With the holiday season coming up, the anxiety around spending the next 3 months “blowing” all of your health and nutrition progress that you’ve worked so hard to make over the past year is high. With the busyness of the holiday season, the break in your typical routine, and the delicious holiday treats that are everywhere, it feels impossible to be consistent with your healthy lifestyle for a whole 2 months straight. In this post, I’m going to talk about why it feels impossible (and, why it’s not!), and how you can tackle the holidays so that you’re not starting the New Year back at square 1 when it comes to your health goals.
Ghosts of Holiday Health Challenges Past
Every year, we try a new approach to try to stay consistent with our nutrition during the holiday season. Basically, to avoid going completely overboard and putting our health on the back burner for 2 months straight. We’ve all tried going into the holiday season with the plan to follow our typical diet program to a T. Or the “restrict approach,” where we try to make certain holiday favorites “off limits” so we don’t open the flood gates and go overboard. Or the calorie-cycling method of eating extremely low calories for every meal to “save up” for the calories we’ll be eating come party time.
All of these attempts end the same way. Every year we end up scrapping the approach completely, going overboard for 2 months straight, and undoing all of the progress we’ve worked so hard to make with our health, ending up right back where we started on January 1st the year before.
Obviously, this is a problem. The inability to stay consistent with our nutrition and health during the last few months of every year keeps us from making the lasting health transformation that we need. We’re worried that not being able to transform our weight and health for good will eventually lead to health conditions that we’ve seen family members suffer. Heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, or other chronic conditions that motivate us to stick to our health and nutrition program the other 10 months of the year.
Plus, many of us are worried that our kids will learn this same yo-yo diet pattern that we find ourselves in year after year, developing the same off-and-on habits that are standing in our way of being able to transform your health for good.
And the biggest problem with this yearly cycle is that the inability to stick to healthy habits during the holidays doesn’t stop after January 1st. Every time life gets busy, or we can’t be “perfect” with our typical program, we scrap the whole thing altogether, fall off the wagon, and go overboard until we can commit fully to perfect again. This is the case over spring break trips, on long holiday weekends, birthday parties, or just a busy stretch of life. This off-and-on cycle that keeps us from our health goals is just exacerbated over the holiday season.
Why Does This Happen
Although many of us try to blame the season itself for the weight gain and poor health outcomes, luckily* it’s not the season itself. Instead, it’s our mindset about health and nutrition around this time of year.
*luckily because, if it’s our fault, we can do something about it. If it were the season itself, we’d have no choice but to throw our hands up and ride the health rollercoaster every November-December.*
Let’s face it, the typical nutrition program or diet that we follow throughout the rest of the year simply won’t work over the holidays. The yearly failed attempts to stay consistent during the holidays happen because we don’t have the mindset needed to modify our typical diet program to meet the busyness of the season. Many of us fall into one (or more!) of the following three mindset traps that cause us to put our health on the back burner for the last 2 months of the year.
- Perfectionist Mindset: if we aren’t able to be “perfect” with our normal program (which during this time of the year…nobody is!), we just throw in the towel and wait until we can. As I’ve mentioned before, this is not only a problem during the holiday season, but on any occasion where we can’t be all-in. Like on vacation, when unexpected things come up, and life schedules get busy. When it comes to our health and nutrition, we’re either 100% on..or 100% off.
- Can’t Control Your Controllables: During the holiday season there are plenty of things out of our control. Maybe we can’t control what foods are served at a party, or what gym equipment we have available when traveling to visit grandparents, or what people bring into the office, or give as gifts. That being said, there are still plenty of things that we can control over the holidays when it comes to our health and nutrition. But because we haven’t learned how to properly control our controllables and make the Best Possible Option (BPO) in any given instance, we feel at the mercy of whatever the season throws at us.
- Setting Unrealistic Expectations: whether it’s that we’re going to avoid all treats and alcohol at parties (come on, like you’re really going to avoid grandma’s snowballs!!), workout *every* day while the kids are on break, or lose weight over the holiday season, we both know these expectations are unrealistic and likely setting us up for failure. Causing us to fall into the guilt trap when our expectations are unmet, and eventually forcing us to give up entirely.
The Mindset for Holiday Health Consistency
In order to stay consistent with our health behaviors over the next few months, it’s absolutely necessary to understand how to modify our mindset to modify our nutrition program for holiday success. To do this, I have my clients adopt a Dial Mindset when it comes to their healthy habits during this busy time of year.
With this mindset, they aren’t stuck in an all-or-nothing, on-or-off thinking pattern with their nutrition. They know how to live in the gray area with their habits so they can still experience success, do the best they can in any given situation, while still enjoying the holiday season!
They understand how to plan ahead and control what they CAN to the best of their abilities. And take Extreme Ownership over controlling their controllables.
They enter the season with realistic expectations and a realistic game plan for themselves, so they can create a sustainable approach to their healthy habits that lasts them through the New Year and beyond!
It’s not the holiday season itself, but the mindset and approach to the holiday season that forces so many of us to be starting from square 1 every new year. When we can adjust our mindset and your nutrition program, we’ll be able to enjoy the holiday season while consistently prioritizing our health.
I’m teaching all about the Dial Mindset and other mindset approaches to help you stay on track this holiday season in my upcoming free webinar, The Secret to Holiday Health Consistency taking place on November 9th at 7pm EST. In this webinar, we’ll be doing a deep dive into the exact mindset shifts needed to tackle the holiday season, and giving you some tools and tips to use over the next few months to make this your healthiest holiday season yet!
To learn more, and secure your free spot, sign up here.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not impossible to stay on track with our healthy habits throughout the last two months of the year. With the right mindset, you’ll see just how easy it can be to enjoy the holiday season AND maintain health progress all year long. To learn more about how to shift your mindset for holiday health success, join me in my free live webinar by signing up here.