Emotional Eating During the Holidays
It’s that time of the year when you have to balance holiday fun, alcohol, food and emotions with diets, exercise and taking care of yourselves. This can be challenging most days of the week but the holidays bring with them numerous parties and family gatherings which makes taking care of yourself much harder.
Two ways to go about it
As I see it there are two ways you can go about this: eat what you want and start over after the new year or be kind and gentle with yourself and do the best you can: enjoy the holidays and realize that you will/should eat some foods that are probably not healthy for you but find time when you can take care of yourself so that you aren’t feeling totally out of control.
Control
Part of the reason people who are trying to lose weight feel bad is because they don’t feel like they are in control of what and how much they eat. You are in control of this and it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can eat some ‘bad’ foods and not exercise everyday and still find days when you eat better and exercise.
How do I take control
- Take out your calendar or whatever you use to schedule your daily life and if you don’t use anything to schedule your life find a blank calendar that you can use for the next month. Go and get it before you read on. 🙂
- In that calendar I want you to put in work and all other ‘things’; ie parties etc.
- If you have friends or family coming to visit write that in.
- Write in the holiday days that you know you are going to be with family and friends.
- Look at what days are left: on those days write in 1-2 healthy meals and ‘some’ exercise.
- Look at the days you have work, obligations, family/friends in town and the holidays. Are there gaps of time where you can eat 1 healthy meal and get a small amount of exercise that won’t take away from what you need to do? Can you include others in your exercise?
You can take some control over the holiday and not be run over by food and alcohol to the point where you feel totally guilty and remorseful. You can choose to have moments where you feel good about taking care of yourself. The important thing is to consciously choose those moments and follow through with as many of them as you can.
Emotional  holidays
Not only are the holidays filled with parties, food and alcohol but for many of you they are filled with a lot of negative emotion. I am imaging this usually means a lot of emotional eating. Why not try to be proactive with what some of these situations and emotions are going to be. Once you’ve filled out your calendar you will have a good sense of what your holidays will look like: family, friends, parties, etc. Now you can start to think about how you ‘think’ you are going to be impacted emotionally during these situations. For example, I am overweight, I have to attend my husbands work holiday party and I have to buy a dress. This congers up emotions (which for many leads to emotional eating).
Take out a piece of paper. Start to write down some of these situations, how you experience them, how you know you are going to feel and if you can how you are going to respond differently than you have in the past. For example, in the past when I’ve gone to my husbands holiday party and needed to buy a dress I’ve avoided it until the last minute, said I couldn’t find one and ended up wearing the same red dress from the year before. This has made me feel so ugly and pathetic that once at the party I end up eating too much and drinking until I pass out.
Free webinar on weight loss
I am offering a free webinar on weight loss on December 30th from Noon-1. You can sign up right here on my website from the home page. It’s called ‘Getting What you Want This Year!’
6-week emotional eating group
During the free webinar I will talk about my NEW and exciting 6 week tele-group on emotional eating.
I have a great blog slated for Wednesday talking about New Year’s Resolutions! Stay tuned!
Happy Holidays!
Dr. Michelle
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