Tips to Survive the Silly Season

Christmas and New Year Celebrations can make it difficult to maintain the healthy habits that you have worked hard to build up through the year. Much of things comes from a break in routine. Perhaps you are on holidays from work, are having to attend far more social events, your personal trainer is away, or your free time is being spent gift shopping.

Amongst all this chaos there are still some things that you can do to stay on track during the holidays.

1: Avoid party hunger

We’ve all done it. Run out of time and ended up turning up to that social get together with an empty stomach, and then we spent the evening snacking on party food (and far more of it than we had planned for). So one strategy to avoid overdoing it at parties is to make sure that you have a healthy meal right before you go.

This could mean keeping a frozen meal handy in case of emergencies, so that you can eat on the run and never turn up with a growling stomach. The alternative is to keep healthy snacks on hand like home made protein balls or fruit so that even if you skip a meal you have something available to satisfy your hunger, at least partially.

2: Don’t disregard incidental activity

So you missed your session at the gym. Does this mean that a downward spiral into crippling guilt in inevitable? Of course not! Be a little gentler on yourself during the holiday season, and take notice of all the ways that your body is moving, even if you wouldn’t necessarily normally class this as exercise.

Are you pushing a trolley grabbing ingredients for a Christmas feast? That’s resistant training. Are you walking around the shops browsing for gift ideas? That’s cardio. Are you decorating the tree, wrapping gifts, cleaning the house getting ready for guests, standing up at social functions, cooking, doing craft with the kids? All of these involve your body moving. Feeling better yet?

3: Set an end date

It could be that all this worry about continuing to lose weight over Christmas is just making you more stressed. Instead you could consider making a bargain with yourself. You will eat healthily when possible, not worry too much if you can’t, and move when you can. Essentially you are going to allow yourself a bit of leniency, but with an end date in mind. Perhaps even New Years Day.

This will allow you to make the most of your time and actually enjoy yourself over Christmas instead of feeling bad. In the scheme of things is a few weeks out of the year going to be your make or break? No! So relax! There’s plenty of time to get back on track, and you know that if you want a new year kickstart you can always book a stay at one of our retreats.

If you are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to follow your healthy eating plan and continue with your regular exercise program at the moment you are certainly not alone!