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If you google “Holiday Eating Tips” there is no end of diet garbage that comes up.
Holiday diet eating tips that deny you types and amounts of food also deny you the pleasure of the season. And let’s remember that diets don’t work anyway!
Instead, here are my tips for relaxed and fun holiday eating.
⚡ Ignore all advice that is rooted in a negative attitude toward eating. That includes “portioning” (just another way to restrict), avoiding certain food groups or macronutrients, or trying to trick yourself out of eating what or how much you really want. Strive instead for a positive attitude toward eating, which means nourishing yourself, trusting your body, and enjoying food.
⚡ Give yourself regular meals and snacks throughout the day. So many people coming from diets and disordered eating don’t feel their hunger until it is so intense it’s unpleasant. That can make eating unpleasant, too, when you need to eat so much so fast. Diet tricks like “saving your calories” can lead to arriving at a meal ravenous and then overeating and feeling sick. Regular, good tasting meals and snacks will enable you to eat exactly what you want at all the special meals and feel well doing it.
⚡ Eat exactly what and how much you want of the foods you enjoy. Permission is the name of the game. Your brain and body need to know they can get enough of what they want so you can calm down and eat enjoyably. So many people think this is counterintuitive but research shows that unconditional permission to eat enables us to eat the right amounts for our body. Why? Because eating is internally regulated – not externally!
⚡ Set some loving boundaries for yourself and others. While I don’t recommend you police everyone’s conversation for diet talk, you don’t have to participate. You can remain silent, or try to subtly change the subject, or politely leave the conversation. You can also participate by stating your views. (“I don’t do diets anymore, want to hear about it?” is probably a great conversation stopper! Be prepared for disagreement.). You can set a firm boundary that friends and family members don’t talk about your body. Simply state, “My body [size, shape, health] is not available as a topic for conversation.” Then change the subject. Remember no one has to agree with you, nor you with them. “Agree to disagree” is a great way to end uncomfortable conversations.
I hope you get to spend your day with people you enjoy eating food that is good! If you’d like to hear even more on the topic, check out this classic Dietitians Unplugged episode about holiday eating!
Do you struggle to feel good about eating?
The Peaceful Eating Jumpstart can help you go from chaotic eating to feeling relaxed about food! Early bird pricing is in effect and another BIG bonus is available when you enroll by Friday, December 30th. Come join us and feel good about eating!
Start your path to normal eating with my free guide, 5 Strategies to Stop Overeating
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Does the idea of eating to satisfaction confound you?
If you’ve struggled with being on and off diets, the idea of feeling “satisfied” at the end of a meal might be really hard to grasp.
Because the concept of satisfaction in itself is nuanced.
You can be full, but not satisfied.
(think of eating a huge salad when what you really felt like was a cheeseburger)
Or, you can be satisfied, but not necessarily full.
(think of a really rich food you enjoy that you find you can’t eat much of all at once*)
And sometimes, you can be both full AND satisfied. It’s a nice, comforting feeling.
But here’s the problem: you can really only experience satisfaction if you aren’t starving all the time.
If you are trying to limit how much you eat to control your weight, you are more likely to swing between always-hungry and too-full. And if you are coming off the diet, you may spend a LOT of time in too-full mode.
What to do?
First, make sure you are well-fed. Adequate nutrition isn’t about eating as little as possible (in fact, that’s called “poor nutrition”). Make sure you’re getting regular, filling meals throughout the day. Find your hunger first and honor it. Then you can practice listening for satisfaction.
It may prove elusive at first, but with enough time and practice (and no judgment), you’ll begin to learn to eat with satisfaction. It’s a delicious feeling!
*if you are actively dieting, you may not be able to experience this right now
Start your path to normal eating with my free guide, 5 Strategies to Stop Overeating
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Let’s talk about the lie that fat bodies are inherently unhealthy.
The whole, complex and nuanced truth is: fat bodies can be unhealthy or healthy. Thin bodies will be unhealthy or healthy.
In our current society, however, we will blame poor health on fatness, and good health as a result of thinness.
This is called weight stigma.
Janet Tomiyama’s research showed the uselessness of BMI in determining health status. BMI as a diagnositic tool dramatically over-diagnosed fat people as unhealthy and under-diagnosed thin people as unhealthy. Clearly, using BMI helps no one at the doctor’s office.
Fat bodies are often under attack from childhood. Chronic food restriction, over-exercising, weight cycling and the effects of weight stigma are harmful to health. Studies that correlate illness with fatness rarely consider the effects of chronic dieting and weight stigma. These are confounding factors.
Behaviors (such as exercise) — more than size — have a greater impact on health, and the evidence is clear on this. That means eating well and fitness and taking care of the various other parts of life can support our health. Many people can do this. Many can’t. As always, health is not a measure of anybody’s worthiness.
Let’s remember: Health is complicated and means different things to different people and is not always 100% within our control.
Ignore the lies of diet culture that tell you fatness is inherently unhealthy and cause you to do worse things for your health (like dieting). Do your best with doing healthy things (which do not include restriction) and leave the rest — like size and shape — up to your personal biology.
Need help with eating?
Wondering where to start with working on “health?” If years of dieting has left you with a chaotic relationship to food, that’s the place to begin. The Peaceful Eating Jumpstart small group coaching program starts September 6 and is filling up fast! Come and join us if your eating needs help! Details here.
Start your path to normal eating with my free guide, 5 Strategies to Stop Overeating
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“If I give myself permission to eat anything, I’ll only eat ice cream, cookies and cupcakes forever!”
This is a fear I hear from clients wishing to eat more normally but still unwilling to trust that they contain within them the ability to make wise decisions with food.
When I talk about giving yourself permission to eat all the foods, I really mean all the foods.
Of course, I still want you to focus on giving yourself satisfying meals regularly so that you are getting enough. Enough is important because on diets no one ever eats enough.
So when a client says, “But I’ll only ever eat ice cream for the rest of my life!”…
I say: Okay, let’s try it. Just eat ice cream for all your meals.
Most people think about this and recognize instantly this is not actually appealing. They already see how bored of ice cream they’ve gotten in the few moments of thinking about it.
But sometimes we need to see how this goes. Sometimes someone has to feel it for themselves, in their bodies. We focus on them giving themselves true permission when they eat the food. We make sure they have enough of this food so they won’t run out quickly. I suggest putting the food on a plate, or a bowl, and eat without distractions like the TV or phone (this last one is hardest).
In the many years I have been doing this work, I have never seen anyone eat only sweets for the bulk of their meals the rest of their lives.
Bodies don’t actually like that. Bodies crave a diverse array of foods.
And it doesn’t mean they never eat sweets either. That’s not the goal. The goal is to enjoy the foods they want in quantities that feel good for them.
And they do this.
And you can too.
This is exactly the kind of thing we focus on in my small group coaching program, The Peaceful Eating Jumpstart. Next group starts September 6 and is filling up fast! Come and join us if your eating needs help! Details here.
Start your path to normal eating with my free guide, 5 Strategies to Stop Overeating
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One of the very seductive tactics of the weight loss industry is to convince us that we need to diet to not only “look better!” but also that it is necessary to lose weight to improve your health.
This is not entirely accurate. (especially when we know that diets don’t work very long for most people)
So what works?
In fact, there are many many things you can do to improve your health without having to go on yet another diet. This might look like:
⚡Eating meals regularly throughout the day
⚡Not skipping meals
⚡Aiming for some balance in your plate (protein, fat, carbs)
⚡Exploring ways to include more fruits and vegetables in your diet
⚡Finding exercise that works for YOU and is not focused solely on “burning calories”
⚡Listening for and honoring your hunger and fullness cues
⚡Giving yourself permission to eat as much as you want of all the foods you love
Doesn’t pursuit of health sound SO achievable? That’s because it is!
Except when…diet culture has wreaked havoc on your relationship to food and your body. When you are so convinced you must lose weight to be healthier. When you remember all those negative messages you’ve received about larger bodies.
Yes, then pursuing health becomes more difficult. Then you cannot start with nutrition…instead you must start with healing the eating relationship.
The good part is, developing a healthy, all-foods-fit relationship to food IS healthy. Why? Because this gives your body and brain a chance to hear its natural inclination toward health.
I love seeing the light go off for clients when they suddenly realize they can trust their bodies to make wise choices for them. All it took (and sometimes this takes A LOT of work) was to turn down the critical noise and turn up the trust. And they do get healthier, too!
So no, the drudgery of a weight loss diet isn’t necessary to improve your health! There is a better, more achievable, sustainable and most importantly, enjoyable way.
Are you in need of help with your relationship to food?
Are you struggling to get to this place of gentle nutrition or peace with eating? You’re not alone. My Peaceful Eating Jumpstart Group Coaching Program will be opening for enrollment soon and is designed to bring you relief from emotional eating, binge or overeating or just plain chaotic eating quickly. Stay tuned for more details coming soon (my email list will be notified first – get on my list by downloading my free guide).
Get my free guide, 5 Strategies to Stop Overeating
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The problem with improving how you feel about your body by losing weight is that it teaches you that there is only one good way to have a body.
This way is:
The smaller body is a good body. The larger body is the bad body.
And since intentional weight loss efforts (aka diets) have such a dismal success rate (less than 5-10% for most people will keep weight off long term), there is a very good chance that you’ll eventually end up in your larger body again.
Sadly, our society reaffirms thin=good, fat=bad, so you’ll get plenty of compliments as you lose weight and none as you gain.
(even if you are healing from an eating disorder or disordered eating as you gain weight. Almost no one will congratulate you on this)
Dieting teaches us that if *normal* eating doesn’t make us thinner, we are doing something wrong.
Because dieting teaches us that fat bodies are wrong.
So if you feel bad about your body, look to a culture that expects conformity with narrow and unrealistic body standards. Look to diets.
There is a way out of this, which is body image healing.
This is not easy or fast work. It takes time and practice. It takes challenging and changing unhelpful beliefs. But it IS achievable, and so worth it.
To help you get on your way to a better body image, I created a FREE guide with some quick strategies you can use to start increasing your body image resilience today.
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We are born with the innate ability to learn how to trust ourselves with food.
This process starts in infancy.
To learn how to eat well, there had to have been enough food, provided regularly and reliably.
People who were forced into diet culture at a young age had this learning process hijacked. Diet rules which take over the child’s role of deciding how much to eat halt the internal learning-to-eat process.
Food restriction or coercion in childhood feeding takes away the child’s ability to learn to regulate food intake internally. In other words, to build trust in oneself when it comes to eating.
Even if you happily got through childhood with this process intact, an adult lifetime of diets will erode your trust in your ability to make wise decisions with food.
And by wise decisions, I do not mean “only eat healthy foods.”
(and “healthy foods” is a loaded term and means different things to different people, to the point that it has no useful meaning that applies to everyone)
By good decisions, I mean eating enough of the foods that are enjoyable to you.
Enjoying a variety of foods.
Experimenting with new foods on occasion.
Being flexible when it is needed.
Paying attention to hunger and fullness but not so rigidly that you can’t enjoy food when you sometimes aren’t hungry.
Providing meals to yourself reliably.
Making do with the food you have when you don’t have something more exciting.
If right now you aren’t at a place where you make wise decisions with eating, you can get there. Even if this wasn’t learned in childhood, it can be learned in adulthood.
It is a joy to watch my clients learn to trust themselves with food.
You can do it too.
Start your path to normal eating with my free guide, 5 Strategies to Stop Overeating
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This is just a quick PSA to say that improving your body image is possible.
(even when it feels like it isn’t)
It is not easy.
It takes undoing harmful beliefs and learning new tools.
It means realignment from needing to like how your body looks to knowing your body IS good.
It takes practice. Sooo much practice.
You don’t have to know everything to start. Here are some low-hanging fruit ideas to get you going:
- Listen to fat-positive podcasts (like Dietitians Unplugged!).
- Read fat-positive books about body image.
- Follow anti-diet and fat-positive social media accounts (there are sooo many).
If I were to pick one resource that would be super helpful right now, I’d say this podcast we did with Kristina Bruce about challenging unhelpful beliefs is at the top of the list.
I also recently created a guide with some simple practices that can help get you on your way: 6 Quick Strategies to Improve Your Body Image Now.
With practice and a ton of self-compassion, body image healing is possible.
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The great thing about learning to eat normally and feel relaxed about eating is that there isn’t just one way to do it.
Intuitive Eating is fantastic and it was one of the books I read early on after quitting dieting for good. It’s one way to learn to eat normally – meaning, listening to your gut (literally) when it comes to knowing when to eat and when to stop, feeling relaxed around food, and feeling confident that you are eating what is right for your body. (It is not a way to lose weight. Losing weight generally does not involve anyone feeling “normal” around food.)
Intuitive eating is one of the ways to learn to eat normally, but it isn’t the only way. There are several other models of non-diet eating, but for now I’m going to talk about my absolute favorite, Ellyn Satter’s Eating Competence model. This was the model that really clicked for me personally and now I use it professionally as well.
Like intuitive eating, this model also trains you to eat according to internal regulation cues, but focuses on the discipline of providing yourself (and your family) rewarding meals at regular times, and the permission to eat as much as you like at each meal. Both IE and EC reject diet mentality and weight manipulation and embrace body diversity, both use internal signals of hunger and fullness to regulate eating. But EC relies more on meal structure to make sure you are eating while IE puts honoring hunger and fullness cues at the forefront of the work. This is useful for my clients who don’t feel hunger signals after years of dieting!
Most importantly, this model hinges on unconditional permission to eat – whatever and as much as you like. Beware of impostors that try to take away that permission, with rules like “eat a vegetable before the rest of your meal,” “fill up on water so you’ll eat less” or “sit and chew your food slowly.” No “tricks,” just permission. If you find yourself making rules about how much to eat that don’t involve how much you actually want to eat, always try to come back to this statement: “I can eat as much as I want.”
If you’re struggling with intuitive eating, you have some options. There isn’t just one way to do this non-diet thing, which is a great thing!
