Welp, here we are. The holiday season is upon us and the food scene is about to get lit. Parties, gatherings, seasonal recipes, heaping platters of goodies, holiday food traditions, family recipes; it’s a time when food takes center stage, and it’s everywhere. It’s also a time when there’s a lot of chit chat around diets, “lifestyle changes,” what’s healthy and what’s not “healthy,” what people are going to do to survive holiday feasts and what people are going to do to get “healthy” in the new year.
The holidays represent a time for joyful celebration, gathering, connecting to our heritage and traditions, being thankful, giving and so much more. While for some, food may not be triggering during the holidays, but for a wide population of people the holidays also present food-related challenges, constant stress, anxiety, guilt and the “all or nothing” mentality hits hardcore.
Examples of holiday diet mentality:
- Plan to overeat: You plan on not eating the entire day so you can eat a giant meal to the point of feeling uncomfortably full.
- Off the rails: You feel like the holidays are a time when you’re afraid to get off track and are nervous to be around “bad” or “forbidden” foods.
- The holidays only come around once a year: “I’m going to eat all the stuffing and eat as much holiday food as I can, because it’s only available one time a year…and then I’ll get back to eating healthy after the new year.”
- Permission with a side of guilt: You give yourself permission to eat the holiday food you want, but deep down you’re riddled with guilt and self judgement for overindulging, whether it be real or perceived.
- The planner: You plan ahead and get ready for the holidays with extra time in the gym.
- Fear: Being surrounded by food can be a source of stress. You fear you will lose control around food, which will result in gaining weight. And maybe you feel like you need rules to get you through the holidays.
- Atonement: You eat the “unhealthy” food (despite your mind telling you that you shouldn’t) and tell yourself you’ll make up for it on the treadmill to balance it all out. Or you make promises to yourself that you’ll make up for it when the holidays are over.
- Diet culture trademark: You allow yourself to binge over the holidays and then purge come January.
Why is food so stressful?
So how did food, something that connects us as families and cultures, something that ties us to our heritage and ancestors and something that is a sign of love and care get to be so stressful over the holidays?? It’s hard not be preoccupied with food when we’re all of a sudden bombarded with conflicting messages around the holidays.
On one hand, there’s the talk that holiday food is joyous, should be celebrated and something we should indulge in, and on the other hand it’s demonized and talked about like it’s something we should fear because it’ll only lead to weight gain. It’s enough to make you feel crazy around food. Especially when food is so moralized (healthy vs. unhealthy) the rest of the year. It’s no wonder our relationships with food can feel challenged during the holidays. And it’s no surprise we feel so out of control that when January rolls around we feel there is no other choice but to succumb to whatever diet is trending.
This does not happen by chance. The holiday binge, then new year new you purge is a diet culture trademark. Ever notice how advertisements and marketing gurus come up with everything from spreads of holiday feasts and treats to everything diet, exercise, weight loss solutions and gym memberships? We are approaching a time when diet culture will be in full bloom and a time when the diet industry knows people are at their most vulnerable and their manipulative marketing will be at its yearly peak. All in the name of dollar bills and at the expense of our mental and physical health.
What if you could end the madness?
What if you could eat those holiday pies without feeling guilty or stop the voice in your head telling you how many burpees you need to do in order to make up for the food you eat? And what if you could bring back the joy of eating during the holidays? Good news, there is a way!! Keep in mind everyone’s relationship with food around the holidays is different. So, here are some broad key points to keep in your pocket so you can make space for a peaceful and balanced relationship with food and enjoy and feel confident this holiday season.
Permission to eat over the holidays.
This is a big one. And truly it deserves an entire post. So stay tuned for that. Giving yourself permission might sound counterintuitive and may even sound scary. You might think Okay, but if I let myself eat whatever I want, I won’t stop or I’ll only eat unhealthy foods and it’s going to make me gain weight. But there is a lot of truth to the idea that you can eat whatever you want but also whatever you don’t want. Food rules and restrictions lead to a sense of deprivation and hinders you from making food choices based on our physiological hunger and fullness cues and disrupts your body’s innate ability to regulate what it needs and what it wants to make you feel good.
Telling yourself you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, whether it be physically avoiding certain food groups while dieting or psychologically labeling and judging foods as bad or unhealthy, can lead to feelings of being deprived where thoughts are intensified and desires for those foods are heightened to the point where it feels like obsession– the forbidden fruit effect. When you violate those terms that are placed on foods, you might end up instead of eating one piece of fudge, eating the whole pan – eating past fullness, eating when you are not hungry or binge eating. This sets us up to feel like we don’t have control or willpower and the feeling that we can’t be trusted around food.
If you allow yourself to eat those “forbidden” or “bad” foods, the all to frequent response is to set conditions for those foods. Like I’ll allow myself to be “bad” at a holiday party, but I won’t eat anything else the rest of the day or I’ve eaten way too many cookies, so I’ll run extra miles tomorrow. And if you know deprivation is around the corner, it will also have an impact on your behaviors around food. For instance, you tell yourself, January 1st is when I’ll start my new “healthy lifestyle”, so you say fuck it over the holidays. These conditions might feel like you have a sense of control. But really the food is doing the controlling.
Unconditional permission always.
Giving yourself permission is not a temporary permission slip kind of thing where you allow yourself one food or one meal. It’s giving yourself unconditional permission every day, no matter the season. The goal is to create a neutral playing field where food is not emotionally charged. When you can dismantle food boundaries, stop obsessing over “good” vs. “bad” foods and see food as morally neutral you can self-moderate and make food choices where deprivation does not set you up for a downward spiral.
When you truly allow yourself unconditional permission to say yes to food whenever, it also allows you to say no to any food. So when no food is off limits, you have the power to decide if you really want it or if you don’t want it and you know it will be there waiting for you when you do want it.
So before you start telling yourself you shouldn’t eat a certain food or before you restrict in preparation for a holiday event, remember the cycle: restrict, overeat, discomfort, shame/guilt/disappointment, restrict, overeat, shame/guilt/disappointment and the cycle goes on and on. Give yourself permission to eat foods without judgement and keep doing it. This is not an easy thing, nor does it happen overnight. Especially when you have years and years of rules around food, dieting and diet culture BS under your belt. So be patient. It’s a process and over time it will click and take root.
Bring awareness to your body’s internal cues to help guide your eating behaviors.
Tune in on your hunger and fullness levels. Our bodies can be great moderators when we listen to them. Take a few minutes to assess your hunger levels before eating. Pay attention to how your body feels when you do eat and check in during your meal and at the end – where do you fall on the hunger scale? How did the food taste? Was it as satisfying as you thought it would be?
Give yourself a little compassion when things don’t go perfectly.
There will be days when you eat past fullness and times when you don’t eat enough and that’s okay. Use those experiences as learning opportunities to explore what factors led up to them. Did you go too long without eating? What expectations did you have and were they realistic? You can gain valuable insight from these experiences and it will help you move on and let go of the negative emotions that may come up during those experiences.
In general, food tastes so much better when you are physically hungry. However, there will be times when you’ve already had a filling meal, but you really want a piece of your grandma’s famous cake. Eating in the absence of physical hunger happens occasionally, and making the choice to eat past physical fullness is okay. There are no rules and only you get to make your own choices based on how you feel.
I wish you happy holidays filled with trust joy and peace of mind!