How To Thrive During The Holidays
How to Thrive—Not Just Survive—During the Holidays
We are coming up on holiday season, quickly! If you are like our owners, Keith and Caroline, you have had Christmas decorations up for weeks in fact!
With the holidays come extra outings, family meals, special desserts, traditions, changes in routine and more.
Oftentimes, what also comes with the holidays in the idea of taking a break and starting again after the holidays. Or throwing in the towel because everything is “off” anyways and starting back up again January 1.
One of our favorite comparisons is to your everyday tasks. You wouldn’t just spill the entire gallon of milk just because you spilled a little on the counter. You wouldn’t let the entire bag of trash spew across the floor just because a little bit spilled out of the bin. You wouldn’t just tell your kids to fail the rest of their tests or skip the rest of their homework assignments because they missed one. So the same should apply to you and your daily habits. Your missing a couple of workouts because of family functions? No sweat, get the rest in and jump back in next week. You went to a holiday party and had a little extra pie? OK! Listen to your fullness cues, kick it back up with a nutritious breakfast tomorrow morning.
Words matter.
Words shape perceptions. Perceptions shape intentions. Intentions shape just about everything.
We hear and read about this often: How to survive holiday parties, family gatherings and a busy season filled with events and festivities.
And let’s be honest, these survival guides are usually aimed at what we should eat and drink over the holiday season—less, usually. Or binge eat it all because you don’t know when you will be “allowed” to have it again. And then restrict, to make up for the “more” you ate during the holidays.
What are we surviving, really?
What if we flipped the script?
Thrive through the holidays.
Thrive by eating delicious food that makes you feel full and warm.
Thrive by doing awesome workouts powered by that great food.
What if we let the things we love to do—being with friends and family, eating well, moving and resting at the right times—take us through this holiday season?
What if we thrived?
But how do we do that?! We’ll cover those bases next week but for today I want you to take the next week to notice a few things:
- Are there specific foods you enjoy that you are not allowing yourself to have currently?
- When you think ahead to the holidays, what are the food(s) you are most looking forward to? If it wasn’t a holiday, would you eat it? What feelings do you associate with those foods?
Keep a quick note in the notes app of your phone and have it ready to go for next week’s blog post! We will be breaking down some quick and simple tips that you can implement right away to start feeling that positive shift!