I Now Eat Xmas Cookies Guilt-Free. And Stopped Researching Diets.

What’s your relationship like with holiday eating?

Do you love all the holiday fare yet feel overwhelmed by anxiety, stress, guilt or shame for eating in ways you typically don’t? 

At night, do you lie in bed resolving to start a new diet and exercise program in January?

Do you wish you could enjoy the holiday season without being distracted by all the food noise in your head? 

If so, you’re not alone—and it doesn’t have to be this way.

My clients have discovered that after working for a while on divesting from diet culture and eating more intuitively, their experience with holiday eating is much different than years prior. 

Over the years, their comments have sounded like this...

Zero Strings Attached
“I used to give myself a free pass to eat anything I wanted during the holidays. It wasn’t really free, however, as I believed I had to pay the price come January 1 by going on another diet and working out more. It’s so liberating to be able to enjoy all my holiday favorites with zero strings attached.”

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Stopped Stuffing Myself
“Since I’m no longer planning to cut out carbs in January, I no longer feel the need to stuff myself with sweets before they are off-limits.”

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No Looming Threat
“From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, I felt like I was engaging in one long Last Supper before my next diet started. The physical discomfort I felt from eating every meal as if it was going to be my last one convinced me all the more that I needed to get back on track in the new year. 

Thank goodness I now know it was the looming threat of another diet that was causing my scarcity-driven Last Supper eating. Without another diet around the corner, I'm now able to eat in a much more satisfying way.

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More Present and Engaged
“Once I started giving myself unconditional permission to eat whatever I want any day of the year, I stopped feeling obsessed with all the holiday food. I still love making it and eating it but I no longer think about it all the time. I'm now much more present for my loved ones and more engaged in other aspects of the season.” 

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Feel a Sense of Ease
“I used to go into the holiday season feeling deprived from my latest diet. As a result, I felt out of control with all that good food. It was like I had found water after being lost in the desert for months. I couldn’t get enough of it. Once I understood it was the dieting, not a lack of self-control, that caused me to eat in a binge-y way, I stopped restricting and eventually started feeling a sense of ease and peace with food."

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No Longer Feel Bad
“I still sometimes eat until I’m super full because the food is so delicious! The big difference is that I don’t feel bad about it anymore and I don’t feel like I have to make up for it.”

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Relief to Stop Researching
“In years past, I always spent New Year’s Day researching detox and diet plans. It’s a relief to know that this year I won’t be wasting my money on an expensive cleanse package or my time trying to learn the rules of a new diet program.”

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There's No Guilt
“My holiday eating is so much more enjoyable now that I no longer feel guilty for eating a bunch of Christmas cookies.”

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A Priceless Gift
Of course, the shift to more peaceful, pleasurable holiday eating doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to move away from diet culture toward a more intuitive relationship with food and your body.

Most people, including me, have found that with patience, practice and perseverance, the food stuff gets a little easier with each passing year.

To be able to eat with ease and gusto during the holiday season, and all year round, is a priceless gift—but even more so, it’s an inherent human right—that everyone deserves, including you.

I Wanted to Toss All the Christmas Cookies

Over the holidays, I recalled a Christmas many years ago when I was visiting my parents at my childhood home.

Every year, my mom would attend a cookie exchange and return home with a giant platter full of a variety of holiday cookies.

I vividly remember standing alone over that red platter and quickly eating one cookie after another after another. Even though most of them didn’t taste very good to me, I kept eating them.

It felt like I was in a trance.

When I finally snapped to, I was so mad at myself for eating so many cookies. I felt crappy, out of control and powerless.

I certainly didn’t feel I could trust myself with those cookies.

I wanted to toss the entire platter into the trash to prevent myself from eating more but that wasn’t possible given they were meant to be shared among all my family members. I wasn’t sure how I would explain the missing cookies without a lot of lying, embarrassment and shame.

The only thing that helped was reassuring myself that I would get back on track with my eating as soon as the holidays were over.

The Cookies Weren’t the Problem
I haven’t had an eating episode like this one in years.

As I worked on healing my relationship with food and my body, I came to understand that my cookie experience and hundreds of others like it were not due to a lack of willpower or self-discipline. They were due to dieting.

Once I stopped all the restriction and rule-following and started eating unconditionally with guidance from my body’s cues, like hunger, fullness, desire and satisfaction, food lost its power over me.

Without the threat of future deprivation, I no longer had the urge to eat cookies or anything else as if it was my last supper.

Breaking up with diet culture and making peace with food and my body was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given myself.

Resolve to Make Peace Instead
Given the world we live in, the desire to diet is completely understandable.

It’s more tempting than ever this time of year as we’re bombarded by weight-loss company ads promising that their method is better than all the others and guaranteed to result in everlasting thinness, health and happiness—even though they don’t have any substantial, including long-term, research to back up their claims.

If you have a history of dieting (or whatever the food-restriction plan is called), you likely know all too well how this game eventually ends: weight regain, feeling like a failure, an even more messed up relationship with food and your body, and so many other undesired outcomes the diet companies don't warn you about.

What if this year, instead of hopping on the diet train, you resolve to make peace with food and your body?

How would doing so change your life?

The last two years have taught us many things, especially how precious life is.

How would you spend your one precious life if you were no longer wasting so much time, energy and headspace obsessing about what you’re eating and your weight?

What if you signed up for peace instead?

What if You Resolved to Do This in 2021?

Happy New Year!

Whether or not you like to make New Year’s resolutions, here’s one intention for the coming year you may want to consider.

Resolve to be kind to your body.

Really, truly kind.

Here’s what body kindness might look like:

• Rejuvenating your body with abundant rest and sleep.

• Moving your body in a joyful way and breaking free from your Exercise Police (no punishing, painful or compensatory workouts).

• Speaking to your body—and about your body—with respect, appreciation, compassion and tenderness.

• Stepping off the dieting roller coaster and away from the physical and physiological harm dieting can cause.

• Listening to and honoring your body’s needs and desires, including its hunger and fullness cues (versus following external eating rules).

• Eating foods that satisfy your body’s need for both nourishment and pleasure.

• Wearing clothes that you love and comfortably fit your here-and-now body.

• Immersing your body in nature, nourishing it with sunshine and fresh air.

• Relaxing your body with deep breathing, stretching, meditation, a massage, a bubble bath, calming music or other soothing activities.

• Thanking your body every day for everything it does for you (like breathing!).

How Would Your Life Change?
I encourage you to reflect on what body kindness means to you and how your life would change if you were kinder to your body.

And, I invite you to consider that your body is a celebration of your survival and it wants more than anything to be your partner throughout this life journey.