Welcome to the holidays! Cue the stress. Around food, around exercise, around trying to please others by eating their holiday desserts but also control yourself from not eating anything and everything. Not to mention family stress, travel…it’s a lot.

This week’s episode is an updated version of a short episode i released last year called how to survive the holidays: without depriving yourself, being totally neurotic, or gaining 20lbs. We’re getting even more deep and sweaty here. It’s gonna be intense (in a good way!)

So: how to survive the holidays? without losing your mind or falling back into the shame cycle of restrictive eating, bingeing, guilt and shame, and then right back to restriction and overexercising for what you ate?

The answer is never more restriction or another diet.

What’s sick about the holidays is we are almost encouraged to overeat during the holidays and then feel bad about ourselves – which drives the force behind the massive weight loss industry (which profits from you feeling bad about yourself) with all those diet programs and gym memberships in January (hello, new year’s resolutions).

What you should completely AVOID doing, if you truly want to heal your relationship with food, stop hating your body, and stop stressing so much about food and your body during the holidays?

It’s not another diet. It’s not more restriction. It’s not over-exercising before and after a holiday meal so you can earn or burn off the meal you just ate. It’s not putting limits on exactly how many Christmas cookies you can eat, or if you can even eat a slice of pumpkin pie.

Today’s post is about actionable tools that you can use to start getting out of the shame cycle, to stop restricting so much around the holidays that you restrict yourself INTO overeating and feeling bad about yourself.

We discuss:

A HUGE MINDEST SHIFT.
Mindful eating.
Enjoy every single bite.
Stop the yes/no foods lists.
Stop telling yourself you can’t have your favorite holiday dessert.
Tell yourself you really can have that cookie tomorrow if you want it (which prevents you from eating the whole tray today).
Listen to what your body truly wants.
Stick up for yourself.

Beware: knowledge bombs (and uncomfortable truths about ourselves) are coming.

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! And if you enjoy the episode, please throw us a 5-star rating & review on iTunes so we can squash the “how to survive the holidays” BS advice out there that is only perpetuating the cycle of disordered eating and a shitty relationship with our bodies (and stupid detox diets on January 1st).