It’s November 1.
There are 23 days until Thanksgiving, 53 days until Christmas and 60 until New Year’s!
Yikes!
Halloween starts the holiday season and if you are anything like me, the next 2 months revolve around food. Oh heck, who am I kidding? My life always revolves around food!
What can I say? I’m an addict.
It starts with Halloween candy and ends with one too many cocktails on New Year’s Eve with pies, cookies, and every carb known to man in the middle. Every year my inner diet perfectionist struggles with the desire to "give up" until I can start fresh come January 1.
I’ve been doing this for 6 years and STILL there’s a tinge of that mentality.
Side note: I looked through my archives and I’ve consistently posted on October 31 since 2005. It blew my mind to go back and read them all…
That’s a lot of Halloweens "I survived" and I needed to see that. It made me realize a few things.
1. It’s so easy to let that old diet perfectionist mindset takeover, especially around the holidays, but I refuse to fall into the cycle ever again. The next two months are no different than any other time of year. I wake up everyday, make conscious choices, move when I can and live life. It’s as simple as that.
2. I saw the best quote a few weeks ago…
"People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas." ~Author Unknown
3. It’s not the special occasions that keep us from our goals. It’s letting those special occasions convince us it’s ok to simply not try because they are coming.
How ridiculous is that? Let’s call a spade a spade.. It IS ridiculous to binge from now until after the holidays just because they are coming. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they are ALWAYS coming. There is always something happening and you can continue to use these "somethings" as an excuse or you can learn to navigate them.
It’s also ridiculous to eat more candy simply because you already had a piece. Yet my brain still wants to justify choices in that way.
I did something I’ve done for the last 6 years this morning. I woke up and ate a healthy breakfast….
Spinach Omelet Rollup
There was a time I would have starved myself the day after I ate "bad" things which would simply lead to more and more binges. Perpetrating the yo-yo diet cycle.
Then I shifted to "forgiving myself" for eating the "bad" things and made better choices the next day.
Now I know I don’t even have to forgive myself. There’s NOTHING WRONG with eating candy. If I want to lose a few pounds I should keep it to a minimum, of course, but I refuse to put the candy on some kind of bad food pedestal and give it any power beyond "it tasted good and I wanted a piece."
My ultimate goal has always been to make food choices consciously. No auto-pilot binges or excuse driven choices, regardless of the season.
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