It’s that time of year again where the Christmas displays are appearing in the malls, the festive plans are well under way and the party invitations are coming in thick and fast. It’s also when diet regimes are starting to become an all too familiar obsession for some women.
Whether you are like the thousands of women out there who are trying to lose weight for Christmas (don’t waste your time on fad diets as they really do not work!) or you are getting ready to start your diet in the New Year as you know you will be gaining weight, I’d like to let you in on a little secret now which might shock you. To lose weight and feel confident in your body and happy in your life, it’s not about focusing on the food, it’s about focusing on living your life to the fullest.
I’m an anti-diet crusader and I help women break free from food obsession, emotional eating, binging and diet mentality. So many women (myself included years ago) go more than a little crazy over the festive period, finding themselves overeating, overindulging and sometimes binging on food, only to feel terribly guilty that they start a diet in the New Year. If that sounds like you, then here are my top tips on how to break that cycle and avoid overeating this Christmas.
1. Stop good food and bad food thinking
I am pretty certain that right now, you categorise food into good and bad. Or maybe healthy and unhealthy? Clean and unclean? Whatever you label them, this need to categorise foods into these two categories is really detrimental to feeling free around food. The problem with doing this is that you automatically start depriving and denying yourself foods, which admittedly taste nice (I love cookies, ice-cream and cheese - although perhaps not all together!). So you eat the foods from the good category for a little while as you want to lose weight but then you start craving food from the bad category and before you know it you’ve inhaled enough chocolate to sustain a small village, you feel guilty and carry on eating from the bad category for a few days or weeks before you put yourself back on a diet and just focus on eating the good foods again. Sound familiar? The problem with this way of thinking is that the good and bad qualities end up passing on to you too, so you feel good when you are sticking to the healthy stuff but then as soon as you drift into the unhealthy foods you end up feeling bad and guilty and fed up with yourself.
This is surprisingly easy to address. Stop thinking this way! Food is food. You are a grown, intelligent and amazing woman who is old enough and wise enough to be allowed to eat whatever you want, whenever you want it. It’s all about choice and from now on, you can make a conscious decision to choose everything you eat, not because you have to, or think you should but because you can and you have a right to. Cravings, binging and ‘falling off diets’ are all due to this good versus bad food thinking. Stop the thinking and you stop the cravings, binging and ‘falling off diets’ mentality. What foods over Christmas do you go crazy around? How do you feel about giving yourself permission to eat them (based on the next tip).
2. Eat when physically hungry
How obvious does this sound? I bet you don’t always do it though especially during the festive season! Our bodies are so amazing at letting us know things. We know when we are thirsty, when we are tired, when we need the toilet and it’s the same for when we need food for energy. Yet so many women ignore these signals for multiply reasons. Diets train us to override hunger and wait until the next ‘allowed’ meal time. Stress and general life means we can sometimes ignore hunger as we are rushing from one thing to the next and then suddenly notice we are so tired, we could eat anything which isn’t pinned down. On the other side of the spectrum, we eat when our bodies aren’t asking for food as we turn to food for emotional reasons, support, comfort and love. Start listening to your body. Allow yourself to eat when physically hungry. And if you aren’t sure whether it’s physical hunger or emotional hunger then try using this question: “Am I hungry or wanting to change how I feel?”
If you can use these top tips over the festive season, I promise you will feel more empowered around food than you have in ages and also have less desire to starve yourself and your body by dieting in the New Year.
With thanks to Rachel Foy, anti-diet crusader for women and self-confessed cake lover. Visit www.rachelfoy.com to learn more about coaching and online programmes for women who struggle with food obsession, weight obsession and emotional eating.
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