Sally should have been looking forward to the summer holidays. Her husband’s family was coming over from the UK to stay for three weeks, she was meeting up with some old school friends for a few days at New Year, and the office party was at a restaurant she’d always wanted to go. She’d been working out for a year now, feeling strong, eating healthy, and her cholesterol levels had gradually come down. Even better, she could finally fit into a favourite dress she’d hadn’t been able to wear for a couple of years.
But somewhere in the back of her mind, a quiet panic was building. She’d made real progress, but was worried about the festive eating and drinking and how that would affect her hard-earned success.
We see this anxiety every single year with our clients. That tension between wanting to enjoy the holidays with the people you love and worrying about what it’ll mean for your health goals.
But it’s important to remember that the festive season is all about connecting with people. A few weeks of celebration fit perfectly well within a year-long health journey. You don’t need to choose between enjoying yourself and maintaining your progress. You just need to approach it with planning and mindfulness rather than restriction and guilt.
“Most of the time, people will generally put on a little bit of weight over Christmas. There’s nothing wrong with those healthy weight fluctuations.”
Before you go to a restaurant, decide before you arrive about what you’re looking forward to eating. Check their Instagram, see what dishes excite you. Don’t think “I’ll have the salad” and then feel guilty if you have the steak and curly fries. It’s about intention. If you’ve already decided you’re excited about the restaurant’s famous risotto or that cocktail everyone raves about, you can enjoy it properly without that nagging guilt. Planning removes the internal battle and lets you enjoy the experience.
‘Banking calories’ doesn’t work
This one’s important, so we’re going to be direct: don’t skip lunch because you’re having a big dinner. It sounds logical to bank those calories for later, but it only works great in theory and is terrible in practice.
You arrive absolutely starving, your discipline evaporates, and you overeat. Then you feel awful about it. So the next day, you don’t eat to ‘make up for it,’ which makes you overeat again the following day because you’re famished. And round you go in a cycle again.
By the time you sit down to eat, your ghrelin levels (the hormone that drives hunger) have surged, making overeating a near-inevitable physiological response rather than a failure of willpower.
Even if you ate your normal 1,000 calories during the day and then 1,500 at dinner (a big meal), you’ve only consumed 1,000 more calories than usual. There are 7,700 calories in a kilo of fat. You haven’t even gained 150 grams. The extra weight you see the next morning? That’s literally just food in your digestive system. It’ll disappear after your next trip to the bathroom.
The water strategy
Want to know the single most effective way to moderate your drinking at social events? Start with water.
If your first drink at a party is champagne, that event will get away from you very quickly. The first drink always disappears fast. But if you start with water, you’re hydrated, and when you do have that champagne or wine, you’ll drink it more slowly.
Then alternate: water, alcoholic drink, water, alcoholic drink. If you do just this, you’ll probably have two drinks instead of four or five. And the decisions you make after two drinks are very different from the decisions you make after five.
When saying no feels impossible
What happens when refusing food feels socially awkward or even rude? Your mum has made her famous pavlova and keeps pressing you to have a second helping. Or your colleague keeps offering you chocolates from the box doing the rounds…
Firstly, if you’re visiting family you rarely see, one meal where you overeat because the food is delicious and you’re enjoying yourself isn’t going to hurt you. That’s a very reasonable and healthy thing to do.
But second, it’s also okay to say no if you don’t want it. You’re allowed to have enough self-respect to make choices for yourself, even if other people don’t like your decision. If it’s your mum, you probably care more about her feelings than asserting a boundary over one extra serving, and that’s okay. But if it’s Deb from work who keeps pushing food on you, or friends who seem uncomfortable with your health choices, that might be worth examining, as it could be more about them than you.
One day won’t make or break you
One day is not going to derail your progress. Even if you ate 7,000 calories on Christmas Day (which would be an extraordinary amount), you still wouldn’t gain a kilo of fat.
What determines whether your weight goes up or down? Your behaviour over three months, not over one day. Our clients who succeed long-term understand this. They might gain a kilo or two over Christmas, lose it in January, gain a bit during a stressful work period, lose it again.
“That’s normal. That’s life. That’s not failure.”
The real challenge isn’t the eating, it’s the guilt. When clients try to be ‘good’ through the whole festive season, they often feel like they’ve missed out. Then they spend most of the next year rebelling against themselves. You’ve worked hard all year, so don’t let anxiety about a few festive meals stop you from enjoying your time with the people that matter. Think about your choices a bit more, and you’ll start the new year with both the confidence and the habits to course-correct if needed.
