Every year, around the end of October, I write lots of articles about healthy holiday cookies, nutritious renditions of Thanksgiving favorites, simple ways to stay slim during the holiday season, and so forth -- you know, all the things that are supposed to help a health-conscious person navigate through a season of holiday dinners, cocktail parties and school festivals.
Don't get me wrong: eating the right foods is important. But even the most creative dieting tricks and healthy stuffing recipes won't help if you don't follow them. Really, you already know what and how to eat. So why do you find yourself bent over a plate of brownies, or halfway through a second heaping helping of stuffing that you swore you wouldn't take?
Tricks don't work because they don't explore the underlying issues, the mental and emotional side of eating. And the holidays, more than any other time, are fraught with emotions. We're short on time, low on cash, and either overburdened with family responsibilities or feeling the pang of loneliness. Certain key dishes may also bring back happy memories of past holidays. And all those high-carb, sugar-rich holiday treats temporarily boost levels of serotonin, the brain's feel-good neurotransmitter, which makes us crave more.
Most of the time, you're not really hungry for pecan pie or holiday ham. You're craving a quick boost of feel-good brain chemicals to counter the effects of holiday emotions, or you're starving for connection, peace, happiness, a fond memory of past experiences.
This season, if you're hoping to maintain some control over holiday binging, look to the underlying cause -- the emotions themselves. Approach this exploration with a gentle, inquisitive air, rather than another must-complete item to cross off your to-do list. Here's how you might start:
1) Stay in touch with your feelings. Most of the time, we don't have a clue what we're feeling in any given moment. Make it a habit to check in two or three times a day; just before meals is the perfect chance to stay on top of your feelings, before they run your food choices.
2) Be in your body. Most of us walk around all day in a state of half-awareness, not really present in the room, on the earth, in our bodies. But if you're not in your body, you have no way of knowing when it's hungry or full. Get in the habit of checking in with your body, especially your belly, during the day. Where are your feet? How do your legs feel? Is your stomach tense, cold, empty, satisfied? Once you've practiced this for a while, it becomes automatic and makes it easier to choose foods based on what your body needs.
3) Examine your cravings. Binges and cravings are fraught with symbolism. The next time you find yourself in the throes of a craving, examine it. What is it about that food that you're really longing for? If you like crunchy cookies when you're stressed, is it the sweetness you're craving, or the texture? Biting down on something hard and crunchy relieves tension in the jaw, and that loud, crunching sound as you chew may literally drown out the noise in your head. If you're aching for warm eggnog, maybe the temperature and creamy texture is symbolic of what you need in your life: something warm, rich and soothing to fill up empty spaces.
4) Shift your focus. Imagine you're alone in the house with a refrigerator full of holiday leftovers. Just before you plunge your hand into a box of chocolates, or your fork into an apple pie, quickly shift your attention. Take your focus to something outside of yourself. It may be visual: look out the window at the snow, the clouds moving across the sky, the blush of sunset. Or it may be auditory: the sound of your children playing in the living room, a favorite song. Focusing on sensory input calms the mind, gets you back in your body and helps you stay present. It's also a fast, simple way to break the chain.
5) Be happy now. We think that once we get thin, or lower our blood pressure, or give up sugar once and for all, we'll be happy. Most of the time, though, it's the opposite: once you get happy, you'll have a better chance of achieving your goals. A few years ago, a study found that happiness may breed success, rather than the other way around. The researchers suggested that happy people were more likely to seek out opportunities that would ensure their success. I believe happy people are more likely to stick to a way of eating that works for them, and less likely to eat from stress, depression or anxiety.
At any rate, there's no point in delaying happiness, or loving your body and yourself, while you wait to achieve some possibly far-off goal. It's all a process, and it may be a life-long one. Enjoy your holidays -- and your life -- in the meantime.
Follow Lisa Turner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/InspiredEating
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.: Understanding Emotional Eating
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D.: New Strategies To Curb Emotional Eating
Dr. Cara Barker: How Good Can You Stand It? Revising the Holiday Game With 5 Solutions
Rather than cooking up something, one easy way of doing this is to mix some whey based protein powder with almond milk, or organic skim milk, and maybe add some flax seed powder for fiber.
Enjoy!
So I found I could allow myself a large meal on some days, but then that would be it - no more food for the day (and of course, no empty calories from soft drinks). That way I did not exceed my daily calories, but I could also enjoy a luscious holiday spread.
Needless to say, in order to get there I have had to practice some of your recommendations, especially #2. Listening to my body was the key.
Just because someone has a thought or feeling and then experiences hunger doesn't mean that the thought or feeling caused the hunger. In any case, since human beings are seldom devoid of a thought or feeling during their waking hours, by your logic, we could make the case that ALL eating is caused by thoughts or feelings.
People overeat because they're hungry, and they're hungry because the composition of their diets causes calories to be stored that would otherwise be used to fuel the body.
These types of foods are also considered "comfort foods" so it can lead to a vicious cycle of constant eating without feeling full. I am all for sampling seasonal treats that often have great memories or traditions associated with them, but I think the key is to mix in foods that are more likely to make us actually feel full. Foods like whole grains (e.g. oatmeal or whole grain breads), nuts, whole fruits, vegetables, and proteins.
The feeling of hunger is vastly different from the feeling of just wanting to snack or eat.
To me the answer to the question of why the obesity rate has doubled in the past 30 years isn't likely to be simply a doubling of mental and emotional issues in the population. Times weren't exactly easy back then either. I think it has a lot more to do with the types of foods that were readily available and consumed 30 years ago compared to what is available and consumed today. There are a lot more simply carbohydrates, sugars in our diets today then 30 years ago. And these are called empty calories for a reason. People can eat and eat these types of food and never feel food. Try doing that with raw nuts, raw fruit, or whole oats.
The foods we eat do matter, particularly in how much they satisfy our hunger which is a powerful biological motivator to eat.
My heart breaks for you. It makes me crazy that we spend so much on the WAR and so many of us here are suffering.
What city do you live in honey? We are in Tucson.
Really? Can this be true? For all of us? I would hope it's only true for a very few people. I always know exactly what I'm feeling.
What you are encouraging is nothing more than the restriction side of the restriction/disinhibition cycle that is responsible for most weight cycling.
Making people fear holiday weight gain is counter-productive and unhealthy. You create tension and fear where there ought to be none. Stop making holiday meals into this monumental three month challenge and and start recognizing that people who allow themselves to indulge over the holidays are less likely to be fraught with the disordered eating issues that plague most dieters.
Peace,
Shannon
FierceFatties.com
And of course you don't get overweight from a few weeks of the holiday season~ ! No one thinks that. But many people DO gain weight, more than they want to, during the holidays--and it's often not from eating and enjoying good meals with family and friends, but from overindulging in sugar and nutritionally devoid foods.
Thanks for your comments~
Deb
if you see the opposite look inside your self!
Treasure yourself, Ed
I find articles like this extremely tiresome, like being beat over the head over and over and over...it just never stops!
I'm tired of hearing about "holiday pounds" in October, and definitely tired of hearing about "healthy Holiday recipes" ---if you want healthy food, eat salads and plates of steamed veggies, but stop forcing it into the national conversation about Holidays! It's dysfunctional and disordered.
A cookie is a cookie, stop asking it to be something else! If you don't want to eat a cookie, don't eat the !@#$%^&* cookie, sheesh!
And is there really no grey area at all between "being bent over a plate of brownies or heaping bowls of mashed potatoes" and that mythological "perfect nutrition"? I'm also so tired of hearing the conversation framed in such extremes....who really does that? NO ONE!
It's not like it's day after day, week after week of holiday eating...it's an evening out, a holiday party, etc....stop making us feel like we can't even have them!