Have Yourself a Stress-Free Christmas

We can guarantee that you have seen many, many articles or posts telling you how not to gain weight over the Christmas holidays, how to keep your exercise regime up throughout the festive season and the calorie content of everything that you are likely to consume from now until New Years Day. All this does is pile on the stress and worry during what can often be a highly-charged time.

We are here to tell you that it doesn’t matter. You can eat and drink what you like, you can relax and enjoy yourself and it won’t really make a difference. In fact, it is likely to be a positive thing. It’s important to remember that health is SO much more than what we eat and what exercise we do. It is easy to become worried that what we do over Christmas will undo all that we have achieved over the past year, but guess what, it won’t! At best (or worst?!) Christmas will last for two weeks (usually much less) but even if it does, a year is 52 weeks long, and Christmas is an incredibly small proportion of that.

Christmas Lunch is just ONE meal - and Christmas Day is ONE day, so what if you eat more than you normally would? It isn’t a typical day and you wouldn’t eat like that every day. Enjoy it and don’t be hard on yourself.

You are probably seeing friends and family or people that you haven’t seen for a long time - food and exercise aren’t the only aspects of health, seeing friends and family and relaxing are all incredibly important. Taking a break from work and the normal stresses and strains of every day life is vital for our mental health. Investing in relationships and being sociable are hugely important and this is the perfect opportunity to catch up with people.

Stop! How many of us spend everyday life worrying about what they need to do and how they are going to find time to do it? Work, home, partners, jobs, children, family, exercise regimes, hobbies all take up huge amounts of time and energy. This is your chance to stop, and live in the moment. Forget what you ‘should’ be eating, how much exercise you have done, if you need to clean the house etc. Just enjoy taking a break from the norm.

You don’t need to EARN your food. Food isn’t a prize or something you have to work hard to enjoy. It is nourishment, it is being sociable, it is about showing and receiving love. So what if you overindulge! Enjoy it, don’t feel like you should deserve it.

Take time away from your phone. Delete your social media apps, turn off your email, put your phone on silent. Most of us are welded to our phones at all times. Phones are so much more than they used to be, we use them for work, to keep in touch with people, to stay up to date with social issues and to take photos (oh so many photos!) sometimes it can be good to step off the treadmill and ignore the perfect filtered photographs, the aspirational social media posts and the ever-demanding email. A few days away from it all can feel incredibly liberating.

Ultimately do whatever YOU enjoy doing in order to relax and have a lovely Christmas. It is only a few days once a year and can all do with some time to stop, take a deep breath and step off of the treadmill for a little while and forget the daily stresses.

Merry Christmas to you all!