Holidays = Weight Gain Fears

There was one precious Christmas Season that I did not overeat at the parties over the holidays. WHAT A SUCCESS! I felt like some sort of majestic food and exercise heroine. I ran in the morning before Thanksgiving that year too, thank you Turkey Trot! I even found a way to exercise on Christmas between presents and dinner to make up for all the food I might not be able to stop myself from eating. There was one thought on my mind- no excuses!

Not for one second did I think I was doing something over those holidays that I would one day regret.

Here is what I wish someone would tell that 25 year old me:

You are going to end up overeating, overcompensating for holding back 342 times over the holidays.

You are going to feel out of control around Christmas baked goods for years after refusing to let yourself eat them.

You are self-objectifying, spending countless hours picturing how others see you.

You are going to feel disconnected from your ability to tell if you are hungry or full because you ignore your hunger constantly.

You are never, ever, ever going to be thin enough or perfect enough, even with all this successful restriction and overexercise.

You are measuring yourself against unrealistic images of beauty and trying to deny your genetic blueprint.

You are eventually going to regain the weight you are putting all your effort into losing.

You deserve to think about something other than your size and shape.

The world desperately needs you to think about something other than your size and shape.

There is another way.

But no one was there to tell me those things. It is because it is normalized in our society to attend Christmas dinner and hear about how the Low Carb Diet is Uncle Tim’s key to finally losing his "beer belly." Until next Christmas. It is normal for everyone to comment on how skinny, thin or tiny I look as if that is the most important thing I worked on all year. This is a societal problem. It is not your Grandma’s fault or your fault or any one person’s fault that we think and talk like this. This isn’t about who to blame.

Long term research on food restriction tells us that 95% of people will regain all the weight they lost from a diet/lifestyle change/forced food restriction in 5 years. Over half of those people will regain even more weight than they initially had. Even the mere thought of restricting puts your brain in a position to hoard food because there may be a potential famine coming up.

Whose Christmas cookies have you passed up because you don’t want to break your fast?

It’s worth thinking about the pressure our culture, the “diet culture” puts on us to fit into an impossibly narrow stereotype. It’s worth thinking about who you might be if you left that behind.

There is another way to feel healthy and happy in your body!