5 Tips For A Diet-Free Holiday Season
Written by Isabel Vasquez RD, LDN
The holidays are approaching fast, which can bring up a lot of emotions—sadness, joy, excitement, anxiety, grief, gratitude.
Unfortunately, the holidays usually spark even more diet and weight talk, with people fearful of holiday foods and potential weight gain.
Therefore, it can be a tough time of year for those overcoming disordered eating, chronic dieting, or an eating disorder.
With more family gatherings, you might have to face relatives who tend to comment on your food choices and your appearance.
Below are 5 tips to help navigate those challenges so you can make the most of this holiday season without falling into the diet trap!
Ditch The Diets For Good!
Food is often a focal point of holiday time. Christmas cookies or big Thanksgiving feasts are common at this time of year, and lots of people worry about the calories present in these foods and how they can “healthify” them. They often talk about starting a diet once the new year comes.
So, it’s normal and natural for you to feel an increased urge to diet at this time of year. But the thing is, diets don’t work.
Dieting hinders our ability to connect with our inner cues.
It causes our hunger and fullness cues to diminish.
It causes our bodies to go into starvation mode.
It results in weight cycling which is harmful to our health, and it doesn’t result in sustainable weight loss or health!
It causes stress mentally because we feel we have to avoid our favorite foods, and it causes stress on our bodies physically because they are not getting the consistent nutrition that they need.
Be aware of the urge to diet as just an urge, and remind yourself that dieting is ineffective. Stay grounded in your healing journey.
Related: An Alternative to Dieting For When You're Done Counting Every Calorie
Show yourself compassion as you navigate societal (and maybe familial) pressure to diet while giving thanks to your here-and-now body for all it does for you daily.
Nourish Yourself Consistently
Around the holidays, it can be tempting to skip meals ahead of celebrations where you expect there to be a lot of food.
However, skipping meals leads to primal hunger—an extreme form of hunger. You’ll probably feel super irritable, have low energy, and become extremely focused on food.
Skipping meals makes you more likely to binge or feel out of control around food and eat far beyond comfortable fullness next time food is available.
That’s because your body doesn’t know that the lack of food was due to intentional restriction and not a famine, so it’s going to help you get in all the energy it can in case food isn’t available for a while again.
So, we recommend sticking with regular meals and snacks leading up to any holiday gatherings rather than restricting to “save calories”. This way, you can approach the holiday meal from a place of abundance and not scarcity.
It’ll also help you to be in a better mood so you can enjoy time with your loved ones rather than being hangry.
Reframe All-Or-Nothing Thoughts
So many of us get caught up in black-and-white thinking around food, especially after dieting.
That might look like going from strict diet days to “cheat days”, or perfectly tracking your intake and then saying “screw it!” and eating everything in sight.
During the holidays, it may look like eating a plate full of holiday cookies and then resolving to hit the gym and limit your food the next day. These are all disordered eating behaviors and signs of a poor relationship with food.
However, you can absolutely break this harmful cycle and find a happy medium.
You can stop swinging on the pendulum and find consistency somewhere in the middle, even during the holiday season.
Especially around the holidays, if you allow yourself to eat the foods you love, you can build trust and habituate to these foods, reducing the likelihood you will feel out of control around these foods in the future.
Remind yourself that you are allowed to eat and enjoy your favorite holiday foods. Remember that you are allowed to eat and enjoy leftovers, and you can eat cookies throughout the year, not just at this time of year.
Rather than planning how you’ll “make up” for your holiday meals, let yourself enjoy them and trust that your body will communicate its needs with you.
It may feel scary, but allowing yourself to eat and enjoy your favorite holiday foods without guilt is key to developing a better relationship with food.
Enjoy Your Cultural Foods
So many people in our Latine community have cut out the foods that mean the most to them because they think they’re ruining their health by eating them.
Unfortunately, we often hear that our cultural foods are bad for us in mainstream media (or we don’t hear anything about them at all and assume they aren’t healthy!)
In reality, this reflects a problem with those creating those recommendations more than it reflects an issue with our foods.
Our foods provide plenty of value: nutritionally, familially, culturally, communally, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally.
These foods helped our ancestors survive, and they reflect the beautiful culture passed down to us through our families.
From eating pan de muertos for Día De Los Muertos to enjoying pasteles for Christmas, we have beautiful food traditions that you deserve to enjoy without guilt. Our holiday eating practices are worthy of being celebrated and upheld, not discouraged.
You deserve to participate in your cultural traditions and eat your cultural foods! Don’t let diet culture take that from you this holiday season.
Set boundaries
We all know the holidays can come with tias, primas, and abuelas commenting on our body changes and our food choices.
We get criticized for gaining weight, but we also get criticized when we don’t eat as much as our abuelas want us to.
That’s where boundaries—everyone’s (not so) favorite thing to work on—come into play.
Setting boundaries can be intimidating; yet, it is super valuable, especially around the holidays. It’s an important way of advocating for yourself on your journey to make peace with food and your body.
Many of our clients find that setting boundaries helps them feel more empowered and supported by loved ones despite the initial discomfort.
You may want to set boundaries around weight and food comments ahead of time or be prepared to change the subject when unwelcome food or body comments are made.
You can also choose to leave the room when those topics are brought up or limit your time at the gatherings if it will be too triggering.
Final Thoughts
The holidays can bring up lots of food fears, but you can learn to navigate them skillfully while protecting your food freedom journey.
Centering yourself around why you decided to ditch diets, eating consistently leading up to family gatherings, letting yourself enjoy your cultural foods, and setting boundaries with family members can all help.
For an intro to intuitive eating for the holidays, check out our dietitian-led holiday masterclass.
If you liked this post, you may also like:
How to Reclaim Your Movement Practice
