Enjoy the Holidays and Stay on Track with Your Healthy Habits!

Last year I shared that one of my neighbors had their house all decorated for Halloween the first weekend of September. Apparently, another neighbor took that as a challenge, and their house was fully decorated for Halloween before the middle of August!

My neighbors are excited for the holiday season, but what about you? Are you ready to celebrate the holidays? For many people, thinking about the holiday season brings up as much concern as it does delight.

I understand their concerns, because between October and February there are so many challenges to a healthy lifestyle. Cold weather makes taking time off from outdoor exercise tempting. Spending time socializing with friends, family, and co-workers can ramp up stress, which makes it easy to rationalize indulgence. If you’re not spending time with loved ones, that can bring up its own uncomfortable feelings. With shopping, decorating, celebrating, traveling, and so on, it's all-too-easy to get less sleep, then compensate with caffeine, carbs, or skipping exercise the next day. And, of course, there's all the holiday food and drink. Need I say more?

Navigating the holiday season is challenging. Fortunately, it's not impossible to enjoy the holidays and stay on track with your healthy habits. There are two simple tenets that can help you stay mentally and physically healthy, and skip the weight gain that's so common during the holiday season.

Tenet No. 1 -- Notice the Focus on Indulgence

The first tenet is to notice the focus on indulgence that underpins the holiday season. As a culture, we tend to associate celebration with indulgence. But why? Celebrating can be indulgent, but it doesn’t have to be.

To celebrate means to acknowledge and appreciate something or someone. Acknowledging and appreciating means enjoying it, but it doesn't need to mean indulgence. It doesn’t mean you need to overeat, overdrink, overspend, or overdo.

Consider the difference between eating a delicious meal and enjoying every bite, versus eating a delicious meal until you’re uncomfortably full. In the first scenario, you appreciate your meal—the tastes, colors, textures, and aromas. At the same time, you’re acknowledging you. You eat and enjoy every bite, until you’re satisfied.

In the second scenario, you start off appreciative of the meal, but at some point, you're not acknowledging your body's needs. You’ve crossed the line from enjoyment to indulgence.

Or, consider the difference between enjoying a glass of wine with a meal, compared to drinking a bottle of wine until you’re intoxicated. Again, in the first scenario you’re appreciating the flavor of the wine and how it enhances your meal. In the second scenario, you reach a point at which you’re no longer appreciative of the flavor of the wine, and you're not respecting your body's limits.

A focus on indulgence may seem like fun, and you might feel better while you're indulging, but in the long run, indulgence hurts. When you indulge, you aren’t meeting your needs--you're meeting your wants. And as the saying goes, you can never get enough of what you want.

Enjoying, on the other hand, doesn’t mean giving up what you want most for what you want now. Enjoyment allows you to be present and celebrate in the moment, and also allows "future you" to be happy with your past decisions.

Tenet No. Two -- Focus on Weight Maintenance, Not Weight Loss

The second tenet is to focus on weight maintenance. When I first began working in weight management, the doctor I was working with told me he hated the holiday season, because every year, his clients regained all the weight they’d lost in the program, undoing all the hard work they'd put in for the past few months. I just smiled and said, "We'll see."

To his surprise, not a single one of our clients gained weight. Most maintained, and a few even lost weight. How did we do it? Instead of coaching my clients to continue with weight loss, we worked out a plan for maintaining, instead of losing weight. 

Why focus on weight maintenance, rather than weight loss? The challenges of the holiday season make maintaining weight a more realistic goal, even if you're currently enjoying success with weight loss.

With maintenance, you have a little more leeway than you do with weight loss. It's okay to stay up late a few nights, enjoy a half-cup or two of eggnog, have a few candy canes, and cut back on your workouts a little (or even skip a few). You won't lose weight, because you're not keeping up with the behaviors that lead to weight loss. But as long as you don't get too carried away, you won't gain weight, either.

Now Put the Two Tenets Together...

This brings us back to the first tenet, which is that the holidays tend to encourage getting carried away, whether the topic is shopping for gifts, partying, or food and drink. And, of course, that's why so many people gain weight during the holiday season.

So, this holiday season, I encourage you to consider how you can change what you're doing a little bit. Not a lot, just a little -- just enough to give you some leeway to enjoy the holiday season, without crossing the line to indulgence. It's crucial to give it some thought now, and plan ahead for the challenges you're likely to face. That way, you can relax, enjoy the holiday season, and maintain your weight. And when January arrives, you're ready to get back on track with the healthy habits that support a lifetime of good health and happiness.

If you're already maintaining your weight, then spending some time thinking about how you'll maintain is even more important. Whatever you're doing on a regular basis is just enough to keep you where you are, so any indulgences you enjoy put you at risk for weight gain. That means it's especially important to think ahead to how you'll create a balance between the things you do that allow you to maintain your weight, and the things you'll do differently during the holiday season.

How to Manage Your Mindset

I have two specific tips for you to try if you want to stay on track with healthy habits through the holiday season. Getting started with them now, before the holidays arrive, will give you time to get good at them!

The first tip is to notice your self-talk. As you think about the holiday season and what you’ve done in the past, is your self-talk indulgent? Do you speak to yourself harshly? Or do you bounce back and forth between the two?

The second tip is to start thinking now about what I refer to as lifestyle mindset. The things you do (or don’t do) have one of three outcomes: They support your healthy lifestyle; they discourage your healthy lifestyle; or they improve your healthy lifestyle.

This is true of weight management, too: The things you do (or don't do) either support weight maintenance, encourage weight gain, or encourage weight loss.

This begs the question, What do you do during the holiday season that encourages weight maintenance, weight gain, and weight loss? What would you be willing to change so the balance tips in favor of weight maintenance?

Most people find that their challenges with the holidays involve both of these mindsets. I shared last year about a client I worked with many years ago, who came in for weight loss counseling specifically for the holidays. He maintained his weight throughout the year, but every holiday season, he gained around 20 pounds. He’d make an effort in January to lose the weight, maintain it through the summer, then regain it when the holidays rolled around again. He'd reached a point where he dreaded the holiday season, instead of enjoying them.

When we looked at what he was doing differently through the holiday season, it was clear that his self-talk was contributing to his challenges. In previous years, he would say to himself that he wouldn’t eat any pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving Day. This would be the year he’d go without, and not gain 20 pounds! But after watching everyone else eat and enjoy pumpkin pie, he’d give in, and then eat at least 4 or 5 slices of pumpkin pie.

As we explored his thinking, he noted that at first, he felt virtuous because he wasn’t eating any pie. But as he watched everyone else enjoy it, he felt left out. That thought turned into “But I deserve to eat pumpkin pie as much as anyone else here does!” His harsh self-talk led to indulgent eating.

So, we talked about how he could focus on weight maintenance this year. He agreed to plan ahead to enjoy 2 slices of pie instead of passing on the pie altogether. Because this new plan wasn’t harsh, he was able to enjoy his first slice of pie. To his surprise, he couldn’t finish the second slice of pie! (And yes, he maintained his weight instead of gaining the usual 20 pounds.)  

I mentioned that I worked with clients who not only maintained, but actually lost weight over the holiday season. In the upcoming months, I'll be sharing tips for handling the holidays themselves, as each of the holidays offers its own unique set of challenges. Those tips helped my clients lose weight instead of maintain or gain.

That said, the foundation of a healthy, happy lifestyle remains being aware of your self-talk, and being aware of your lifestyle mindset. Now's the time to take a look at how you're doing with them, so you're ready for the holiday season. Then, you can build on these skills with specific tools for each holiday. When you combine a healthy mindset with an awareness of indulgence, and you plan ahead for weight maintenance, you'll be just as prepared for the holidays as my neighbors are!

If you feel overwhelmed or frustrated thinking about working toward greater awareness of your self-talk and your lifestyle mindset, I encourage you to consider working with either a registered dietitian or a therapist who specializes in weight management. You deserve a lifetime of good health and happiness!

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