Developing Your Healthy Holiday Plan

Having a Healthy Holiday Plan is more than just about avoiding weight gain. For most of us this coming month is about avoiding bad habits. Bad exercise habits and bad nutritional habits. There are several studies that suggest creating a habit and making it stick as part of your life can be done in 21 days; just 3 simple weeks of repeating a behavior and it will be part of you. The sad thing is that those studies are talking about how to create a positive behavior (things like doing weekly and daily planning, getting into an exercise routine, or quitting smoking). Those are habits that take some effort to establish.

Bad habits are much easier to establish. From now until January 1st we have about 5 weeks of time. And for a lot of us it is a time where we typically create bad habits. You know what they are; eating too much, eating too often, skipping exercise, making bad food choices.

Five weeks. 35 days of temptation. 35 days of people not judging you for taking a second piece of pie. 35 days of there being a second piece of pie just hanging around.

For many people it is that time between now and New Years Day where they not only disrupt their healthy lifestyles for a month but they set themselves up for continued struggle into the New Year. And we all know that once you have taken a step back in your progress it becomes very difficult to get your healthy habits back. The key is to set yourself up for a healthy holiday by having a plan, not a plan that prevents you from enjoying time with family and friends or a piece or two of pie. I am talking about a realistic, sensible, simple plan for approaching the holidays. You need to establish a mindset that will guide you into the New Year.

I need you to start by asking yourself 4 simple questions.
- Are you having company to your house or are you travelling?
- How many people will be at your destination?
- What is on the menu?
- Where will everyone be exercising?

It is not unusual to have no answer to that last question. You know where you will be, who will be there and what you will be eating. But you have not thought at all about where you will exercise. Most of us want to avoid weight gain and loss of energy over the holiday season. But what happens is we spend hours planning all the details about how we WILL gain weight and no time planning the details of how we will AVOID weight gain. If you have a plan for gaining weight and no plan for not gaining weight, guess what is going to happen. You’re going to execute on your plan and your going to gain weight.

Keep an eye open over the next week for the remainder of my Healthy Holiday Plan series. The next blog posting talks about setting realistic expectations, determining your “cheat days,” and creating the PLAN. Stay tuned….