It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of year except you can’t stop thinking about how you’ve ruined your diet at every festive event so far.
Depending on who you are, you might be saying “F it, I’ll start a diet in the new year” or you might be using a diet as an excuse throughout the holidays to turn down eating festive foods. These two situations are black and white, suggesting that when the holidays come around you either have to eat no cookies or all of the cookies. This holiday season, find your shade of gray and get your holiday cheer back with these 5 tips for healthy holiday eating!
Tip 1: Actually plan to incorporate the festive foods when meal planning throughout the weeks!
Planning to eat fun foods with meals and snacks will help to change your mindset about eating them. Coming from a place of restriction and then being bombarded off guard with the holiday treats you’ve been trying to restrict is the reason you feel guilty about eating them and end up eating more than if you had planned to offer yourself these festive treats routinely.
Tip 2: Make and eat the real deal. You do not need to healthify desserts. Dessert is dessert. Sugar is sugar.
Making the healthified version of sweets leads to meal dissatisfaction and the phantom food phenomenon. Phantom foods are the random foods you eat while trying to avoid a craving. For example, you crave a cookie but you told yourself you are not allowing yourself any cookies. So you decide to eat rice cakes instead, then dry cereal, then wafers (phantom foods) until you finally cave and eat cookies (the craving). If you had just allowed yourself a cookie, you would’ve crushed the craving and moved on, but instead, you ate more than anticipated and binge-ate the cookies.
Tip 3: On the day of the actual holiday, eat regularly.
For holiday dinners that occur earlier than your usual dinner time, have your breakfast per usual and perhaps a midday snack instead of a lunch to hold you over until the holiday meal time. Not eating all day can blunt your hunger cues and ruin your appetite for the festive meal so that you don’t even get to enjoy the food. Not eating all day could also make you hangry and lead to binge eating leaving you feeling miserably uncomfortably full on the couch (also ruining your festive fun).
Tip 4: Set your boundaries.
Of course, if you want seconds or want to take leftovers home for later, go for it and you do not have to apologize or justify. However, you have the right to honor your fullness and say “no thank you” to more food or dessert. Additionally, you have the right to continuously say “no” if asked multiple times. It’s not your job to make someone else happy by overeating.
Tip 5: Enjoy this time with loved ones.
As a dietitian, it pains me to see someone giving up family traditions to be on a BS diet. As cliche as this sounds, you do only have life to live and time is limited. Do you really want to be wasting your precious time restricting gluten (unless celiac) or no added sugar for no good reason? The key is finding balance and moderation with holiday foods, not restricting and subsequently binge eating them (talking to you, Diet Culture).
Bonus Tip: Have some self-compassion.
If this is your first year attempting to not restrict and eat intuitively, it is common to accidentally overdo it and that's okay! Give yourself some grace as you learn to develop this new skill called habituation. Habituation is the process of something getting less and less special with each experience- Like driving a new car gets less exciting with each drive. View your eating experiences just as collecting data and use that data to inform future decision-making. You got this!
With these 6 tips, I know you will find a shade of gray that will work for your lifestyle to allow an all-foods-fit mentality. Feeling neutral about foods is an important skill that can be developed, even after years of believing some foods are “good” and some foods are “bad.” Food guilt and stress are not side dishes. Enjoy your holidays TastyCait family. Find me on Instagram @tasty.cait.rd and DM me what tip you found most helpful as I love to hear from you!
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