It’s that time of the year again. The time where your healthy habits that you’ve been so consistent with for the last 10 months just seem to go out the window. During the holiday season, it feels impossible to stick to your typical nutrition, fitness, and health routine. So, you tend to just “fall off the wagon,” or put your health completely on the backburner until January 1st (or…January 2nd when the hangover wears off).
But, this 2 month “break” is really starting to get to you. Feeling like you’re yo-yoing with your weight loss and health goals every year, having to start from square 1 on January 1st over and over again, never seeing the health transformation that you want to see because you’re always off-and-on with your healthy habits during this time of the year. You’ve tried everything to try and stay consistent or not “ruin your diet” during the holiday season, but nothing seems to work.
In this post, I’m going to talk about why this seems to happen year after year after year, and what you can do THIS year to avoid falling off the wagon so you can make this your healthiest holiday season yet.
November 1st, We Turn “Off”
Listen, I get it. For all of us, the holidays are a tough time to stay consistent with the routine that we’ve developed over the past year. Busy schedules, a ton of parties to attend, tasty temptations everywhere you look, food pushers around every corner, traveling to mom & dad’s (who happen to make your favorite holiday cookie recipe that you can’t resist every year), and having the kids home for 1+ weeks means your normal routine is disrupted. There’s no way any of us can stick to our typical healthy eating/dietary pattern that we’re normally consistent with for the rest of the year.
But, for many of us, not being able to be consistent means that we just fall off completely when it comes to our health/diet/nutrition. Instead of modifying, scaling back, or adjusting what we normally do to fit into our busy schedule, we just completely put health on the back burner until we’re back to our regularly scheduled routine.
Because let’s face it, when we’ve “blown” our diet with one piece of pie at a work event, what’s the point of having a healthy dinner? If we can’t get our normal one hour workout class in every morning, why bother even trying to go for a walk, or do a bodyweight routine in the basement?
The Switch Mindset
I call this a Switch Mindset. Just like a lightswitch, your healthy habits are either turned off, or on. There’s no in between. It’s all-or-nothing. This mindset causes many of us to fall into the trap of being “off” with our nutrition and other healthy behaviors every holiday season. Going completely overboard with our eating, not working out for 2 months straight, gaining weight, and undoing all of the hard work we’ve put into our health transformation over the past year. Causing us to start on Jan 1 from square 1, with promises of making the next holiday season better.
With the Switch mindset, we’re thinking that the holiday season can only be fun & enjoyable OR healthy. We’re not realizing that there’s a way to have both. We’re not giving ourselves the chance to be able to have both. To make fun holiday memories with our families, enjoy special treats that only come around once a year, celebrate with friends, AND ALSO make sure we’re focusing on our health as much as possible. Making the Best Possible Option (BPO) with food choices when we can, planning ahead to control what we can control, adjusting our typical nutrition plan to match the needs of the season. So that we can wake up on Jan 1 the same way we woke up on Nov 1.
A Different Mindset for a Different Outcome
If we go into the holiday season with the same mindset that we’ve had the last few years, the Switch mindset, we’re inevitably going to get the same results. We’ll decide that because there’s no way to be “perfect” with our typical healthy routine, we’ll just put our health completely on the back burner for the next two months. Putting our health transformation “on hold” once again, and ending 2022 the same way we ended 2021 (and 2020…2019…2018…1999?).
In order to wake up Jan 1 feeling guiltless, proud of the progress you’ve maintained, and confident in your ability to continue with your health transformation for good, it’s absolutely necessary to modify your current nutrition and health program to meet the busyness of the season. And, in order to do this, we need a different mindset about health and nutrition. We need to adopt what I like to call, a Dial Mindset.
I know for many of us with the holidays coming up, the anxiety around ruining your diet over the next few months and undoing all of your health progress you’ve made over the past year is high. Which is why I’m doing a deep dive into the Dial Mindset and other mindset strategies needed to help you stay consistent with your health goals over the holiday season in my free live webinar, The Secret to Holiday Health Consistency on November 9th, 2022. In this webinar, I’m going to help you uncover what your own mindset challenges might be that hold you back from being able to maintain your health progress over the holiday season. And give you some exercises and tools that you can use this year to make this your healthiest holidays yet. To learn more, and sign up for your free spot, click here.
This year is the year that we’re going to stop “turning off” the lightswitch when it comes to our health over the holiday season. We’re going to give ourselves the opportunity to both have fun and enjoy the holiday memories with loved ones, and ensure that we’re finding a way to make our health a priority all the time. We’re going to adopt a Dial Mindset for our health and nutrition over the holiday season, so we can wake up on January 1st excited and confident in our ability to maintain our health transformation all year long. Who’s with me?! Sign up for your free spot in my live webinar here.