Avoiding (unwanted) holiday weight gain...
While the same principles apply to gaining excess weight and / or body fat any time of year, the holidays do bring a unique set of circumstance for many of us.
OVEREATING. This is simply eating more than your body requires for fuel and is the case if you are at a weight or body fat percentage that YOU believe to be greater than you'd like it to be for optimal health and mobility. Emphasis on YOU here because I strongly believe YOU are the only one that gets to decide this.
Here are a few of the reasons weight gan can be accelerated this time of year:
Baggy clothes help us 'forget' about our body and hide.
Seasonal Affective Disorder and / or lower Vitamin D levels wreak havoc on our emotions and ability to choose our long-term goals over short-term satisfaction.
Heightened emotional states - both positive and negative - usually exist this time of year. Where you have big emotions, you will often find overeating.
A false promise of a clean slate coming on January 1st tends to 'allow' us to throw caution to the wind between now and then.
Greater access to comfort foods, social events, alcohol, etc.
Here are 4 tips you can start to implement to help right away...
1) Stop over-restricting. When you focus so hard on avoiding certain foods, and then have more access to them (such as this time of year), it often has an 'opening of the floodgates' sort of result. Allow the 'fun' foods to exist in your life at a frequency that you look forward to, but also that allows you to move closer to your goals.
2) Trigger Foods. Remove any food from your house that you just cannot control yourself around. Maybe it's peanut butter? Maybe it's ice cream. If you love ice cream but can't control yourself around it, remove it from the house and just go out to get a cone - or single serving - when you want it.
3) When you find yourself reaching for the food that you don't want or need, ask yourself this series of questions:
What's going on with me right now?
Will food help? (If the problem is not hunger, then food is not the solution)
If not food, then what WILL help right now? (Maybe you just need a break)
4) Delayed gratification. Allow yourself to have whatever it is you're craving....but only after 5, 10, or 20 minutes. Even if you end up eating THE SAME amount of food after that time, it's still a huge win because you are teaching your toddler brain that it won't always get what it wants, when it wants it. In turn, the intense cravings (tantrum) will slowly dissipate, reduce in duration, frequency, and intensity. Win!
I'd love to hear from you now...do you struggle with overeating? I don't know anyone who doesn't at least sometimes! I'd love to help. :-)
XO,
Tara