Healthy Holidays: Weight Management Amid the Holiday Cheer

Heidi has you covered this holiday season if you're hoping to stay healthy. This episode begins our 4 part Healthy Holiday series. 

Part 1: Weight management among all the treats and seasonal delights.

Part 2: Sleep and stress relief while still enjoying Christmas parties and buying presents.

Part 3: Diet and exercise tips to keep you healthy enough and temper overindulgence. 

Part 4: Staying hydrated among the hustle and bustle (and why it's worth focusing on!)

Take Aways

• With some planning, you can eat some sweets, indulge a little, and maintain your current weight over the holidays.
• You have a lot of control over your health.
• Have a plan that includes 12-16 hours of intermittent fasting, 2 hour breaks between eating meals and snacks, what you'll eat (and what you won't), the amount of food you'll eat (same as now, less than now, or more than now), and record your weight each day.
• Consider what you will do differently from your plan at each event you hope to attend.
• Allow for humanity by giving yourself grace when you mess up and by feeling any and all emotions that come up this season. 
• Don't ignore your feelings. It will be harder to stick to your plan if you do.
•  The emotions you have or the mess ups you make don't mean that there's something wrong with you. 

Want to feel better? I'd love to help. Book a 30 minute call with me (Heidi) here. 

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Music 

• Music- Island Breeze by Surf House Productions |...

Transcript

Episode 81: Healthy Holidays: Weight management

[00:00:00] Hello, this is the Living Well with PMDD podcast. I'm your host, Heidi Bradford, certified life coach, mom of five and PMDD Survivor. Happy to have you here. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be considered health advice.

Hello. Thanks for joining me today. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you took a moment to feel thankful for some of the things that you have for who you are, for the people around you that support and love you and cheer you on as we continue through the holidays. Remember to keep that thankful heart. Take some time every now and again to remember your blessings.

That actually has been shown to benefit us in physical ways, emotionally and mentally. [00:01:00] So keep that thankfulness in your back pocket as you continue through the holidays.

Last year for December and for the holidays, I did a few different podcasts. I did one on de-stressing the holidays. Then I did two offering helps for loved ones of women with PMDD, and then I did two others about goal setting and kind of better goal setting. If any of those topics seem interesting to you or that seems like what you need at this time. Just go back to last year, 2024, find it and listen to it.

This year I thought I would offer a healthy holiday series. I'm gonna cover topics that I think will help benefit you in your overall health goals this holiday season. It's really great to use December to kind of set [00:02:00] up january and next year with health goals so that you are more able to do the things you want to do in 2026 and even tackle a really big goal for 2026.

If we can keep from overindulging this last month of the year, then it just sets us up for more success next year. It makes next year a little bit easier and we don't just have to rely on the New Year's resolution.

My plan at this point in time is today I'm gonna talk about weight management over the holidays. Next week I'll talk about sleep and stress relief. The following week, diet and exercise, and then the following week, water and hydration. I might add some other things in there, but that's what I have planned at this point. The last [00:03:00] podcast of the year I'm kind of fiddling with, um, either a review of 2025 or a best of 2025, or I might share A favorite topic from my clients from this year or , a tool that they've loved, like their favorite tool from 2025. Okay, one more thing. If you want one-on-one individualized help over the next six weeks, go ahead and go to the Calendly link in the notes and book, um, the 30 minute free consultation with me and I can get you set up with getting through this holiday season and not let it thwart your health goals or gain those 10 pounds that sometimes happens over the holidays, right? We, you don't have to do that. All right, so today I wanna talk about weight management.

I like to think of weight as we want to be at a natural weight. At a healthy weight. [00:04:00] If you are someone that does not fall into the overweight category based on the National Institute of Health or the CDC, then you have probably learned that it's okay to enjoy some pie and ice cream. That it's okay to have some candy from your stocking, to have those sweets at the party and to not freak out about it. You've learned to not make it mean anything negative about yourself. It doesn't mean that can't control yourself or that you're a pig.

If you do not fall in the overweight category you've probably already gained that belief.

And even though you might come to the holidays and recognize that you will gain some weight, possibly, it doesn't freak you [00:05:00] out. And that actually serves you really, really well because come January when you set a new health goal, a new fitness goal, you're not coming from a place of I'm a terrible person. I can't control myself. You're like, it's the holidays. I understand. I need to get back to my routines and things like that, and, and you move on.

But if you're someone who is in the overweight category then you might still be fighting your own thoughts and your own beliefs about what it means to gain a few pounds over the holidays.

For a lot of women and some men, when we get to the holidays, there's an these kind of natural beliefs. My health is going to go down. Um, I'm going to eat too many sweets. [00:06:00] I'm gonna overeat because there's gonna be yummy food to eat. I am not gonna get enough sleep because I'm gonna be hanging out with family and friends and going to parties. There's just these natural beliefs that can creep in and they aren't completely true.

You still have control over a lot of your health. So right now what we wanna do is set ourself up for success by having a plan and acknowledging the areas that will be more difficult and ones that will be less difficult and preemptively deciding when and where we're going to indulge and when and where we're not so it gets to be on your timetable,

on your desires, [00:07:00] not based on what's around you, who you're with, how you're feeling that day, how late at night it is. Those factors don't have to thwart your health over the holidays. How we go through December without just grabbing the little candies that are everywhere, you know, at every desk you go to is by having a plan.

That starts with knowing where you are right now and what you want. For the next month. Maybe six weeks. Do you wanna maintain your current weight and your current health? Do you want to lose some weight? Do you want to gain some weight?

For those of you that have i've been on a rollercoaster of weight loss or the perpetual [00:08:00] hamster wheel of weight loss. You're probably thinking gain weight. Why would I ever want to gain weight? I'm always needing to lose. Some of your weight loss and your health needs to be mathematical and other of it needs to be emotional.

So the mathematical part is if a person can lose weight, they can also gain weight and neither one of those is bad or good. It completely depends on where you are and where you want to go. For someone who is overweight and they want more energy and they want clearer ability to focus and maybe their heart health is being affected.

They wanna be around for another 50 years , then yes, it makes sense to look at how can I lose weight and therefore [00:09:00] get to a more natural weight. For the person finishing chemotherapy or a child finishing chemotherapy, that is a different place and they probably need to gain weight.

If you, have been sick for the last year, maybe you have an autoimmune disease or something that's affected you so much that you have lost tons of muscle fat then you need to look at gaining weight.

So first thing, know where you are and where you want to go. The second part of having a plan is you need to allow

for you to be human. You are not a robot. Part of allowing for you to be human comes [00:10:00] with giving yourself grace when you mess up, when you don't stay true to your plan. It's also about just getting back to the plan whenever you get off the plan. And then it's addressing your emotions. By allowing yourself to feel whatever emotions you're feeling, you can more easily stick to a plan. This goes for a plan or a goal in any area of your life. Money, health, relationships. If you are not allowing emotions and you're not identifying them, then it will be harder to achieve a, a certain goal you have and to stick to a [00:11:00] plan.

Those are the two areas I wanna hit on today. Having a plan and then allowing for your humanity.

When we have a plan for, specifically for weight management, at least this is what I do with my clients and it's worked really well. We decide on an intermittent fasting window, that just means going without food, but still continuing to drink water for a certain amount of time.

If you are looking to maintain a certain weight, your intermittent fasting window, uh, a 12 hour one works fine. So stop eating at 7:00 PM Start eating at seven in the morning. Stop eating at 8:00 PM Start eating at eight in the morning. Okay? Intermittent fasting is a piece of it. If you are wanting to lose, say, five pounds by [00:12:00] Christmas, then you need to have a

16 hour intermittent fasting window, somewhere around there. 14 to 16 works well. That means you're going to close your eating window at about 7:00 PM and you will open it at 11:11 AM. For gaining weight, stick to the 12 hour eating window, or sorry, the 12 hour, well, intermittent fasting, which is the same as a 12 hour eating window.

Why we do that is to regulate your hormones. Insulin, we don't want it to be elevated. And when you are eating all of the time, your insulin will be elevated. There are other hormones that help us know when we're full, when we're hungry, when we've had enough, and when our body needs to move. When we're eating all the time, those get [00:13:00] off . So that's the benefit of intermittent fasting, at least the ones I focus on. There's other ones as well.

Another piece is to have eating windows within your big eating window. Let's say we're eating at 11:00 AM and we're gonna say our first seating window is 11 to 12, and then our next one is sometime in the afternoon and our last one is from six to seven. What we want to have there are breaks, hours separating those eating windows at least two hours between eating. From when you finish eating to when you start eating we want a break of two hours. Okay. And again, that helps with hormone stabilization.

[00:14:00] Then depending on where you want to go, that will affect the amount of food and what you're going to eat. What you're going to eat literally we're talking here about food.

Are there certain foods you're not going to eat? Are there certain things you're not gonna drink? Right. For my clients, it's been helpful to print out a food list of all of the foods that they are allowing themselves to eat. Most of my clients keep almost every food, so don't feel like you have to, like not have ice cream or not have pie. We focus and I encourage you to focus more on when you eat, how much you eat, and I do want you to eliminate if you can ultra processed foods or limit them, that includes anything with high fructose corn [00:15:00] syrup. If you're going to have pie, try to have it be homemade or check the ingredients. There's plenty of them that don't use high fructose corn syrup. They might use corn syrup. Sugar tends to be the best especially if it's non GMO or cane sugar. Um, yeah, cook with that and your health will benefit from using those natural things that our body is used to processing and that it was made to process.

Okay, we talked about intermittent fasting, having breaks between eating, what you're going to eat, deciding what foods you are going to eat, and then the amount of food you eat.

If you're wanting to lose a little bit of weight between now and Christmas, then you need to be eating a little bit less at each meal. If you're wanting to maintain, just stick with what you're eating.

The last part of having a plan is [00:16:00] recording. You need to have a record of your weight. You need to have a scale. If you don't have a scale, please go get one. Each morning, weigh yourself. It's usually easiest to weigh yourself naked because there's no other factors. But if you wanna weigh in your clothes, then you just need to decide. Either weigh in your clothes with your shoes on or without your shoes on. Or choose you're going to weigh without anything on every morning. Do it at the same time of day. I prefer morning. I think it helps inform the decisions you make throughout the day.

So recording is not stressful. It doesn't need to be. Maybe it has been for you in the past. But this is just information. We need to know where we are in order to know if we're progressing, or if we're digressing [00:17:00] or what's going on. So that's what this number is. If it helps, think of the number on the scale. It's the pull of gravity on you. It doesn't mean anything about you. This is a number. And we're going to use it to our benefit. We're gonna use it to get healthier.

With having a plan, that's pretty much a really good general plan to set up, but then we also need to plan for events. The week of Thanksgiving, last week, my kids helped a lot with cleaning up the house for our guests, and I wanted to take them to a movie just to say thank you, and it's $5 Tuesdays at the theater here, so I offered it to them.

Because of other things going on and two of my boys hadn't seen Wicked [00:18:00] One, and the movie that I offered was Wicked Two. So I ended up just going with one of my daughters and having a mommy daughter date night. It was really fun. Leading up to it, like in my head I was thinking, okay, what am I going to eat tonight?

The movie's gonna start probably about six. So I still have an hour of my eating window. Am I going to have popcorn? Am I gonna let her get candy? What's the plan?

So right now, or when you decide to think about your plans, think about your travel plans. Think about the events, the church party that you already know, the day and the time of it.

Think about what you want to eat there and how you're gonna go about it. What's gonna be the purpose of each of these [00:19:00] different events? What I chose last week with my daughter was that I was gonna eat popcorn and that I would stop around seven. I just wouldn't have popcorn the last half of the movie. I decided that she would get candy and that I would have some, but I wasn't gonna get my own box and I wasn't gonna like split it with her. I just have some. I can tell you that works really well.

Having a plan for events, thinking about each event. Um deciding now. Are you going to take one candy every time you see a candy dish? Are you going to take zero candies from a candy dish? But do something else instead once a week maybe, and that's just up to you. But decide ahead of time so that the circumstance isn't making the decision [00:20:00] for you. You are in charge.

Give yourself grace through the process. When you eat after 7:00 PM just decide tomorrow. I'm not gonna do that. And get back to your eating window. You're eating plan. When you're feeling overwhelmed, take a minute and let that feeling of overwhelm be there with you. Often it will actually turn into sadness or anger. And just give yourself that minute to feel that way. And then you move on. You take the overwhelm, you take the sadness, the anger with you.

Don't let the emotions you have or the mess up you make mean that there's something wrong with you. You let it mean that you're human and that's a really good thing and that you're gonna be okay this holiday season because

you are [00:21:00] taking the time to be intentional about the upcoming a few weeks and that will bless you. It will help you to stay healthier than if you didn't. So just remember that.

And when you have those unpleasant emotions, the ones that are uncomfortable, maybe even grief, you know, we remember things that happen near the holidays and near Christmas I think sometimes even more. So if someone that you loved passed away around this time, that might be a little more on the surface, um, during this month and let it be there.

We are so lucky to have emotions. They're not a burden. They're communicating things to us and they're helping us to be, um, healthy and happy and just normal human beings.

Okay, that's what I have for you today and I would love to talk to you. I've opened up, um, a lot of slots this week [00:22:00] for free consults, so please, hop in there if you want some one-on-one support, and we'll talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the Living Well with PMDD podcast. To learn more about life coaching with me, visit my website Heidi, H-E-I-D-I, bradford coaching.com. Until next time, keep hoping, keep loving, and remember that you are not alone.