How to Eat Mindfully During the Holidays Over 40

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Social events can feel like a landmine to your nutrition goals and to your fitness goals, right? So maybe you're wondering, how can I enjoy myself without feeling guilty or derailing my progress? Or can I really stay consistent when I'm surrounded by drinks and food and friends that are also indulging in these luxuries as well? And the good news is you 1000% absolutely can.

What's going on, you guys? So most people gain weight during the holidays and they spend January absolutely regretting it. But here's the truth. It doesn't have to be that way. In this episode, we've packed a no-BS mashup of advice on how to eat mindfully during the holidays without feeling deprived or like you've completely lost control. So if you're having cravings or you're having guilt, let them be gone. It's time to own your choices and make this holiday season work for you. Enjoy.

I feel like the first half of the year is like a holiday every three weeks. Or it could be a night out with your friends. This one time isn't going to mess you up. It's not going to make or break your progress. What matters the most is your consistency, your behaviors and habits around these events. And truly giving yourself the permission to enjoy the event while staying intentional will make all of the difference in how you feel about it before and afterwards.

So one of the best ways to feel confident at an event, I personally think, is to plan ahead. But don't overcomplicate it. So I want to give you guys a few things that you can do before you show up to the event. Maybe you're working towards a goal or you're new to starting your journey and you're trying to rewrite your habits, and maybe you're four weeks in and you have the social event. So one, you know that it's not going to derail your progress, but also be consistent when you're done with the event. But two, maybe you have a hard goal that you're trying to get to. Maybe there's a vacation. Maybe there's a wedding. Maybe there's just something that you want to prove to yourself. And you do need to kind of plan ahead.

So the first thing that I would say is, if you know what the event will have, like specific types of foods, if it's a barbecue, a buffet, or a sit-down dinner where you can plan your meals around it, then I would be more aware of that. If there's a menu, for example, you know where you're going to dinner and you can search the menu online, then I would, and I've told thousands of women to do this and it truly helps them mentally, recommend that you look at that menu and see what options they have. And then you can plug and play that with your MyFitnessPal to see how you can plan your other meals around that meal.

Or another example: the dinner you go to will be higher carb or higher fat. You can aim for more protein and veggies earlier in the day and in all of those other meals around the big meal. It's not about restricting yourself. It's about making adjustments that allow you to enjoy the event or the holiday without any type of stress.

First, let's just talk about what cravings are and why they happen. First and foremost, they're intense feelings or intense desires to eat a specific type of food. And they're different from hunger because they're actually about you wanting a very specific food, like chocolate, for example. Have you ever had a craving where you're like, oh, I really want something salty, I want chips, or I want ice cream, rather than just wanting food in general? Hunger is like, oh, I'm hungry, I need to have a meal right now. A craving is like, I want chips. I want ice cream. I want a piece of pizza. I want chocolate.

And cravings sometimes can come out of nowhere. And sometimes they can really get in the way of the best intentions that you have for yourself in the day. Have you ever noticed you have a desire for a specific type of food like chips or ice cream or chocolate, but you just had an amazing day? You went to the gym, you ate well, you stayed hydrated. But then all of a sudden at the end of the day, you have these cravings, and it can sometimes derail the incredible day you set out on with the intentions you woke up with. But then at the end of the day, it's like, bam, you have this type of craving.

So why do they happen? I feel like the biggest reasons why they happen, and what I've seen working with hundreds of people, are the emotional triggers you get from being bored or from being stressed or even from being happy. Like you had a big promotion at work, and so you're like, I'm going to celebrate, and then it leads to this emotional trigger of going out for pizza or going out for a glass of wine, and it ripple effects.

Or the other example of what I just talked about: maybe you set out for an intentional day and you successfully did that. But now you're at home and the stress of the kids running around, or the stress of a conversation with your partner, or maybe the stress of the day is getting to you. And so that is an emotional trigger. And at that point, think about how many times you've been in those emotional feelings. Think about how many times you've reached for a snack because you were stressed out or because you wanted to celebrate, right? Think about the times that's happened.

And there's room for all types of foods when you're having a balanced approach to it. When you stop demonizing certain foods, they lose power over you. So if you just view foods as neutral, chocolate's neutral, a piece of pizza is neutral, protein, chicken, it's neutral. You're not labeling it as something. And so there's room for all of what I just said if you're allowing yourself to have a balanced approach.

And that brings me into the next one of how you guys can handle cravings. What I mentioned earlier is plan for your indulgences. Depriving yourself completely will backfire. Instead of banning your favorite desserts and your favorite treats, allow yourself to have a couple pieces of candy this holiday season, and plan for them in moderation. I love going out with friends sometimes on weekends or even weekdays. And I love knowing what the restaurant offers in terms of desserts. And so if I love having that, I'm going to allow myself to have it. I'm going to allow myself to include it in my plan so I don't feel like I'm breaking the rules. And you guys can do the same exact thing.

When you plan for these types of indulgences, you can actually enjoy them without feeling like you failed or like you've given up or like you lost control. So the mindset after having an indulgence is, again, you've got to be kind to yourself, give yourself grace, know that you planned for this, and not allow yourself to feel like you've lost control or failed. It's more of a mindset thing. You can't go in the next day and be like, oh, I've got to go work out hard, I've got to go run a marathon, or I've got to go run five miles because I had this for dinner last night. That's not being successful at actually planning for these indulgences. You're still beating yourself up afterwards and you're still acting as if you lost control. If you do it the right way, you feel at ease with it and you feel like you actually have control over the situation and that you didn't lose your power over the situation.

Sometimes we confuse thirst with hunger or cravings, since it's the same control in our brain. So when a craving hits, go drink a glass of water and see if it subsides. If you're still craving something after a few minutes, then you can make a more informed decision about whether you want or need it, or whether you should indulge.

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Actually, I think this is a really cool topic to be talking about because we just kicked off a similar thing inside of the WarriorBabe VIP program. The babes inside are doing a 60-day lifestyle challenge. And so we are encouraging the babes to give up alcohol, to focus on meal prep, to focus on their steps, to focus on strength training and to focus on their mindset. And I think all of these pillars really make up a lifestyle change rather than just focusing on another diet to follow.

So many people use the terms diet and lifestyle change interchangeably. However, while they seem similar, I believe that there are some very, very important differences between the two. A diet is a temporary approach to food. And it's usually focused on achieving some specific health goal or addressing a particular health issue. For instance, someone might adopt a low-carb diet to lose weight, or go gluten-free because they're managing celiac disease. And diets can be helpful in the short term. I don't want to totally discredit that word, but they often require a lot of willpower, they are often very difficult to sustain, and they may not provide the necessary nutrients that your body needs for optimal health.

And not just to speak to the word diet in terms of people having to achieve specific health goals or address specific health issues: women out there jump on tons of different diets in hopes of achieving some type of instant gratification result in X amount of time. There's low carb. There's keto. There's freaking the 21 Day Fix. There are so many things out there that require one to drastically stop all of the things that they are doing and put on mad restrictions and rules in order to get to X amount of weight loss in X amount of time. Typically it's like 21 Day Fix, 21 days. Some people expect immediate results with a keto diet. And I've talked in previous podcasts about what happens with immediate results. But then what happens when you start actually eating that one macronutrient that you can't give up forever, because it's not sustainable?

People think of the word diet in terms of, I'm going on a diet because I need to lose 10 pounds in 30 days. And so I'm going to cut out everything that I've been doing and get to that goal in 30 days. And then once the goal is achieved, I can go back to doing all the things I was doing before I set out to achieve that goal. That's not a lifestyle change. That's just you getting on and off the hamster wheel of losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over and over again. And that's what these diets give you. They have their own set of rules. They have their own set of restrictions.

What I firmly believe in, on the other hand, is a lifestyle change. You've heard me say this if you listen to the podcast. If this is the first time you're hearing it, you're going to hear me continue to say it. I believe that macronutrients are not a diet. I believe that they are a skill set that can serve you for the rest of your life. If you understand what's on your plate in front of you and you know what that food is made up of, then you have empowering skills to be able to make decisions for every other meal that you eat moving forward.

I believe that to be a lifestyle change because you're gaining skills, you're gaining understanding, you're learning insights about nutrition that carry out long-term and apply to a long-term commitment to living a healthy and balanced life. So you don't have to set specific rules with macros. You don't have to set specific restrictions like other diets do. Sure, there are rules with macros, but they allow you to eat the foods that will help you manage a sustainable plan in the long term. The macros aren't asking you to eliminate anything. They're not asking you to drastically cut down on calories in one specific group. They're saying, hey, here is what you should be eating based off of your lifestyle, based off of your goals, based off of where you're at as a human.

I mean, diving even deeper into maybe some lab work and understanding how metabolic processes work for you, or where your sex hormones are, where your hormones are in general, where your cortisol is. What is so cool is that there can be a unique number for you to follow on a regular daily basis. Nobody should be following the same macronutrient numbers because we are so vastly different. And what the diets offer you is, hey, here's a cookie-cutter program that I found online. It's a PDF that came from my cousin's friend's sister's daughter and they're all following it, so you should follow it too.

At WarriorBabe, we pride ourselves on not giving meal plans for our babes, our clients, to follow for a 60-day, 90-day or 24-month period, right? We give them meal plans at the beginning as a tool and resource for how to put some macros together and some meals together on a daily basis. But a meal plan is restrictive in and of itself, because a meal plan is telling you, oh, you have to have this for breakfast today, you have to have this for lunch today, and you have to have this for dinner today. There is a wide variety of so many foods out there in our world that you can incorporate into your plan, rather than the three options that are given to you in each one of these meals, which some people don't find enjoyable, but they eat it. And the reason they get off of it after 30 days is because they don't like it, it's not enjoyable and it's not sustainable. And so they go back to all of the things they were doing prior, which is that hamster wheel of gaining back and losing the same 10 pounds over and over and over again.

People are only looking at the surface level of what diets can offer you, right? Quick results. And this is what I'm hoping you guys understand within this podcast episode: if people can shift from that mentality, that mindset of instant gratification, of, oh, here's just a simple plan that I can follow for 30 days, and shift to, oh, okay, this lifestyle bit that Nikkiey's talking about may be a little bit harder to do, which it is. But anything worth doing, you guys, requires hard work, consistency, and changing the way that you are navigating the type of result you're going after.

It's the same result that people want: losing weight, getting toned, building muscle. The diet aspect has a different type of mindset to get you to that goal. It's probably easier, but it's also not sustainable. It's not long-term. Actually, I'd argue it's not easier. It's harder, because you're constantly in this loop of gaining and losing and restrictions and rules and pressure and unhappiness. Same goal, though. That's the diet aspect.

Then there's the lifestyle change. You can find any fitness program out there. You can find somebody giving you a workout program. You can find an app. You can find somebody giving you a nutrition protocol. You can find all of that. But what makes a long-term change, a lifestyle change, entirely applicable and one that you are able to jump on board with, is the behavioral changes that have to come into play.

Diets are like, I'm just going to get rid of the habits that have gotten me to where I am, to where I'm not happy, for 30 days to make a change. But then the habits come right back. The bad habits come right back. Whereas a lifestyle change is like, okay, I'm learning these triggers that I have with myself when it comes to food. I'm understanding that I am not eating enough and why. It's being insightful, taking this information and getting rid of the bad habits that got you to this point, or understanding the triggers that got you to this point, or learning that, oh, eating less actually isn't ideal, I need to eat more.

And you're learning all of these facets about you, which you should, because you're so individual. There are different triggers that you would have than somebody else. There are different beliefs and stories being told to you about eating less food than to somebody else. There are different habits that you have than somebody else that got you to where you are, where you're not feeling comfortable with yourself right now, which led you to want to make a change. But I want you to not make the diet change. I want you to make the lifestyle change. And I want you to understand and learn these behaviors about yourself, which is what we do at WarriorBabe.

What we pride ourselves on is that our coaches don't just give you these plans that I mentioned. They build a relationship with you to understand how you operate, how you think, your stories, the narratives that you're telling yourself on a daily basis, the triggers that you have. And from building that relationship and being able to professionally give you some tools and resources to create new habits and shift the behavior, that's going to lead you to the ultimate transformation. That's going to lead you to a lifestyle change.

So with that said, guys, I love y'all. I appreciate you all. Cheers to lifestyle changes. And I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

Hey, really quick before you go. I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all of the difference, helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.