By J. Mercola, D.O.
Perhaps you made it past the first traditional day of overeating for the holiday season, Thanksgiving, without gaining unwanted weight. Perhaps you slipped but appreciate yourself too much to give up. Or maybe you’ve wisely decided to start focusing on your healthy diet right now. Whatever the case, ‘tis the season for the big test, as the holidays kick into high gear with parties and gatherings and the attendant "December glut" of food, food, food. Make it past these holidays with dietary success, and you are well on your way to a successful diet!
As just about all of the U.S. has heard by now, over 2/3 of Americans are currently overweight or obese, and these numbers are only climbing. There are multiple reasons for this epidemic, of course, but our national gluttony during the holidays certainly plays a part.
The first way to avoid the month-plus binge, of course, is to find an optimal diet plan that meets all of your body’s nutritional needs and won’t leave you feeling "starved" or lacking in some other respect. I have spent years developing an optimal nutrition plan, which is broken down by beginning, intermediate and advanced levels and available to all for free on my website, www.Mercola.com. This plan meets all of your nutrition needs while also providing strategies for addressing the emotional barriers and pitfalls of adopting a healthy eating pattern that so many other diets fail to address.
I also highly recommend, though, that you find out your body’s "metabolic type" in order to focus on the aspects of a healthy diet that are most important to you. While our bodies are all similar in many ways, we also each have a unique body chemistry; still, our chemistries can be grouped into a few specific metabolic types, such as the "protein type" or "carbohydrate type." Certain types are more likely to succeed on certain diets while being destined to fail at others. What’s more, by discovering your body’s ideal mix of fats, carbs and proteins, you will find a drastic reduction in your unhealthy food cravings. You should read one of the books on the market covering this subject in greater detail, including how to determine your own metabolic type, "The Metabolic Typing Diet" by William Wolcott or the classic on the subject, "Biochemical Individuality" by Roger Williams.
By knowing your metabolic type and adopting the healthy eating habits of a plan like mine, you will already have a great advantage in your battle against holiday season bingeing, as your body will actually feel "fulfilled" and your cravings for the wrong foods, or an excess of the right ones, will be vastly reduced. On the other hand, being on the wrong diet -- one that does not meet your individual needs, one that’s based on pills or other fads and not real food -- is an invitation to fail at any time, but especially during the holidays.
Plan Your Holiday Eating List and Check it Twice
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail -- this adage applies to many walks of life, but especially to maintaining the proper diet.
In addition to finding the right program, successful weight loss also boils down to good planning; more than any other time of the year, planning is paramount during the holiday season. You need to establish a specific course of action for not only what you intend to eat, but what you will do in those specific holiday situations that often make you feel compelled to eat.
Before heading to that party, for instance, you should plan exactly what you are going to do and say when you are offered food (and drink) that you should not eat. Before heading to the relatives’ for dinner, you must be prepared with polite but firm methods of rejecting Auntie B’s famous triple-fudge pie. Yes, Auntie B and everyone else will say, "Oh, come on, it’s the holidays, just this one time..." But as you know by now, it only takes that one time.
You need to plan what you will eat instead, and in what quantity. In fact, it helps most of my patients to write their plan down on paper and carry it with them, and even refer to it as a reminder (and motivator) during the gathering. The more concrete the plan is to you, after all, the more likely you are to stick to it.
Finally, wherever possible without becoming a Scrooge, plan holiday activities that are not centered on consuming food. There are many old traditions that work well, such as caroling or ice-skating, and certainly many more activities that could become your new traditions.
Be Like a Reindeer and Graze
Eat right, but eat more often. Instead of three big meals per day, you should eat smaller portions of something healthy about two hours, ideally consuming about six mini-meals per day. This gives your body a better ability to digest and will leave you feeling satisfied, not hungry, throughout the entire day.
One of the worse blunders that people commit during the holidays is to "save their appetite" for the big meal they know is waiting at a forthcoming gathering. Even if you haven’t yet adopted the grazing advice above, eat a healthy mini-meal before you head to the office gala or family festivities. You can appreciate small portions of Mom’s famous stuffing just as much as the massive portions, and you’ll especially appreciate what the scale tells you a few hours, days and weeks later.
In This Season of Hope, Stay Positive!
The Boy Scout’s motto -- "Be Prepared" -- is highly applicable when it comes to maintaining a diet during the holidays. Beyond planning what you will eat, and what you will say when offered something you shouldn’t eat, it is important to prepare yourself on a psychological level, especially with all the temptations during the holidays.
For starters, it is important to focus on the desired outcome of your diet when confronted with no-nos like gooey cookies or negative emotions such as "I’m meant to be fat and unhealthy." Picture yourself thin. Imagine yourself with an intensely higher amount of energy. Envision yourself getting far fewer colds and headaches, and really, fighting major diseases and living longer. These are the very real results of the healthy diet you are trying to maintain, and well worth the effort.
Prepare yourself for temptations, as they can't all be avoided, by preparing to divert your attention back to the desired outcomes of your diet. Don't dwell on the things with negative outcomes, no matter how good they might taste on the spot. Don’t cater to the feelings of self-deprivation, and don't allow yourself to think, "I’ll never be thin anyway," just to give yourself an excuse to eat that pumpkin pie.
Instead, devote your energy to focusing on how wonderful you will feel for having made it past the pie, past the entire dinner, and past the entire holidays with little or no cave-ins. Focus on the positives, and positive things will result. And if you buckle once and violate your plan for avoiding the holiday weight gain trap, don’t use that as an excuse to keep failing. Re-focus on your outcomes and get back on the plan.
Of course, with some people, the emotional barriers preventing this positive thinking may run deeper. There are multiple methods, from meditation to prayer to professional counseling, that have helped people past such barriers.
In my practice, I use a newer approach called EFT that has been profoundly successful at helping people move themselves beyond mental and emotional issues sabotaging their dietary success, such as mild to major traumas in youth. EFT stands for "Emotional Freedom Technique," and while it is quite easy to learn and use on yourself, many newcomers also find it looks quite strange at first.
In essence, EFT blends the power of positive thinking and affirmations with principles adopted from Eastern medical practices, particularly acupuncture. In acupuncture -- which has gained such acceptance now in the West that many insurance companies cover it -- the specific "energy points" in the body are manipulated toward re-balancing the body’s bioenergy system. In EFT, these energy points are simply tapped, as it has been found that simply applying this pressure, without inserting any needles, will produce the desired effect. So this "tapping" is done in concert with repeating positive affirmations, and corny as it may appear, the results are profound.
Whatever method you decide to try, though, right now during the holidays -- when hope runs high but so does temptation -- is an ideal time to start practicing it. What better gift to give yourself, and those you love, than a truly healthier you?
If you live in the Chicago area, please consider attending our second annual weight loss seminar and EFT. It is run by our chief therapist, Jody Stevens. She is universally loved by our patients and has helped hundreds of people lose weight successfully.