Although we here at GQ have urged you in the strongest possible terms to refrain from counting calories at the Thanksgiving table—anyone who pushes anything resembling "healthy holiday dinner" tips is a cop—our pleas have evidently failed to persuade something called the Calorie Control Council, which estimates that a typical dinner entails something like 4,500 calories. That is, to be fair, a lot of calories. Today, if you're insisting on feeling all guilty about your fourth serving of gravy-soaked stuffing and/or your midnight bonus slice of chocolate pecan pie, feel free to spend some time this afternoon earning it back.

Admittedly, burning through an entire holiday meal in one go-round is probably neither healthy nor realistic. But since you hopefully have the day off from work, use some of that extra time to try a more interesting (and challenging) workout than the standard 30-minute treadmill session that usually passes for your cardio. Do some hill runs! Find a decent-sized hill—a quarter-mile will suffice, though if you have something longer available and are feeling ambitious, good for you—and sprint hard up it, walking down after each ascent as you catch your breath. If the closest thing to a hill in your Thanksgiving environs is a tall building, never fear, for it is probably equipped with stairs, and according to science, running up those stairs will wear you out just as thoroughly.

To get the most out of this adventure, try and keep your in-between-sprints recovery time below two minutes. Alternating sprints and cool-downs with a training buddy—maybe your best friend from high school has some grim memories of last night's green bean casserole consumption, too—can help keep you honest on this front. Also, decide on the number of reps you're going to finish before the workout begins. Ten is a nice even number. That way, if by the seventh round you find yourself unable to maintain the effort involved in the first six, you'll be more inclined to gut out the last few at a slower pace, and less inclined to just give up and head home to watch the always-underwhelming Black Friday college football slate.

Why hills? Studies have shown high-intensity intermittent exercise to be even more efficient than low-intensity, steady-state exercise at helping folks lose weight. In addition to the cardiovascular benefits associated with interval training, running hills also helps to build leg strength and power, since each step gets transformed into sort of a de facto lunge, and sprinting up a slope necessarily requires you to do... a lot of them at once. If done correctly, this type of workout will cause your heart rate to spike in ways that jogging simply can't replicate. Given the sheer number of times you elected to spray whipped cream directly into your mouth after dinner last night, that's a very good thing.

Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read moreRelated Stories for GQThanksgiving