Happy Christmas!

For my pre-Christmas blog, I’m sharing a few thoughts about Christmas and how I approach it in terms of my eating and healthy eating.  It’s something I’ve been discussing with all of my 1-2-1 coaching clients over the past few weeks to help everyone find the approach that works best for them – and that’s the really important message in this blog – You do You!  What works for one person, won’t work for another and there’s no right or wrong approach.

The most important thing is that you find your way to balance the festivities with your healthy eating and weight loss goals and whether you go all out and eat and drink everything in sight or whether you just stick to your normal healthy eating plan, you do what works for you.

Here’s my approach:

Over my 13 years of healthy eating, I’ve approached the festive period in many different ways:
1) I’ve stuck strictly to my healthy eating plan with no deviation for any of the festive foods
2) I’ve completely abandoned any notion of healthy eating and gone all in on everything and anything remotely Christmassy demolishing mince pies and Quality Street with glee
3) I’ve found a balance, eating and enjoying my normal way of cooking and preparing food but also enjoying some of the festive goodies.

The key thing is I’ve learned from each approach and found what works best for me and that’s what I’d advise you to do too – think back over previous Christmases and how you felt afterwards – did you feel like you’d missed out on things or didn’t enjoy yourself because you were too paranoid about weight gain?  Did you feel bad if you gained several pounds and threw your healthy eating out of the window?  Did you enjoy a more flexible approach with your eating?  

The most important part of the next week is that you rid yourself of any guilt, enjoy your festive celebrations and remember, it’s only one, two or a few days, even if Christmas lasts a week for you – there’s another 51 weeks of the year where you can return to your healthy eating plan.

One thing that really works for me, whether its Christmas, birthdays, holidays or other celebrations is to give myself a ‘cut off’ point. Deciding in advance how many days I’m going to allow myself to be more flexible and knowing when I’m going to get back to my normal pattern. I also plan my meals for my ‘return to normal’ day so that I don’t have to think too much about what I’m going to be eating that day.

So what’s my plan for this year?

Our family tradition is to have a yummy bowl of spaghetti bolognese with garlic bread for dinner on Christmas Eve – it’s just going to me and my husband for Christmas Eve but we’ll still be sticking to the tradition – I’ll make up a vat of bolognese sauce so that we have some meals for the freezer as well as make my own garlic bread (here’s a link to my blog on how I make it)

Christmas Day
Breakfast will be smoked salmon, eggs, avocado and spinach
Lunch will be a cheese, cracker and chutney snack plate and I’m thinking of making some homemade pate as well.
Christmas Dinner (we eat ours early evening) will be soup to start, a full on roast for main and this year, I’m breaking tradition and we’re having fish as our main protein – I bought a stuffed seabass festive thing from Lidl but I’ll be serving it with the normal Christmas Dinner trimmings which I’ll be cooking my normal way.  We will be enjoying a dessert – I’ve not bought anything yet, but we’ll most likely have some sort of chocolatey cake / dessert and there may well be a mince pie in the mix too. I won’t be counting or weighing or measuring anything but enjoying a nice balance of yummy food throughout the day.

Boxing Day
I’ll pretty much be back to normal on Boxing Day – we’ll have loads of leftovers from Christmas Dinner (I purposefully cook enough to do at least another dinner for everyone to save me cooking again), and there will be dessert in the mix again!

My ‘return to normal’ day is Tuesday 27th December, our meals are all planned and the shopping is being done before Christmas so we’ve got everything in.  

We’ll be heading out for a nice walk each day – I’m still not back to my running after my injury earlier in the year but getting outside and getting some fresh air really does make a big difference!

This is what works for me and I’m certainly not saying this is ‘the right way’ for anyone else. We are all unique and we all have different approaches – the most important message is to enjoy, let go of any guilt and remember, Christmas is just a few days of the year!

I hope this helps and that you have a wonderful time!