An all-or-nothing mindset and dieting during the holidays typically sets us up for a seemingly endless trip down the diet culture spiral, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how to practice self care during the holidays and lean into your joy.

Holiday Self Care Without the Diet Culture

The holidays can feel particularly charged for many of us. They’re of course full of joy, gratitude, warm memories, sweet traditions and precious family time. But they can also hold a lot of heaviness. Strained relationships, past hurts and stress come up for so many of us during this time.

I am fully aware that the holidays are not just about the food, but food is a central piece to many of our end of year celebrations. Food is a beautiful way to share love and connect with the people dearest to us. To celebrate culture and bring people together. But I also do know this is a time that can encourage more pressure, compensatory behaviors, and all or nothing practices with diet and lifestyle.

Turkey trots, holiday hustles and new year new me promises stem from the discomfort many of us feel about what it means to lean into the pleasure and joy of celebrating around food.

But I can promise you that your energy is far better spent experiencing joy in the present rather than worrying about a couple days off of your routine. Know that what you eat is just one aspect of your health, not the full picture…over obsessing and overcompensating here will be an energy drain and often discourages us from consistency.

Joy is an essential healing nutrient. On a biological level, we know that positive emotional states have beneficial effects on the body from immune health to cardiovascular health to mitochondrial health. Finding balance between leaning into enjoyment while still practicing nourishment is ultimately where the magic happens here. Maintaining a certain level of consistency and also permission to truly ~enjoy~ yourself during the holidays can prevent the yo-yo effect that is so tempting in the new year.

Why Dieting During the Holidays Doesn’t Work

In creating longterm health and longevity, your daily routines and your FOUNDATION take the highest priority. In my clinical experience, consistency with these routines is best approached with a good, better, best mindset VS. all or nothing.

I want you to take a moment to honestly reflect on whether or not this has ever been true for you: You show up to Thanksgiving or your holiday celebration, you see the table packed full with all your favorite traditional dishes that you look forward to each year. But you’ve been really trying to kick things into gear and be serious about your health goals. So you tell yourself you’ll just have a little taste of everything and insist that you’re too full for dessert. But then the pie and cookies come out and it feels impossible to resist. The leftovers the next couple days are calling your name, so you promise you’ll set a strong goal for the new year and really stick to it this time.

This is the diet cycle, and it can be viciously difficult to break free from. When we lead with the all-or-nothing mindset or one of restriction, we will always swing back to our old habits. This is why dieting during the holidays, or really any time of year, doesn’t work.

Instead, we want to give ourselves full, unconditional permission to lean into our joy during the holidays AND employ the right strategies consistently throughout the entire holiday season to drive real, meaningful change in our health. When we can enjoy our food without limitations, while also learning to nourish our body completely, we will slow the pendulum’s swing and finally find balance.

How to Practice Healthy Eating During the Holidays

Our body still does require nourishment and care during the busy holiday season. Perhaps you can remember years past where you overindulged all season long and felt fatigued, sluggish and foggy come January. This is another way the all or nothing mindset can show up.

Instead, we want to strike the right balance between choosing joy during the holidays, while also supporting our health and setting ourselves up for long-term success on our health journey. There are small, simple ways we can practice healthy eating during the holidays without falling into the trap of restriction.

Taking care of our health through nourishment is a form of self care, as is giving yourself unconditional permission to enjoy your favorite special foods. By developing habitual self-care practices ahead of the holiday season instead of compensating with them after over-indulging, we will be able to fully be present in our joy during this season without feeling the intense need to course correct and swing back into the diet cycle in the new year.

Here are my six holiday self care tips to help you feel your best and find balance this season.

1. Practice blood sugar balance

Walking into a holiday with balanced blood sugar helps you eat with intention vs. impulse. When our blood sugar is constantly spiking and crashing throughout the day due to inconsistent meal timing and lack of balance in our food choices, we typically feel hangry, experience strong cravings and overall feel more out of control around food.

By building meals that support blood sugar balance regularly throughout the day, we can feel more grounded and regulated around our favorite foods and are better equipped enjoy them without binging.

Pro tips:

• Start your day with a balanced breakfast to anchor your blood sugar for the day. Try to ensure you have a source of protein, fiber and carbs present. Yes, carbs! Our body is primed to best make use of carbohydrates in the morning, so we want to take advantage of this window to provide ourselves with energy.
• Pack strategic snacks for holiday travel or to break up long days. If we’re traveling and we don’t have any snacks ready to go, this is when we feel most called to go for the fast food or load up on snacks at the gas station. Jerky, nuts, clementines, almond butter packets, crackers and dried fruit and can be great travel-friendly snacks to have on hand.
• Eat every 3-4 hours to keep you off the blood sugar roller coaster. When we go too long without eating, our blood sugar will crash. These lows can leave us feeling irritable and ravenous, which can lead to a lot of food noise impacting our decisions around our next meal. Being thoughtful about meal timing is just as important as WHAT you eat at meals.
• Create balance in your meals using the Nourished Plate with a “good, better, best” mindset. Try to have a protein, quality carb, starchy veg and source of fat at all of your meals. But remember – There’s no such thing as perfect here. We’re looking for balance overall throughout the day and week.

2. Create a balanced plate that you enjoy

I just mentioned my method for creating balanced meals above. Incorporating foods from different food groups is key to nourishment, but the other piece of the puzzle is choosing foods you enjoy. If we’re constantly reaching for foods that don’t sound good to us, or never allowing ourselves to enjoy our favorite foods, we’ll ultimately feel restricted, emotionally unsatisfied and more likely to binge later.

Each time you’re preparing for a meal, ask yourself what sounds good to you. Then aim to round it out into a balanced plate. Here you can make sure you are including your favorite foods that support emotional satisfaction while also building a meal that is going to create comfortable physical satisfaction too.

For example, if you’re really wanting to have a scoop of the leftover mac and cheese from Thanksgiving, but feeling like you should have a salad because of everything you ate on the holiday, how could you meet yourself in the middle? What if you gave yourself permission to have the mac and cheese, but paired it with a leftover slice of turkey and a side salad of arugula, cranberries and chopped nuts? If we just opted for the salad, we would likely still go back for the mac and cheese later.

To put it simply, we need to practice nourishing our physical needs AND our emotional needs.

3. Keep an abundance mindset

When you can adopt the mindset of permission with food, you can make choices from a place of neutrality vs. lack.

If you’re constantly telling yourself a story of what you are and are not allowed to eat, we inadvertently put the off limits foods on a pedestal. And when we’re really longing for those foods up on their pedestal, they start to seem shinier and shinier the longer we go without them. At some point they become irresistible and we lose control.

Instead, we want to focus on ADDING foods to our plate instead of what we need to take away. In addition to your slice of pumpkin pie, could you add a sprinkle of pecans for fiber and protein? What if you allowed yourself to eat the holiday cookie, while pairing it with a snack board with a Chomps stick, almonds and carrots?

If you are finding yourself feeling impulsive with food around the holidays, check in to see if there is restriction with food in your day to day. Setting food rules and too much rigidity with food ultimately fuels impulse and feeling lack of control especially around the holidays! Giving yourself permission to enjoy food mindfully and without guilt can release this yo-yo tension.

4. Ask yourself, what do I need

During this season, we’re very hyper-focused on what we’re giving to others. So much so that we forget to check in with ourselves. This is where practicing self care during the holidays becomes critical.

I know it’s an old and tired saying, but you cannot pour from an empty cup. When you feel yourself getting caught up in the energy you’re expending while giving to others, take a moment to check in and make sure you are also giving back to yourself. Fill up your cup with practices that allow you to recharge and feel in body. Remember it is ok to say no and important to hold your boundaries, especially during a busy season with a lot of demands.

When the stress of the season and continual dismissal of our own personal needs starts to build and catch up with us, it can leave us feeling energetically depleted and can exacerbate the all-or-nothing mindset. Aim to proactively schedule in some of your favorite self care practices during the rush of the season and prioritize that time just as much you prioritize the time spent on those around you.

5. Practice eating hygiene

Especially when we’re stressed, busy and strapped for time, we tend to rush or skip meals, which can really impair our digestion and leave us feeling less than optimal. When we don’t take the time to sit down and fully enjoy our meals regularly throughout the day, we’re more likely to experience bloating and GI discomfort, which can interact with other stressors we’re feeling around foods and worsen any negative thought patterns we’re feeling tangled within.

Eating hygiene practices can help boost digestion, support mindfulness and help us feel grounded with eating and overall will increase emotional satisfaction at meal times. If this term of eating hygiene is new to you, start with these 3 tools:

1. Smell your food before eating. This helps to stimulate the flow of enzymes to kickstart the process of good digestion.
2. Take 3 deep breaths at the start of the meal and remember to breathe while eating. We want to get out of fight or flight mode when we’re eating. Deep belly breathing is a proven way to help transition us into a parasympathetic state, or our rest and digest mode.
3. Chew your food well and remember that your stomach does not have teeth. Aim for your food to be the texture of applesauce before you swallow.

These self care practices can be very supportive for your physical digestive health with frequent celebrations and holiday meals, and they don’t involve any restriction of the foods on your plate.

6. Check in with hunger and fullness

Keep in mind your levels of hunger and fullness throughout the holidays. Checking in before the meal, during the meal and after the meal here can help keep you aware of how you are feeling in your body while eating. This mindfulness helps prevent feelings of over-fulness and digestive stress!

When we’re not regularly pausing to assess our hunger and fullness, we may quickly swing between ravenous and stuffed. Just as it doesn’t feel good to be uncomfortably hungry, I’m sure you’ve also experienced what it’s like to be uncomfortably full. Neither are an enjoyable experience.

Taking a moment to put your fork down a few times while eating and assessing your hunger cues will allow you to engage with the foods you enjoy, without eating past the point of feeling uncomfortable.

Healthy Holiday Recipes to Support Blood Sugar Balance

We don’t need to health-ify all our favorite holiday foods. But eating to promote blood sugar balance when we can during the holiday season will give us the space to enjoy our celebratory meals without feeling guilty or out of control.

If you’re looking for blood-sugar balancing, healthy holiday recipe ideas, give some of these a try this season:

• Best Brunch Frittata
• Holiday Brussels Sprout Slaw
• Fall Kale Salad with Butternut Squash, Walnuts and Pomegranate Seeds
• Double Chocolate Pumpkin Bread with Probiotic Cream Cheese Frosting
• Snickerdoodle Smoothie

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All this being said.. Enjoy your time with family and friends, enjoy your vacation, enjoy your holidays. Be present and feel joy in the moment. How you show up for yourself with self care and mindful approaches to eating ultimately allows you to feel your best and also impacts your ability to be fully available and in presence with your loved ones.

Wishing you a season of mindfulness, connection, joy, and love ❤️.