night, and at higher doses it reduces REM sleep (Ebrahim et al., Alcohol Clin Exp Res, 2013). You wake up having slept for eight hours and feeling as if you slept for five.


Alternate alcoholic drinks with water or soft drinks, eat a proper dinner instead of drinking on top of snacks, and have a glass of water before bed. The next morning, eat a normal breakfast and keep the session easy, or rest. A fasted run to "burn off" the night before only adds an energy shortfall to a sleep shortfall.


Plenty of athletes who celebrate Diwali don't drink at all. For them the late night is the only cost, and the same easy-day approach applies.


Should you train outdoors on firecracker nights?

On the nights of heavy firecracker use and the mornings after, move hard sessions indoors or make them easy, especially in cities where air quality is already poor. In Delhi, fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) rose by up to around 100% within about five hours of firecrackers starting on Diwali evening, and stayed elevated from two days before the festival to two days after (Ghei & Sane, PLoS ONE, 2018). During hard exercise you breathe far more air, much of it through your mouth, which bypasses some of the nose's filtering, so you take in more of those particles (Giles & Koehle, Sports Medicine, 2014).


Check a local air-quality index before heading out. Do intensity work on a treadmill, indoor bike trainer or in the gym for those few days, and keep outdoor runs easy and away from busy roads. If you have asthma or another breathing condition, speak to your doctor about training in poor air rather than pushing through symptoms. Training in air pollution has a fuller guide, and the same principle carries over to any bad-air day, from wildfire smoke in California to bushfire smoke in Australia.


Will one festive week undo months of training?

No. In the best-known study of holiday weight gain, adults put on an average of about 0.4kg (0.8lb) across the six-week US holiday season, while believing they'd gained several times that (Yanovski et al., NEJM, 2000). A Diwali week with training kept going is a smaller exposure than six weeks of Thanksgiving-to-New-Year eating. Fitness built over months doesn't disappear in a week either, and an easier week is close to what many coaches would programme as a recovery week anyway.


The same study carries a caveat: that small gain wasn't lost afterwards. The risk, then, is the season stretching on, with leftover mithai into wedding season into Christmas parties, rather than the festival itself. Once the visiting is done, go back to your normal meals, and give away or freeze some of the boxes. Don't compensate by cutting food hard for a fortnight; that's how a festival week turns into a month of under-fuelled training.


The Fueletics Perspective

I'd much rather an athlete eat the laddoo at the family table than spend Diwali tired and irritable, skipping meals to stay "on plan". Festival weeks are a planning problem. The athletes who handle them well decide in advance where the late nights fall, keep their meals, and move their hard sessions to the mornings that can carry them.


The part people usually get wrong is the food on the days in between. An easy festival day and a hard session day need different amounts of carbohydrate, and in a week where three of seven days have turned into easy days, intake should shift with them. In Fueletics, that's the job of the Daily Fuelling Engine, which adjusts intake between training days and rest days. The amounts themselves depend on your weight, your training and your race calendar, and guessing usually means under-eating on exactly the days that matter, so if you want those numbers worked out for you, start with a Fueletics assessment.


Then have your kaju katli after dinner on Diwali night, and make the next morning's run an easy one.


FAQ

Is it okay to eat sweets before a workout?

Yes, before an easy session. A couple of dates or a small laddoo an hour or so before an easy run suits most people. Keep rich, ghee-heavy sweets at least two to three hours away from a hard session.


Should I skip training on Diwali?

You don't have to, but the main festival day is a sensible day for rest or an easy session. Keep hard sessions for mornings when you've slept normally.


How do I recover after a late Diwali party?

Sleep in if you can, eat a normal breakfast with carbohydrate and protein, drink water through the morning, and keep training easy that day. Avoid fasted sessions to "make up" for the night before.


Is it safe to run outside during Diwali pollution?

On the nights of heavy firecracker use and the morning after, air quality in many Indian cities is poor. Check the local air-quality index, move hard sessions indoors, and keep outdoor runs easy. Anyone with asthma or a breathing condition should take their doctor's advice.


Research References

 
 

Subscribe to our latest articles

bottom of page