How to Stay on Track with Your Eating and Health Goals During the Holidays

Between now and the end of the year, most of us will be navigating holiday parties, buffets, cocktails galore, and endless desserts, while also feeling busier and perhaps more stressed than usual. And while the holidays are supposed to be a joyous time of year, they can also cause significant holiday eating stress and anxiety.

Many people I talk to tell me they feel like they’re in a tug of war with themselves or their willpower this time of year.

They want to enjoy the holiday parties and buffets but end up overeating all the delicious food and feeling sick and full of guilt and regret. They want to be festive and bake with their families, but the truth is they don’t trust themselves to have that many sweets around the house without bingeing on them. They set purposeful healthy eating and exercise intentions for themselves throughout the holiday season, only to end up breaking those intentions again and again—especially on busy and stressful days.

So, how do you end this mental tug of war and feel good about your eating and health routines throughout the holiday season without needing massive amounts of willpower or having to follow rigid eating rules that suck all the joy out of the holiday season?

Here are 5 Tips to Help You Stay on Track and Stop Feeling So Stressed and Anxious Around Food this Holiday Season

 Before we jump in, let’s pause together for a moment to consider how you’re approaching food and nutrition. Because we live in a toxic diet culture that’s hyper focused on body shape and size, it’s common to view food primarily through the lens of weight, calories, and a bunch of dieting or so-called healthy eating “rules.”

One of many, many problems with this approach, though, is that weight, calories, and dieting rules have nothing to do with how hungry or full you are, which foods you enjoy, or how food makes you feel in your body. Since most of us don’t want to count calories or rigidly track our food choices for the rest of our lives, these approaches set us up for failure from the outset. (Click here to learn why calorie counting doesn’t work, and what to do instead!)

These rigid approaches can disconnect you from your body’s innate eating cues and undermine your ability to trust yourself to eat and enjoy foods in ways that feel good and support your health. They’re also time-consuming, inflexible, and unenjoyable, which means they’re typically the first thing to get tossed aside as soon as life gets busy, stressful, or overwhelming (ahem, do your holidays feel like this at times, too?!).

Beyond that, food is so much more than just calories and nutrients. It’s also love, social connection, tradition, culture, and so much more—especially around the holidays!

So, before you jump into any of the tips I’m about to share to help you stick with your healthy eating goals throughout the holidays, remember that at its best nutrition is gentle, flexible, and enjoyable. Healthful eating is not just about eating nutrient-dense foods but also having a happy, healthy relationship with food that enhances, not detracts from, your overall health and wellbeing.

Tip #1: Avoid Getting Overly Hungry

In my Intuitive Eating coaching practice, one of the most common things I see is people who eat very little or “so good” throughout the day, only to wind up struggling with overeating, nighttime eating, endlessly snacking or grazing, or choosing foods that don’t make them feel good later on.

Our bodies are extremely adept at making sure they get adequate energy from food to fully support essential functioning as well as all of our daily activities. Also, as I teach my clients, when we get overly hungry it’s nearly impossible to eat mindfully and with intention.

So, avoid the temptation to “save up” your calories for holiday meals or to ignore or try to hack your hunger. Eating nourishing and satisfying meals and snacks throughout the day—even if you’re planning to attend a holiday gathering—will actually set you up to make better food choices. Plus, you’ll have a much easier time stopping at a comfortable fullness point.

If respecting your fullness cues is something you struggle with, be sure to grab a free copy of my helpful guide, 5 Ways to Get Better At Respecting Your Fullness Cues.

Tip #2: Stop Trying So Hard to Restrict and Limit How Much You Can Eat, Especially When It Comes to Your Favorite Foods

Wait, what? You’re probably wondering how in the world this could possibly help you stay on track with your eating goals but let me explain.

Research shows us that the more dieters or restrained eaters try to restrict and limit certain foods the more likely they are to crave, overeat, or binge on those very same foods. It’s known as the restrict-binge cycle, and believe it or not, research shows us that this phenomenon can be triggered by even just thinking about restricting certain foods!

If you’ve ever committed to going on a diet or “cutting back” or “buckling down” with your food choices come Monday and then found yourself eating everything you plan to avoid or limit in a Last Supper style of eating between now and then, you have a real-life example of how this restrict-binge cycle plays out by even just thinking about restriction.

Rigidly hyper-monitoring what you eat or restricting yourself from eating foods you love is akin to pulling a pendulum far back to one side. In the process, you inadvertently spring-load the pendulum to launch back over to the opposite extreme when you do finally cave and eat those same foods that you’re working so hard to avoid.

Typically, when this happens, most people will sit at the “overeating” end of the pendulum for a while, until they just can’t take it anymore. At that point, they decide to recommit, buckle down, or choose another rigid diet or healthy eating plan—in effect, pulling the pendulum back once more and launching the whole frustrating cycle yet again.

To break the cycle, avoid pulling the pendulum back in the first place. Give yourself full permission to eat foods you enjoy throughout the holidays without shaming yourself for doing so or placing artificial limits on how much you can have.

Instead of telling yourself you “shouldn’t” be eating those foods, commit to savoring them with your full attention. Sit down with a plate and fork and as mindfully and non-judgmentally as possible tune into all the flavors, textures, and smells as you eat. Commit to enjoying what you’re eating to the fullest extent possible. Allowing yourself to be fully satisfied with your food choices is a powerful tool to help you eat what you love in a way that feels good too!

Tip #3: Flexibility and Compromise Will Minimize Stress and Help You Stay the Course

The holiday season is loaded with competing priorities and choice points around food and exercise. For example, perhaps you planned to go to the gym at 4 pm but then realize you need a last-minute gift for an office party later this evening and the only time to grab it is when you had planned to exercise.

Or maybe you bought ingredients to make a nourishing, home-cooked meal but after an unexpectedly demanding day of working and running errands, you’re exhausted and don’t have the energy to make it.

The potential pitfalls and extra demands on your time are endless, especially during the holiday season.

People tend to want to view food, movement, and other health behaviors through the lens of an “on/off” switch. You’re either doing what you intended or wanted to do—or you’re not. 

But the truth is, approaching food and exercise decisions with this type of all-or-nothing rigidity will often leave you feeling frustrated and defeated.

Instead of asking, “will I do this?” or “won’t I do this?” Practice asking, “how can I do something that will feel better than nothing?”

For example:

Maybe you can’t make it to that 4 p.m. gym class… but you can park further away and take the stairs while you’re out shopping for that gift and maybe even sneak in 10 minutes of yoga, squats, or a walk around the block before you head out to your party.

Perhaps you’re not going to make that recipe you earmarked… but you can still throw together a quick mini pizza on a whole grain English muffin with some fruit and a quick salad or protein-packed edamame on the side instead of ordering takeout

In other words, stay flexible and get creative. There’s no “perfect” way of eating, exercising, or caring for your body.

Learning to embrace the “imperfect” with a flexible, something-is-better-than-nothing mindset is a key anti-diet holiday tool.

Tip #4: Instead of Searching for More Self-Control, Embrace Self-Care—You’ll Find It So Much Easier to Stay on Track with this Simple Mindset Shift

Self-control conjures of thoughts of discipline, self-sacrifice, and mustering up the willpower to follow somebody else’s “rules” about how to eat or exercise or promote your health.

Instead, practice prioritizing self-care this holiday season by asking yourself two simple questions, “what am I feeling?” and then “what do I need?”

Maybe you’re feeling super stressed and anxious, and what would be helpful is some sort of enjoyable exercise to lower your stress levels and boost your mood. Perhaps you’ve noticed your digestion has been off or you’ve been slightly constipated and a veggie-packed, fiber-rich meal or two would be really helpful. Perhaps you’re exhausted and need to go to bed early so you can wake up refreshed and energized to go grocery shopping and prep some healthful meals tomorrow.

When you can figure out what you need and want to do to help yourself feel good, it’s so much easier to make helpful choices that will enhance your health and wellbeing versus when you’re just trying to force yourself to do something you think you “should.”

Tip #5: Expect to Overeat and Have an Action Plan in Place for When it Happens

Best intentions aside, it’s entirely normal to occasionally choose foods you wish you hadn’t or to eat too much and end up feeling poorly. Perfection isn’t attainable and it’s not a helpful goal.

Instead, consider how you can react in the most helpful manner when this does, in fact, happen. Ditch the negative self-talk self-induced guilt. You can’t shame yourself into better health and wellbeing because shame itself detracts from those things.

Remind yourself that what you’re experiencing is normal. Everyone overeats now and then.

Then, get curious, about the events surrounding that meal. Had you gotten overly hungry? Were you stressed out and disconnected from your body? Were you too distracted to eat mindfully? Did too many cocktails play a role in what or how much you ate? Had you been trying so hard to avoid certain foods that you ended up launching that restrict-binge pendulum we talked about above? Were you too tired to and burnt out to make intentional choices?

Any number of factors could have contributed to your overeating and feeling icky. Put on your food anthropologist hat, ask yourself lots of non-judgmental questions, and see what you can learn about your body, your eating habits, or your behaviors that will be useful going forward.

There is no failure when it comes to nourishing and caring for your body—only helpful feedback for what does and doesn’t work well for you!

Want help ending the battle with food and your body once and for all? My Thrive Tribe Intuitive Eating coaching group can help you find the happy, healthy middle ground with food, movement, and health-promoting self-care!