How to Prevent a Holiday Food Fiasco

by

How to Prevent a Holiday Food Fiasco

Just thinking about all the holiday food and obligations is enough to send anyone into hiding until the New Year! The truth is…it’s not the food’s (or booze) fault. The holiday season itself can trigger emotions like stress, anxiety, and overwhelm, which then leads to stress eating, mindless eating, comfort eating, etc.

So, if you want to change the game this season and create a more peaceful and joyful time for yourself, then you don’t want to miss this episode.

I’ll share with you the single most important thing I’m doing to prevent a holiday food fiasco, along with tools and strategies to navigate the festivities with ease while creating a truly joyful and soul-nourishing holiday experience for you.

I’ll dive into:

  • Understanding emotional triggers and how to recognize them so they don’t own you. (No more feeling like food is in control!)
  • The importance of taking time to reflect on how you want to feel and show up during the holiday season by building consciousness and awareness.
  • How practicing grounding techniques and developing embodied skill sets can help you to better manage stress and make empowered choices around food. (I’ll teach you how to learn these!)

And…if that wasn’t enough…If you’re ready to transform your relationship with food and body this holiday season, join my totally FREE Holiday Survival Workshop at HelloBodyFreedom.com. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to find freedom around food and peace during the holidays.

 

Resources and Links:

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:44. Prevent holiday food fiascos.

00:05:30 Navigating holiday food and emotions.

00:14:11 Regulate your nervous system for a mindful holiday season.

00:16:23 Holiday Survival Workshop for mindful, healthy holidays.

00:21:09 Develop a healthy relationship with food.

Leave a Review, Get a Mug!

Full Episode Transcript:

How to Prevent a Holiday Food Fiasco

Hello, love. How are you doing today? I hope you’re having an epic day. I started my day with some really cool habits that have nothing to do with what we’re going to be talking about today. Today, we’re going to be diving into what my plan is and how I am handling my world, my life in order to prevent a holiday food fiasco.

So my holiday food fiasco if you were in the U S it is Thanksgiving, the time that I am recording this Thanksgiving is about a week away, a little bit more than a week away.  And in the US that’s a big thing. It’s a big Eating holiday that messes up a lot of people who struggle with their relationship with food and body.

And then it really sets us forward into a holiday season of insanity, of stress, of parties, of obligation, of obligation and event after obligation and event of eating and people and eating and people, and it is not eating people, but eating and lots of people. So I’m just saying that if you struggle with food and with your body, then it can be a little bit tough. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. But I thought I would share a little bit about my morning because it is an absolutely epic, beautiful day. And I like to take advantage of those when I can. And so I woke up and took care of my animals and fed them as I always did.

My cat actually went on a walk with me. You can always go check out my Instagram stories or Facebook stories because anytime it happens, I always take some video of it because I can’t even believe that I have cats that follow me on a walk with my dog,  but that was lovely. And I went for a speed walk slash jog in the sunshine, no sunglasses, no hat on my head, trying to get as much sunshine and sunlight into my eyes and on my body that you can eat something in the morning.

Not a lot.  And really the exciting thing was coming home and listening to Lizzo in the shower. So there’s something about that woman. I freaking love Lizzo. Her music just makes my vibe go all the way up. The second I hear her grooves, she’s got such cool sound and beat and her lyrics are so juicy and they’re so like. 

They’re just high-life, positive, juicy stuff. So yay to Lizzo, yay to put me in a good mood and all of those things led to having kind of a nice high vibe today. It’s been feeling pretty good and while that is definitely one thing that I’m currently doing to prevent holiday food fiascos, that is not what we are here to talk about.

All right, let’s go ahead and dive in because I want to really address this from the lens of someone. I. e. me, who is a woman who has struggled for quite a long time in the past. I’m over a decade on the other side of it, but I fully know what it’s like and remember the challenges of holiday season, where there’s always the sense that food has had control over me but the holiday season just made it a lot harder and you don’t really understand why unless you are deciding to go deep and dig in and work with kind of the deeper reasons why there might be a struggle there. But I did not do that work for a very long time. And it was just a struggle.

And I’ll give you an example. I was talking to a new client who just came in and in the conversation was I do comfort eat. I totally know that comfort eating is a thing, and it’s no big deal. A lot of times I can control it, but then there’s these other times when I don’t know how to stop it.

It doesn’t stop. I don’t know when it’s ever going to stop. And those are the moments that I’m talking about. These are the moments that feel scary for some people. I know it did for me. It feels like you don’t have control. And then that leads to a bunch of emotions like shame and guilt and feeling like it’s your fault and all of this stuff.

And it is not a lovely place to live my friends for sure.  I Think that if we think about this from that standpoint because if you would be listening to Hello Body Freedom, my guess is that as a part of your story, this is what we do at Hello Body Freedom. We help women heal the deeper reasons why they struggle with food and body in the first place. 

And that example that I gave of a client with comfort eating, that is one of her red flags. That is an inner conflict. There’s an inner something that needs to be processed on the inside that has not been processed yet. And this is what we do inside of HelloBodyFreedom. So, let’s keep going into understanding like how we really get set up in a way that really makes it hard.

And the way that we need to understand this is before I get into what I’m currently doing to prevent a holiday food fiasco, let’s understand how we would have this perfect storm happen in the first place. All right. Ultimately, let’s give some holiday examples. So Thanksgiving, Christmas, holiday parties, all the things that get together is right.

And let’s say that someone shows up to the party, maybe it’s a distant relative and they are the food pusher. They always are trying to push food on you and everybody else. And for other people that don’t have issues with food and body, it’s not a big deal, but when you struggle and all of a sudden you’re just like, Oh, I guess I better be nice.

Oh, I guess I better try this. Where there’s not a connection to body. There’s not a connection to boundary. Then it can feel very frustrating and agitating because it almost like you would just wish you didn’t have to see this person. So that way you could avoid it altogether because when you end up eating the food and then you don’t feel good and then it just, it creates this whole downward spiral. Or think about like maybe a great aunt or something who has this major habit of commenting on what you’re eating, commenting on what’s on your plate, comment, commenting on how much is on your plate, how much you’re eating, how little you’re eating.

And maybe it’s not just you, maybe this crazy great aunt does this to everybody, but I don’t know about you, but we have those people in my family too, where it’s like, they love to talk about it’s all up in other people’s business about what other people are eating. It’s crazy. Or I don’t know about you, but I’m may or may not also have a very special cousin in my family who is chronically always talking about the latest diet she’s been on. The latest food fad that she’s going on and every year she swears by it.

And thinks that you should do it too and tells you all about it and send you the URL and it probably includes shakes and meal plans and all of these other things and pills and all the stuff, right? I’ll give you another example of just simply walking into your childhood home , or a home that’s, from your childhood, maybe a aunt’s house or grandmother’s house or something like that and just noticing what you feel it noticing that it might be a mix of feelings sensations that might be anxiety or stress might also feel warmth and cozy and home it can be like a mirage and of all the things going on in the body. 

And what we want to understand is that what actually happens is if we would actually look at all those experiences that kind of maybe rub us the wrong way, there is an emotion underneath that there is something going on in our body that starts to feel a little uncomfortable Oh, this doesn’t feel good.

So let’s name some of the emotions that you might be experienced. It might be very subtle. It might just be like an irritation. Like you’re like, notice, Oh, that crazy aunt is here. And now, Oh, what’s going to do in my body? Maybe it’s a little anxiety. Maybe it’s a lot of anxiety.

Maybe it’s stress. Maybe it’s a little bit of overwhelm or a lot of overwhelm. Avoidance is a real thing. So maybe just trying to not have that conversation with that person, frustration.  The idea that I’m trying to get to here is that there are all of these experiences that you do not have other times of the year.

And we haven’t even talked about like parties, like when you, this obligation to go to this party that you don’t really want to, it’s a work thing. You have to be there and already your anxiety is high, your nerves are high.  Maybe you even want to be there. I don’t know. But then there’s all of these people around.

Maybe you’ve struggled since COVID. I hear this a lot with my clients, like getting back into the social scene and doing all these things. And then the next thing,  you’re spending the entire time at the bar drinking or at the food table, just like noshing on everything. And the next thing you know, you’ve eaten and drinking yourself into an oblivion as an avoidant way to not have any meaningful conversations with the people who you don’t really want to be hanging out with in the first place.

It goes on and on. And what we want to understand, like what we really want to get to is that there’s, yes, there’s all of these strategies. There’s strategies where yes, let’s figure out how to keep the food out of the house and make the plan.  And all of these strategies are important and we’re going to get into that for sure.

But what I want you to understand is that like I had a call with another client, she actually joined. So , she was considering being a part of HelloBodyFreedom coming out as a client. She just came on, I think yesterday. And one of the first things that she said when we got on the phone, and she’s I just think I need to keep the food out of the cupboard.

I think that’s it. I think that if I can just do that, then I’ll be okay. And I’m like, you are talking to the wrong person because that’s not a solution. I know that’s not a solution.  And while it might be a strategy it’s not going to work in a meaningful way for the long term. Cause if we really want to think about true depth of healing around our relationship with food, you could have all of the chocolate, all of the junk food, all the stuff in your cupboard and have a completely neutral relationship to it. 

So  I called her out with a lot of love and we had a really powerful conversation and she ended up becoming a client. So it’s, I’m actually really excited, but it’s a great point though.  Because whenever we deflect and look, oh, it must just, I’m just going to go for more walks because that must be the answer.

I’m going to just keep that food out of my house. That’ll fix everything. That’s not really going to work with and heal at that deeper level. So what we want to really understand is in the moment that we start to feel all these feels, We talked about irritation, anxious sense,  stress, overwhelm, avoidance, frustration, fear, all of these things.

And it could also be super high vibe, positive emotions as well. Like all the feels,  then what happens is you very likely have a nervous system, a stress response that gets activated. So for instance, you might be able to handle anxiety a little like at a one or two, but as soon as it gets up to a five or a six on a scale of one to 10, it just starts to blow out of proportion.

It doesn’t feel good. So think about what irritation Anxiety, what this feels like in your body, what stress feels like sensing like that overwhelm avoidance, frustration, fear. These are really intense feelings in the body and our nervous systems. Not everybody, but if you struggle with your relationship with food, very likely something happens in the body that creates a level of discomfort instead of being able to feel it and process it and work with it, what ends up happening at an unconscious level is you immediately go reach for the food to fix it, the food or the booze, whatever it might be, just something to ease the sensation of what is going on in the body. And that is the heart of what we are talking about here. That is the heart of it. 

And the truth is that this time of the year is emotionally charged. All right. In a big way.  So if you have a nervous system that doesn’t have a lot of capacity to feel in general, right? We’re good when all of our ducks are in a row when everything’s going just right, then everything’s okay. Why can’t we just stay here?

But as soon as things get a little out of that window of your own tolerance, that’s when these unconscious habit patterns of using food to fix it come into play. And just to be really clear, a lot of us learn this in childhood. So that means that we’ve been practicing this habit loop of feeling intensity, then shutting it down before we’ve had the chance to feel it before we’ve had the chance to process it, shutting it down.

And how do we shut it down? Food, booze, right?  Shopping, drugs. There’s all the ways we shut that shit down.  And this is what makes the holiday season so challenging. Okay. When we can understand that. Then we can go into working on what do I do to change my experience this holiday. What do I do to take November and December and make it so I don’t go completely mindless and throw my middle fingers up in the air and go F it, screw it, who cares?

I’ll just wait till January because that usually never pans out. In a good way for most people, we usually wake up on January 1st, feeling hungover and bloated and exhausted and a little heavier or a lot heavier.  And that doesn’t feel good. So what if we were able to move through the holiday season in a way that feels energized, that feels peaceful, that’s more connected to joy and ease versus overwhelm and stress? 

And I’ll tell you when we can do that, that my friends is a regulated nervous system that will likely not be reaching for food to cope as much. Okay. And so the thing that I am doing for right now, to prevent food fiascos is something that I’m doing with clients and non-clients alike. I am moving through a ritualistic process that I do every single year.  

We do it with our clients every single month, right? There’s a ritual involved here. And this is what we might call building a whole lot of consciousness and awareness around what kind of experience we want to have for the holiday season coming up and how can we practice in the moment regulating the nervous system so that we will be better equipped to move through the holiday season in a really meaningful way.

Does that sound like fun to anybody?  I love shit like this. And the reason I do is because it’s really crazy when you just take a little bit of time, out of your life. You spend an hour tops out of your life and you actually come in and do this focus time where you go inward and you make some decisions.

How do I want to feel? What is this going to be for me? How do I want my holiday season to go? What kind of energy do I want to exude? What is this intention that I have? How do I want my relationship to be around food, right? How do I want to show up to this party? How do I want to show up on Thanksgiving day?

How do I want to show up the day before Thanksgiving? How do I want to show up the weekend after, right? Cause in the U S Thanksgiving is on Thursday, but I don’t know about you. It’s one meal. Thanksgiving is a meal. But that’s usually not what happens. It’s Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday.

And then it keeps going all the way until January 1st. And this is where we have a lot of power. And that’s what I want to offer to you today is I want to, I’m going to show it. If you are watching on YouTube. So you guys can subscribe on YouTube. That would be amazing. But you will see there’s a ticker going across the bottom and it just says, hello, body freedom.com. It actually says hollow body freedom. com holiday survival workshop.  If you just go to  hellobodyfreedom.com, you will immediately see the link for the holiday survival workshop. And I’m really excited to share this with clients and not clients. It’s totally free.

If you’ve never been in my world before, this is absolutely a beautiful place to start. If you’ve only been in my world for a little bit of time, Definitely check this out. And if you struggle with the holidays, if you notice that you’re thinking about the holidays, brings up stress, brings up anxiety, thinking about your relationship to food, thinking about your health journey and how the holiday season can be a part of your health and healing journey every single year. 

Inside on Hello Body Freedom with our clients the year after it’s the week after Christmas, but before New Year’s or sometimes it’s like first week of the year. It’s one of those two weeks we get together and we do a big group coaching call. And it is really spectacular. Everybody that shares that are like, this is the first holiday season

I did not gain a single pound. I enjoyed the holiday season. I enjoyed the meals, the celebrations. I had my grandma’s famous fruit cake. I did all of these things, yet my level of mindfulness and nervous system regulation and just all of the work that we do inside the holiday survival workshop really makes a difference in a really made a difference for them. Notoriously the clients of Hello Body Freedom, our clients are either, they don’t put a pound on, or they even lose a few if that’s what their goal is.  It’s pretty powerful if you’ve struggled like forever with weight and body, it is very powerful.

So I want to invite you into the thing that I am currently doing, which is preparing for this workshop and showing up for this workshop. It is going to be right here. So if you’re watching this, like a video-wise on YouTube, you will see my offices in the back. It’s cozy. It’s my yoga room. You can see my yoga mat over there.

And this is where we do rituals and it will all be on Zoom, but we will all be together and, you can keep your video off. You never have to show your video, everybody will be muted. And then there’s the opportunity to share, if you want to, you could be completely anonymous if you want to, but just going through the process of spending like an hour where you start to do some cognitive work and some future pacing, right?

How do I want to feel this holiday season? How do I want to show up on the planet?  How do I want to show up to this particular meal, this particular party? How am I going to handle this particular aunt? How am I going to handle it When my second cousin, so and so first removed, start saying this and this knowing that has triggered me in the past, right?

Like really, truly coming into the holiday season with knowledge and with power and really having a plan in place that will make you feel good. Now that’s the first thing, but that’s not all of it. The other thing that we’re doing in the holiday survival workshop is we are doing some legit nervous system regulation, grounding that nervous system down, and we’re going to practice this over and over again because when you have these tools moving through, what will happen is yes, the stress will come.

Yes, the overwhelm will come for sure. It’s just that time of the year where it’s for most people, it’s, I don’t know, it’s can be pretty impossible to not have those moments,  but for you to have skill sets, embodied skill sets that you can start to use and you can take with you through the holiday season and beyond in order to regulate that nervous system, in order to feel better in your body, you are likely not going to use food the way that you would without these skill sets, without the holiday survival workshop. Okay. So I just want you to imagine, and Oh, just to be really clear. So this is a live workshop. And even if you can’t make it live, You still want to register because you can get the replay.

You can get the replay. Okay. The replay is real. So maybe you wouldn’t be able to do it live, but you could still create that same energy. You could still create that same boundary, that little bit of space and time for yourself to do this work. And maybe you end up catching the replay and it’s like after Thanksgiving or it’s like Christmas day, right? You’re struggling busing it. Even then, it’s gonna help you. It’s gonna serve you, I promise. It is so so powerful. Okay? So I just want you to imagine, just imagine that you get to this place where you are able to have a different relationship with food where you are confidently saying yes to food.

That might mean yes to grandma’s fruit cake. That might mean no to that. That might be yes to the kale salad. That might mean no to the kale salad, right? You’re going to learn how to do this in a way that feels good for you. You’re also going to learn how to say yes and no to people like how to put a loving boundary and that needs that boundary or an event that yes, we absolutely are going to be there.

Can’t wait. Or Ooh, no. Love you. Thank you. Can’t go. Maybe next year, got to self-care. How cool would that be?  Also imagine just no more mindless eating, right? So many of us have this thing where it’s like, Oh, it’s the holiday food. I’m not going to get this till next year. And so we shove it and shove it in her face.

But what if that disappeared, really? Feeling into that your ability to say yes and no, your ability to have just the right amount, right?  And just sense like what it’s like to trust yourself to really start to trust yourself around holiday food, around holiday treats. Trust that you can make right decisions for yourself, not in a way that’s militant, not in a way that’s restrictive, but also not in a way that’s like a six-year-old in a candy store, unsupervised, right?

Neither of those are freedom y’all. Neither of those are freedom. Okay. And most importantly, what I desire for you, I want you to wake up on new Year’s day feeling freaking great feeling energized and light and without a hangover. Unless you just love to get shit-faced the night before it’s all up to you, but you get my point.

Like really the idea is like, how cool would it be if you got to the end of the year and didn’t gain a pound of that? If that’s your goal, if your goal is to either be on a weight loss journey or sustain, like most of us don’t sustain like research shows, most of us don’t sustain. I was looking at an article from Harvard, was it an article or a review?

And it literally talks about how like most of us, if we put on weight, the most substantial amount of weight we put on is inside the holiday season. And then over the course of years, that leads to substantial weight gain. Like it does matter. It does matter. It matters if you care about that.

Not everybody cares about that. Some, I have plenty of clients who are really struggling with emotions and eating, and we’re going to be going over that as well. We’re going to be talking about how we untangle that inside of the holiday survival workshop. So I hope that you’ve gotten a lot out of this. I hope that you see, and even if you don’t come to the workshop, although it’s free, you really should, it’s going to be amazing.

Get your butt there. It’s going to be Epic. I am not going to disappoint. It’s going to be amazing.  And, I will tell you that especially just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, we’ll be using like a big holiday dinner as an example, thinking about the people, thinking about the food, future pacing, how do we want to feel?

And then working with how we stabilize that nervous system to make that happen.  It’s going to be amazeballs. I’m super excited. And I hope to see you there.  Just go to hellobodyfreedom.com. It is totally free. It is going to be on a Sunday night. I think it’s going to be November 19th, which is what it’s.

Yeah, that’s this coming Sunday. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. It’s going to be the Sunday before Thanksgiving if you’re in the U S so it’s one of those things.  And I also want you to know that if you’re in the other part of the world, and maybe that time doesn’t work for you or that day doesn’t work for you like the replay is there.

I know I’ve said this 20 times already, but repetition. It’s really good for us to hear.  So feel in to if this feels good for you, feel into what it would be like to move through the holiday season with calm and joy and ease in a way that feels connected and not numbed out. 

Oh, for me, every year that we do this, my Christmases, my Christmas, the whole holiday season really just is, gets better and better for me. So I want the same thing for you. I am sending you all the love on the world. I can’t believe we’re getting into the holiday season. Ah,  Super exciting time.

And I’m really excited to finally have this podcast because this is the first holiday season I’ve had a podcast and I always have been preaching this since forever inside of my Facebook group. But this is fun to get out into the interwebs in a way that will hopefully really resonate with some women and where you can really, truly get to a level of freedom with food, freedom with your body.

It does exist. You do get it. You deserve it. You are worthy of it and you can have it.  It’s not inaccessible to you. It just requires a different approach than probably you have ever tried. And so go to hellobodyfreedom.com. Check it out and you are the bomb. com. Thank you so much for coming y’all.

I will see you next time and I will see you in the holiday survival workshop. All right. Bye everybody.