3 Steps to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain

This is the time of year when every where you turn there are sweets, parties and holiday networking events. It is hard to stay in control and avoid indulging, particularly when you are stressed or trying to fit so much into your schedule you can hardly find time for a decent meal. Yet you probably don’t want to find yourself in January unable to zip up your pants and wishing you had found a way to control yourself.

The good news is being in control is much easier than you may have thought. Here are 3 steps to avoid weight gain during the holidays so you don’t find yourself a size larger in the new year.

1. Notice What Your Body is Telling You
You can’t change your behavior if you aren’t really paying attention to what you are doing at the time you are doing it, and few people are conscious when they put food in their mouths. Eating is something we do without being aware of whether we are even hungry, if something other than physical hunger is driving us, or even when we have already gotten full and are beginning to feel sick.

Most likely you are eating without even knowing why you are doing it, and the only way to be in control is to start noticing the difference between physical and non-physical hunger. It starts by noticing every single you time you start to get full, and to notice with interest – not judgment. Once you start doing that, you may find you don’t like the way it feels. You can also notice each time to reach for food if you are actually hungry and in need of that food. You may also find in many cases that you aren’t eating for physical hunger. So what are you eating for?

2. Get Curious About Why You Are Really Eating That Food
If you aren’t eating because you need the food, something else is driving you to eat. That doesn’t make you wrong or bad. It just means that your behavior is being driven subconsciously, which makes being in control very difficult when you aren’t aware of what is driving your actions.

The most common drivers during the holidays are Mindless Excess, Ravenous Response, Restricted Rebellion, Emotional Repression and Subconscious Beliefs. These are five of the eight common reasons people overeat that I address in my book Inspired to Feel Good.

Read more about these five common drivers

3. Choose to Eat What Feels Best
The most important thing you can do for yourself during the holidays is to avoid dieting, which is a trigger for rebellious overeating when you inevitably blow it.

Instead, eat because you are hungry and then choose foods that leave you feeling good physically without feeling deprived emotionally. If you pay attention to how your body feels, you will know when you need food, when you’ve had too much and when food doesn’t really agree with you. You may even discover foods you thought you enjoyed don’t actually taste all that good.

Give yourself permission to have foods you love without getting full, and ideally pair the sweets and holiday treats with a balanced meal or snack. That way you will avoid getting sugar rushes and feeling sick. You will also keep your blood sugars and metabolism better balanced, and you will be able to feel the difference. Focus on eating what leaves you feeling good physically and emotionally, and you will be surprised to see you may naturally gravitate to healthier choices and combinations.

Have a great holiday feeling free to enjoy yourself without the guilt or the weight gain!

Kicking Food Cravings, Binges and Addictions with Intuitive Eating

Many people believe they are addicted to sugar, simple carbohydrates or other specific foods, because they crave them all the time and then seem to go crazy on a binge when they gain access to them. There is a good argument to support this belief in Dr. David Kessler’s latest book The End of Overeating, which puts the blame on the food industry for developing foods specifically to create this uncontrollable preoccupation and compulsive eating.

Yet, having worked with many people who struggle with cravings, binges and a belief they are addicted to certain foods, I know the issue is just as much driven by subconscious factors as bio-chemical ones. I also know you don’t have to give up these foods to be in control of them, as he strongly recommends.

Dr. Kessler’s research findings conclude the reason people crave specific foods is the combination of fat, sugar and salt often used in those foods to stimulate dopamine in the brain, which feels really good. Once you’ve had a food with this combination that stimulates arousal, you’ll want it again and again. This is certainly an important breakthrough in understanding why people are irresistibly drawn to food that isn’t healthy and struggle to stop eating even when they are full. No doubt, the food industry has taken full advantage of this potent combination, putting them in processed and fast foods where you’d least expect to find them, to keep people coming back for more and boosting their profits.

One approach to dealing with this is to simply stop eating all types of desserts, packaged and processed foods, fast foods, and most restaurant meals, and replace them with healthy whole foods with no sugar, fat, salt or emotional triggers. And that will indeed eliminate the cravings, for a while.

But like dieting, very few people can stick with eliminating foods they enjoy long term without feeling deprived. While Kessler acknowledges this problem by suggesting you rewire your circuitry by creating unappealing images of the food, this doesn’t address the real issue of deprivation backlash and the need for food satisfaction.

A better way to address foods that are designed to trigger cravings is to incorporate them into a healthy diet, so they are balanced with other foods to create satisfaction. Satisfaction is an important element of eating, and you are just as likely to overeat in an attempt to reach satisfaction as you are when you are over-stimulated by too much satisfaction.

6 ways to control cravings and binges without giving up favorite foods

1. Pay attention to how hungry, satisfied and full you feel. If you don’t know when you are satisfied physically or when you are full, you won’t realize you are overeating or appreciate how unpleasant it feels to get full.

2. Identify the food for what it is instead of calling it a bad food. Most highly stimulating foods, like cookies, are primarily a simple carbohydrate with saturated fat. It is harder to tell if it has much salt.

3. Balance this food with other foods that have complex carbohydrates, unsaturated fats and lean protein. If you want a cookie, then the trade off is to not have simple carbs or saturated fat in the rest of your meal or snack. When most of what you are eating is really healthy, having a little less healthy food doesn’t throw off the balance or make it unhealthy.

4. Give yourself permission to have this food in moderation when ever you balance it with healthier foods. When you eat food you think you shouldn’t, it creates a feeling of guilt and reinforces the belief that you should be deprived of it. This fuels emotional and rebellious eating, giving the food power over you. To take back your power, you have to stop seeing the food as a guilty pleasure or a forbidden food.

5. Really taste this food to see how much you enjoy it. When you aren’t over-stimulated or concerned about being deprived, you can more easily focus on tasting the food you crave. Most people find it isn’t as good as they thought and that healthier foods actually taste better.

6. Focus on creating satisfying meals with healthier foods. The more you remove the charge of highly-stimulating foods by allowing them in balanced moderation, the more likely you’ll gravitate to choosing healthier ways of being satisfied without feeling forced or deprived.

This approach, which is the basis of Intuitive Eating, addresses the emotional and bio-chemical cravings for foods designed to get us hooked. The less we eat of these foods, the less the food industry profits from them.

Breaking the Deprivation Cycle

You know you shouldn’t have that piece of cake, the Girl Scout cookies or the candy that is calling your name, but you just can’t help yourself. You just have to have some. The next thing you know, you’ve eaten more than you wanted and now you are feeling a bit full and guilty. Once again you just couldn’t seem to stay in control around food. Has this happened to you recently – like over the holidays?

Feeling out of control around food can happen to the best of us, and right now it is happening to a great many people who have tried so hard to stick to their New Year’s resolutions and are giving in to their forbidden foods. Succumbing to what isn’t on a diet is inevitable. The more you try to force yourself to resist something you want and believe you shouldn’t have, the more you rebel against that restriction. Have you ever noticed that when you are deprived of something, you want it all the more?

It is when you are depriving yourself that you are emotionally compelled to make up for being deprived. This is true whether you think you should be deprived of ever having the food again, will surely be deprived because of an upcoming diet, have just been deprived having stopped a diet, or were deprived in your past. Many people are overeating foods they were once unable to have, even as far back as fifty years ago. An older man in one of my audiences wanted to know what he could do about overeating desserts every night. It turns out he grew up in the depression when sugar was rationed and he seldom got desserts. He is still compelled to make up for having been deprived of the desserts he wanted as a kid.

This week pay attention to the foods you are trying to restrict and notice how this affects your behavior. Then try giving yourself permission to have that food in moderation and see if you really want all that much of it.

Read a longer version of this post

How to Feel in Control Through the Holidays - Open Tele-Program

I’m offering a one hour freebie call – How to Have a Healthier Holiday
Wednesday, November 19th at 8pm ET.

Join me to learn how you can stay in charge of your eating and fitness choices during the holidays.

We will talk about:
~ How to avoid overeating
~ How to deal with temptations
~ What works at a party
~ Strategies for holiday meals
~ Recognizing emotional eating
~ How to fit in fitness activities
~ Creating indoor fitness plans
~ Learning from past holidays

Are you ready to fully enjoy the holidays and to start the New Year feeling great about yourself?

Click here to register for dial-in details.

Get the tips you need to enjoy your holidays with confidence.

The Perfectionist Trap

How often have you resolved to have a healthier lifestyle by eating better, exercising more, getting enough sleep, taking a multivitamin or reducing your stress, and you start a routine to do one of these things? Yet for one reason or another you stop doing it. You may not even be sure why. Life got in the way.

Do you give up fairly easily because you didn’t do everything right as planned, you missed a few days or you couldn’t do what you set out to do for a whole week? Do you assume you failed because you didn’t do it all perfectly? Who says you failed. Where does that belief come from? Beliefs, if they don’t make sense for you, are things you can change. You can give yourself permission to do what you can, to learn from what gets in the way, and to do what is more realistic for you.

Life always gets in the way, and it is virtually impossible to always eat well and avoid wanting to indulge now and then. It is equally difficult to always fit in your exercising or always get in the full amount of activity planned. The best thing to do when things interfere with your best laid plans is to roll with the flow and make decisions that most honor your needs, knowing you don’t always have full control. When you do that, you can let go of those events or challenging days without judgment and focus on today and setting new goals for the upcoming week.

What matters isn’t about being exact, perfect and doing things just so. It is about setting an intention, doing the best you can, not judging yourself but observing with interest what happened and why, then learning what works better and renewing your intentions based on new insights.

Read a longer version of this post

Haunted by Food You Didn’t Get to Eat

You’ve probably heard of emotional eating, which happens when you turn to food as a coping mechanism for emotional support. Although at the time, you may think you just need or crave something to eat. That is the catch 22 of emotional eating. You aren’t eating to relieve the emotions you are consciously aware of. You are eating to suppress the feelings you are unconsciously pushing away. You may know you aren’t happy before you dig into your favorite comfort foods, but you may not really know the depths of your unhappiness or the associated unmet needs.

For some people part of their unhappiness and unmet needs can be traced back to an experience with food, where they were denied something they needed or wanted. This experience can be fairly recent or date back to your childhood – even if it was fifty or sixty years ago. In fact the further back it goes for you the more powerful the emotions around it can be, because it has been festering and kept suppressed for such a long time. That deprivation becomes something you are unconsciously trying to make up for, and coupled with this unmet need is the one thing that is keeping you from ever feeling satiated and resolved – the shadow of the enforcer that is silently judging you again and again when you succumb to doing what you were told you shouldn’t do. Is this happening with you?

Are you compelled to eat comfort or forbidden foods, unable to stop eating even when you are full, doubling up on portions, or losing control around certain foods or situations involving food. If so, take an interest in why that might be, without judging yourself for it. The judgment won’t allow you to dig a little deeper to uncover what is unconsciously driving your behavior. It may just be a past deprivation, one that you grew up with or a more recent experience from dieting.

Read a longer version of this post

Avoiding Thanksgiving Day Stuffed

Are you already starting to worry about overeating during the Thanksgiving holiday? It is such a tradition to eat until you are as stuffed as the bird that you may not even realize how full you get. Few escape the need to unbutton their pants or loosen their belts by the end of Thanksgiving Day. Why is that? Let me share three possible explanations you may not have thought of.

First is because we only get this meal once a year. Thanksgiving dinner includes fresh cut turkey, stuffing, pies and all the family recipes that get pulled out for this special occasion. When we finally sit down to dinner we know that this is a one-time thing, not to be repeated for another year. That is a long time, and we feel we have to get it now while we can, because we won’t get it again any time soon. So we sit down to dinner having been deprived of it for the past year and knowing we will be deprived of it again for the upcoming year. This sets the stage for overeating, often to the point of feeling sick. Did this happen to you last year?

Second, the meal takes hours of preparation and we gather ahead of time to socialize, nibble and wait for the big event. During this time we are impatiently waiting and at the same time often bored, doing preparation chores or talking with family members with whom we may not be that fond or we may not have much to say to. So we eat mindlessly to keep our feelings of frustration, boredom or annoyance at bay or to give us a reason for a diversion.

The third explanation is you may be feeling alone and wish you were with family or you are with family and wishing you were somewhere else. This can create emotions that are difficult to address and food is an easy way to push the feelings away. Food is a comfort and a coping mechanism for emotions. Do you anticipate some emotion during the Thanksgiving holiday?

This Thanksgiving be conscious of your hunger levels, find ways not to feel deprived, plan your day so you don’t get to the table filled up on hors d’oeuvres, and recognize if you are having some emotions so you can address them without turning to food. Then enjoy all your favorite things about the holiday meal.

Read a longer version of this post

Handling Halloween Candy Differently

There is always concern about how much candy kids are eating at Halloween, but what about parents who consume nearly half of what the kids are bringing home? Candy is a comfort food for many of us, and when lying around in bowls and bags, it becomes a temptress greater than most adults can resist. Do you find yourself unable to stop when it comes to Halloween candy?

Instead of gearing up for a binge fest and worrying about how you are going to handle having all that candy around the house, consider what is driving you to overeat and crave it and then put some strategies in place to help yourself eat much less of it.

Some of the most common reasons people can’t seem to stop at a few pieces of Halloween candy start with feelings of deprivation.

What does this have to do with deprivation? Everything. When you believe that you shouldn’t have something, you want it all the more. And the more you try to control the urges and deprive yourself, the more you obsess and overdo it when given the chance. This is human nature, and it is easy to see in children. We tend to forget that as adults we aren’t any different. Like kids we rebel against harsh rules and restrictions that are depriving.

Here is a way to have your candy without feeling out of control.

• Pick 2-3 pieces of the candy you like most for greatest satisfaction
• Eat the candy along with one of your meals to minimize high blood sugar levels
• Pay attention to when you start to feel full and stop
• Remind yourself that you can have more at your next meal
• After a few days when your favorites are gone, figure out the best way to get rid of the rest of it.
• You won't miss it because you've let yourself enjoy it
• And you can always get more at the store if you really want more

Read a longer version of this post