A foolproof plan for managing your diet during the holidays
If you're worried about "holiday eating," you're focused on the wrong thing. Change your thinking, change your habits.
This week kicks off the official high-stress season when it comes to diet and weight management. Below is my take on that. I’ll even throw the spoiler at you right now: there's no special plan, and in my experience that's the wrong way to approach the holiday season.
People tend to develop a myopic focus on the holidays, and for good reason: this is when most people surrender discipline and eat without structure, and come January, they pay for it, both on the scale and how they feel about themselves.
The “holidays” are essentially two days for most folks – Thanksgiving and Christmas. You can also throw in New Year’s Eve if you want. Even a Christmas party or two. It doesn’t matter, and you'll see why.
In most cases, we’re talking three days out of 365 – not even 1% of the year (.8% to be exact). Three days. Even five days are a paltry 1.3% of the year.
The best thing you can do during these three days is celebrate with your friends and family, and be thankful for all that you have in your life. Enjoy the time off work, seasonal cheer and football games. We are social creatures, and the holidays are a social time. There’s a ton of value in these traditions.
So when it comes to diet, focusing on three days and ignoring the other 99.2% of the year is a mistake. Sure, the holidays are diet triggers for most people, but they are nothing special in the big picture.
If you have control over the rest of the year when you stick to a larger diet framework, these three or five days become irrelevant.
The problem for a lot of people is that they tend to go off the rails on a holiday, and then for days or weeks afterwards. There’s the crux of the problem. When this happens, you are taking three days and turning them into 30 or 35 - or more.
In other words, you’ve gone from under 1% of the year affected by an undisciplined diet to about 10%. That’s a huge swing, enough to morph 'the holidays' into a diet boogeyman that lumbers on for two months. It’s the type of behavior that forces new gym members into a weight loss program in January only to have it fizzle out by late February.
So, for the holidays, truly enjoy them. ‘Regular’ days – meaning, the vast majority of the year – are when you want to adhere to an eating framework. If your diet overall is in poor shape, trying to limit what you eat or drink during the holidays will have literally no effect except to continue the trajectory you're on already.
Don’t sweat the details – sweat the big stuff. Cater to large numbers and timeframes. In this case, the ‘big stuff’ is what you do on every day that isn’t a holiday.
Have fun this holiday season. Family, friends, laughter and community are more important than ever as screens and distractions absorb more of our attention.
And then renew your focus on the rest of the year, when nearly all of your progress will be made.
Attack those days with a plan in mind.
Happy Thanksgiving fam. Be well.
Good advice!