Healthy Holidays: Diet and Exercise

The holidays are a time for connection, spending time with family and friends, and thinking of Jesus. Tune in to hear some tidbits of advice on enjoying the holidays without neglecting your diet and exercise goals. Follow Heidi's advice so you stick close to your health goals without sacrificing time and attention to your loved ones. Merry Christmas! 🎄

Take Aways

• Make decisions ahead of time.
• Consider each event you plan to host or attend this holiday season. What and how much will you eat?
• You are beautiful as you are. 
• Any effort you put in to not overeat is embellishments to an already beautiful YOU.
• Exercise = Movement
• The goal can be to move some every day.
• There's no right or wrong form of exercise. There is no right or wrong length of exercise.
• The steps around the airport count. The trips and up and down the stairs to the Christmas tree count. The walks along a beach during your vacation count!
• It's okay if you don't get as much exercise as you'd like during this time. 
• It's okay if you eat more than you think you should.
• If the scale steadily goes up and up and up, make a change. Eat a little less tomorrow. Move a little more.

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Music 

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

Transcript

Episode 83: Healthy holidays: Diet and Exercise

[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.

Welcome to the podcast, Merry Christmas. I hope you're getting in some moments to rest from some of the cares of this world and to think about Jesus.

Today we're going to look at healthy holidays, diet and exercise. Let's not get overwhelmed. Around these topics, there can be some information overload, and there's even some conflicting health advice, right, what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, when we should eat.

I want to acknowledge that [00:01:00] around the holidays, Christmas, new Year's there's gonna be yummy food available to us. And there's probably gonna be more sweet food available to us. Pies, desserts, gingerbread cookies, sugar cookies. Um, what is it?

Chex muddy Buddies, divinity, English toffee. That is part of the holidays, getting together with people and eating together, spending time together. We don't need to be overwhelmed at the prospect of, oh no, I'm gonna get fat. Instead, we're going to ponder beforehand and make some decisions beforehand. Again, it doesn't have to be heavy and they don't have to be really specific unless you want them to be.

I do wanna say though, you can influence your health. I want you to focus on acting more than you [00:02:00] are acted upon. If you go to your children's holiday concert or maybe their classroom Christmas party and you've thought ahead of time, " oh, there's probably gonna be sweets there and I'm gonna have two cookies," versus just showing up and there's this nice array of 10 different kinds of cookies. And in the moment you're like, oh my goodness, I wanna try the molasses cookie. I wanna try the. Wedding cookies, whatever the powdered sugar covered ones are, and I wanna have the snicker doodle and the gingerbread cookie and the one with the Hershey's kiss on top.

Try to get ahead of it by thinking about what is in your future. You likely have a party, maybe you're hosting, or maybe you're attending a church party. Think about how [00:03:00] much food you're gonna consume and are you gonna have sweetss that night or not. And that will really lift some of the stress and the anxiety that you have before you go to these things.

It is completely okay if you just decide, when I'm at a party, I'm not going to eat anything sweet, and I'm gonna even limit other stuff. If you are overweight, classified by the National Institute of Health, or the CDC or, an objective source that gives just a general benchmark, then it's okay to prioritize your health over eating.

You can still be a part of a gathering without eating everything or stuffing your face.

I'm listening to a podcast episode talking about how [00:04:00] there's just information overload about health. What is healthy, what's not healthy for our kids, for ourself, for men versus women. I love in this episode that they're encouraging us to remember that not everything is for you to take and apply right now. From that I just wanna tell you, let things go. It's wonderful to learn, still learn and take in information, but then pause and think, is this something I want to apply right now? Does it even apply to you at all? Our bodies are different. Not every woman should be doing the same exact thing for her health. You need to know your body and learn your body and your mind and your spirit. It'll just be easier to be healthy. Still learn. Don't get down. There is conflicting health advice and it's a part of [00:05:00] really finding truth and you know, just being a part of this world. We get to just take it all in and decide for ourselves what to think of it.

Also, you are beautiful as you are. Your body, your mind, your spirit. You are just a beautiful being. Anything that you do towards diet and exercise here around the holidays and at other times. It is just icing on a beautiful cake. You are already this beautiful person. You can add some things, you know, little embellishments, but as you are, you're beautiful.

All right, let's move on to exercise. Exercise over the holidays. I have a ton of thoughts about this. When we look at the benefits of exercise and you can think about why do you exercise in the first place, what are your motivations? [00:06:00] I hope it comes back to it's good for me. That exercise helps me feel better in some way, that it gives me mental clarity that it provides toning and strength for my body that I feel more able to tackle the day and problems that arise.

It's the same over the holidays . The holidays are a wonderful time for connection and for building relationships and spending time with loved ones or friends. Even giving time to projects that you've put off. The holiday time can be great for that.

Some of us have more time off of work, other people don't, so you can factor that in. How much are your routines going to be affected by this holiday season? And that changes from year to year as well.

If you're looking at exercise from your like body mass index or your weight, [00:07:00] and it's something that you do to help you be healthier weight-wise, wise, I think over the holidays your goal is to either maintain your current weight or to not gain too much. You can lose weight over the holidays, but it can be a distraction from the holidays if you are overly concerned about it.

Think about exercise as movement over the holidays too. We sometimes don't count certain things as exercise just because we don't think about it or because it's not what we're normally doing. You're taking an airplane, all of your walking in the airport can count as your exercise. That is exercising.

Say you're going to a beach this holiday season, you could go do walks on the beach. You do not have to be in the gym at the motel. Now, if you wanna be in the gym at the motel, [00:08:00] great. That's wonderful too.

There's no right or wrong form of exercise or, um, just keep in mind that movement is exercise. You can drop and do 10 pushups here and there if you want the strength training.

You wanna be able to look back after the new year and say, I'm so glad I, I did. Some things that had to do with movement, okay? Whether you went and played pickleball with your kids that are home from college. Whatever it is, you wanna be able to look back and s be happy that you did something.

You don't want to look back and think. Man, I spent a lot of time at the gym and I wish I would've spent more time with the kids at home. I wish we would've made more cookies together or delivered treats to the neighbors or gone caroling. [00:09:00] It's good right now to get it in your mind. The exercise comes in a lot of different ways and to be mindful of that, so you're not too preoccupied with getting in your gym routine.

If you already know, I'm gonna feel better come January 7th if I just stick to my gym routine, then do it. If you know that exercise helps you be a better version of yourself, then make a way to make it happen. Wake up, um, at an hour earlier in the morning or decide to do your exercise after your kids have gone to bed so that you can spend time in the day with them. Or decide to do your exercise with them instead of maybe at a gym.

All of this really does depend on you, but I want you to have your own back. When you get to January, be able to say, " I probably didn't do as [00:10:00] much exercise as I could have, but I did some exercise and I'm grateful that I did what I did. And I'm really glad I spent time doing X, Y, z I'm glad I spent time with my kids doing this. I'm glad I spent extra time on that project that I've been wanting to do.

If you have a lot of time off of work, this could be a great time to add in more exercise and really get your body just feeling even better than it does now. That's not gonna be the case for most of us, I don't think, especially if you're a stay at home mom. We just have things we wanna do with our kids.

We wanna make it a special time. We want to make certain desserts or certain dinners or certain crafts, like whatever it is, and that's okay. Keep some movement in your life [00:11:00] during this time. It's good to watch the scale. If you notice it's just climbing, climbing, climbing. Then pull back on how much you're eating or pull back on how much time you're sitting.

Make a little time for extra movement. Okay, we'll talk to you next week and Merry Christmas.

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.