Weight loss for health

Below are five tips to help you handle holiday eating and overeating.

You can’t instantly rewire holiday habits still you can prepare a game plan to observe and neutralize some triggers.

1. Agree to keep your word. Then make a self-covenant that promises only what’s realistic and you know you can keep. Then think about some powerful yet easy things you can do to create boundaries of reason.

2. Agree to better manage the heavy bombardment of people, activities, foods, desserts and drinks? Think about past years and decide on ways you can change the outcome of stuffing yourself silly. Resist being unrealistic and setting up demands that are more than you can give. That means failure and punishment and even more eating so don’t set yourself up to be martyred. Starting now, ask yourself, how can you better manage?

3. Could you agree to make friends with yourself and raise the quality of your relationship with you? Start with little steps that focus on self-awareness. Begin with questions and work on this idea now.

Questions:

4. Are you willing to not stuff your plate with food and instead take smaller servings? Then when you go for seconds, you’ll be eating no more than what you would have eaten with a large portion.

Can you agree to not eat your least favorite food? Surely there must be one or two take it or leave it foods on the table you could decline. Can you agree to have one dessert? Or can you agree to sample taste all the desserts with a tiny sample and then pick one as your favorite to eat and limit it to one serving of moderate size? Can you agree to decline alcohol before, during and after dinner? Alcohol lowers and often eliminates barriers to resistance. The drink goes in and the hog comes out. There is no resistance at all with alcohol. Can you agree to decline sodas, juices and ciders? It’s sugar impact is huge. Try water or seltzer with lemon.

5. Stress impacts eating and holiday stress guarantees overeating. So what’s a stress buster idea?

Before you commit to an activity, ask yourself does it serve you? If not, do you have to get involved? Can someone else handle it? Do you want to spend your precious time on this? Are you willing to say no? If not, why not?

Can you set personal boundaries that examine, reduce and eliminate stress building to do lists? Are you allowing overwhelm to rule? Overwhelm causes pressure and stress buildup and that always demands release. Can you guess how? You know how!

You need to step back and evaluate are you living a high volume life with low quality returns? If it’s all about doing without supporting personal fulfillment or your goals for an enhanced lifestyle, then you incubate boredom, stress and empty consumption all leading to emotional eating.

Think about it and make a plan. Put your self-covenant in writing. Date it, sign it and mean it. It’s your word. Keep it reasonable, make it doable and experience all the joy and fulfillment of the holiday season without feeling deprived and without the guilt hangover for out of control eating. Stick to your agreement and enjoy!