The holidays can be a difficult time for any number of reasons. The pressure of finding the perfect gift for everyone, tension-filled family gatherings, missing a special someone who recently passed away.
Stressing about your increased calorie intake will not make it easier for you. If the holidays are a tough time for you, go easy on yourself. Make healthy choices where you can, drink moderately, and try to keep big holiday overeats to a minimum.
Look, it happens. The tail end of the year might bring an awkward Christmas party at work, where you rely on the free punch to get you through your colleagues’ boring stories. Cake Friday suddenly becomes an everyday thing, and your willpower doesn’t extend to Karen’s chocolate fudge brownies.
Being with your family can be a huge strain. That extra helping of gravy might be the only thing stopping you from losing your cool with that relative who keeps loudly hating on feminism.
I’m not saying you should throw all your hard work out the window and pig out for a couple of months. But, try not to obsess over every mouthful and lose out on the joy of holiday eating. You deserve to have fun along with everyone else.
Calorie banking doesn’t work
You may have heard of calorie banking, or even tried it yourself.
Calorie banking is when you prepare for a big meal or party by skiping meals or undereating beforehand.
So, say you have a work dinner planned for the evening: it’s a 4-course Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. It might feel logical to skip breakfast and lunch to ‘bank’ the calories for later gorging.
But, in reality, turning up starving hungry will only make you more likely to overeat at the dinner. You could well end up polishing off three bread baskets and feeling pretty sick by the end of the night.
And, not that I advocate calorie counting, but you’ll probably have inhaled more than you would have if you’d eaten normally that day.
This starving and bingeing behaviour is not good for cultivating a healthy relationship with food, and will not serve you on your journey in the long-term.
HAPPY Holidays
Feelings of enjoyment, satisfaction and social connection over food are important positives that must be on your plate. A main course of restriction with a side of anxiety and bingeing is a sure-fire way to an unhappy eating life. Oh, and guess what? It’s always guilt for dessert.
Holidays can be a time for family connection, religious contemplation, and meaningful tradition. Food is involved in many of our rituals, it’s embedded deep in human culture. It’s okay for you to take part wholeheartedly, even if you’re trying to get healthy.
So, this holiday, instead of swinging between extremes of overeating and punishing yourself, why not treat yourself in the best way?
Take a deep breath and recentre yourself. True self-love allows you to reach out and connect to those around you. Even when there’s food involved.
Self-love doesn’t put you in a corner drunk and alone, where you come to in a guilty haze, knee-deep in pavlova.
Drink, eat, celebrate, be merry. Make the best choices you can in each situation, and don’t beat yourself up when you inevitably have a slip-up. Forgive yourself and keep going.
And, if you do choose to eat your grandmother’s insanely rich and creamy mashed potatoes, make sure you enjoy the crap out of them! Indulging in holiday foods you love is not a bad thing in itself.