Simple Steps To Overcome Holiday Challenges

I have always found it so ironic that the times of the year that "should be" the happiest often bring the most stress.  The fact is the holidays can be very stressful for many of us. Because of the additional stress and also the abundance of delicious (yet unhealthy) food, people tend to overeat. There are lots of ways to ensure this doesn't happen.

1.Meditate.
It's important for us to ground ourselves to be in the right state of mind before we are in stressful situations. I recommend meditating every day of the year but especially around holidays. Being stressed out often tends to have us overeat or make poor food choices.

2. Get plenty of sleep.
We need eight hours of sleep a night. When we don't get enough sleep, it negatively affects our mood, our metabolism, our memory, our energy, and our immune system.  It is common for us to eat in order to try to get more energy. When we do that, we often overeat or make poor food choices. (Do you see a trend starting here?)

3. Get plenty of exercise.
Exercise is important because of the obvious fact that we just need to move our bodies. It also helps us to eat less and make better food choices because we know how hard we worked to burn some calories :-) Exercise is also a great stress reliever as long as it's done at a cardiovascular rate. If you're exercising too hard, it is sometimes counterproductive and produces cortisol, the stress hormone, and that leads to holding weight on and feeling stressed.

4. Bring a healthy dish to parties.
This guarantees that you will have something delicious to eat and it helps other people have a healthy choices well.

5. Remember to be grateful.
When we are feeling stressed, it is easy to lose sight (or at least not focus on) all the things we have to be grateful for.  (Ironic at Thanksgiving but totally part of human nature.)

6. Be gentle with yourself.
Why are we so hard on ourselves? Remember that you always do the best you can in every situation. That doesn't mean that you can't do better next time. That also doesn't mean that you wouldn't do something different if you could do it again. But at that moment, you did the best you can could. We are all changing and we're all growing and improving AND we need to love ourselves exactly as we are!! :-)

Enjoy the holidays because you deserve the best!! Do what makes you happy!!