Intuitive Holidays: Balancing Food Guilt & Family Pressure
Christmas is coming up. The stressful internal battle of will is usually evident during this time. With different activities going on and family gatherings, it might be considerably hard to make peace with food, guilt and pressure from the surroundings. Nonetheless, intuitive eating during the holidays lets you balance family pressure and eat all you want without feeling guilty.
Intuitive eating during the holidays means not restricting yourself from eating any meal or favourite holiday snack. Put differently; no meal is off-limit. Food is neither good nor bad, also during the holiday season. Since the festive season is not always without its share of family dysfunctions and pressure, you should pay little less attention to what goes on around you and the people that trigger those actions of guilt. Instead of letting the pressure get to you, pay less attention to the outside world and its pressure of body goals and food morality. Focus on the inside of how you feel, and what satisfies your needs and wants. You should be concerned about listening to your body for cues and not what friends and family members have to say. Intuitive eating is mostly about attuning your body to know when you should eat and when you've had enough. This way, you will avoid overeating, food deprivation and guilt. Apart from food, you need to find pleasure in other activities and keep your mind occupied, in order to heal yourself from bad experiences. This will help you shift the mind from what's bad, into finding what makes you feel good.
The Idea
In our world that focuses more on diets, food rules, and physical appearance, it is easy to become guilty about what you eat. For example, after eating healthy meals all day, but you come home stressed from work, you open the fridge to grab a couple of chocolate biscuits. Although they taste great, you feel guilty about eating them all. The thoughts about how food will ruin our health and body-shape, haunts us everyday. While there is no reason not to aim to health and body image, the quest to do it, following laid down rules and principles, leads many on the path of food guilt and eating disorders. This is possibly made worse by the presence of family and friends.
Intuitive eating during the holidays allows you spend time with friends and loved ones eating the foods you enjoy eating. For many, the festive season is a time of emotional and physical stress. As a result, the perfectionism for many kicks into high gear. However, intuitive eating lets you eat what you want without following any rules. The principle is simple; eat what you want mindfully because your body craves it and do so until you are satisfied. Hence, regardless of what someone is saying, you don’t need to judge what you eat.
4 ways to practice intuitive eating during the Holidays
1. Do not restrict yourself
Simple as highlighted; do not restrict yourself from eating any meal. You can tweak this principle anyhow you want depending on your holidays complexity; however, the fundamental principle is always the same. Family dysfunctions and pressure are all parts of many peoples Christmas; however, you should let it stay at that; the family level. Don’t let the pressure for acceptance and conformity stop you from eating what you derive pleasure from.
Restricting yourself from eating "too often", "too much" or a certain type of food, might lead to worse problems than to start with. The restriction makes you lose peace with food and will deprive your body of essential nutrients. Instead, you should listen to your hunger cues and not make things more complicated than they already are. By understanding that the holidays are just another season in the year of joyful eating and delicious foods, you start the process of healing. You need to start feeling that you are more than deserving of happiness and health, even though you've had a second or third round of food for dinner. Food has no moral, therefore if you want to enjoy your favourite Christmas snack for breakfast, that is okay. You are neither a good or bad person based on what you eat.
Additionally, you don’t need to force yourself to eat from a plate just because it was placed in front of you. Instead of eating to sickness every time, make yourself eat more slowly, so your body get the chance to give you a cue of fullness and satisfaction. If you are not full, keep eating and stop when you reach satiety. The emphasis should always be on trusting your body and its cues above what others say.
2. Pay less attention to the things around you
Now, I don’t mean this in a wrong way; but you have to learn to pay less attention to your surroundings. During the festive season, people will travel from different parts of the town in the spirit of celebration. With them, they’ll bring their own ideologies, traditions and varying mindsets. It is your duty to guard your decision to eat intuitively without letting their ideas breach your walls.
Put differently; pressure for perfect body goals, food rules and other negative feelings should not affect your meal decisions. Since the big idea behind intuitive eating is to listen to your body, you should not be preoccupied with what others have to say about how you want to live your own life. Some family members or friends will be quick to judge you when you help yourself to an extra serving, but that is okay. Why? Because that has nothing to do with you. Many people around us, has yet to make peace with food and their own body, therefore they reflect their own feelings outwards. When they do, smile and tell them you are still feeling hungry. To sound polite, you can complement the food and shift attention from the conversation to something they will be interested in. However, if the person is not having any of it, move on without playing along. That is okay too. Protect yourself, your body and your mind.
On the other hand, people will approach you and pressure you into taking another serving or another glass of wine under the guise of enjoyment and holidays. However, you should know when you’ve had enough and set up the boundary. Intuitive eating is not mindless eating. Instead, it is reinforced by the satisfaction factor and mindfulness. Hence, you know when you are satisfied and when you shouldn’t eat any more than you already have.
When people pressure you to eat what you don’t feel like eating, politely make them understand that they need to respect your food choices, but that you thank them for the delicious food.
3. Find pleasure in other activities besides food
It is Christmas! Christmas is not only about food and eating. There are different memorable experiences that you can have to brighten your day. Rather than make food and eating your focus, look for bursts of activities to turn your attention away from food consciousness. For example, you could do some holiday crafts, watch a Christmas movie, or read a book. Since it is a period to feel grateful, engage in activities that help you relax.
Self-care is one of a few things to remember, especially during this festive season. Some might have other negative feelings about the holidays besides food. This includes loneliness, family dysfunctions, guilty feelings, boredom, etc. Like any other months during the year, it's important to focus on yourself during Christmas. By making a list of your favourite activities, engaging positively with your friends, family or community as much as possible, you might experience more enjoyment than you've originally planned for.
Additionally, if you have a feeling that the family or friends gatherings might be a little challenging for you, make an "emergency plan" with one of your friends/family members, so you can call them for support if things get tough.
4. You deserve happiness, but you also deserve to be healthy
It is okay to eat what you want on Christmas; that is the essence of intuitive eating, isn’t it? To make the most of it, you should diversify your plate and eat enough to fuel your body with essentials too. For example, whatever you eat, make sure you get your dosage of vegetables and fruits intake during the day too. To honor your hunger, you also need to nourish and be kind to your body.
When you eat, do so slowly while savoring the taste and pleasure of the food. Slow eating helps to match the pace between your brain and stomach to avoid overeating. Apart from this, it helps you appreciate the food and the process that went into the production. In the spirit of gratitude, eat different meals till you are satisfied without feeling guilty. If you want chocolate for dessert, do it, because you don't need the holidays to be an excuse for it. Ever.
