Hello my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. This week I hope you had a relaxing and enjoyable holiday week. And today what we’re going to talk about is how to end post-holiday food guilt in this week between the holidays and New Year’s. We can find ourselves experiencing emotions around how we ate or how we showed up during the holiday week. And I wanna dedicate an episode today for you to check in reset so you can move into the new year with the best mindset to lose weight for the last time.
So before we get into today’s episode, I wanna give you a reminder that on January 4th, 2024, I will be hosting my free masterclass Lose weight permanently without tracking and planning. So it is going to be a crash course on losing weight permanently in the new year. So you’re going to learn what’s keeping you stuck from the weight loss you want to create.
Now, the key differences between short-term and long-term weight loss, exactly what you will need to prioritize to eat healthy naturally and lose weight for the last time. And I’m also going to be sharing what the opportunities will look like to work with me in the new year. You don’t want to miss it. So sign up for the masterclass now at cat rent us.com/masterclass. And if you have a friend that you know would love this content and love the masterclass, you can send them to that URL as well to sign up.
Alright, so let’s get into today’s episode. And really when we’re talking about post-holiday food guilt, what tends to happen is you’ll enjoy the holidays with family or friends. You let your guard down so you allow yourself to indulge in all of the yummy foods that you look forward to all year. But then what happens is you may notice this post-holiday hangover where you feel a sense of guilt, shame, or maybe discouragement because of how you chose to eat.
And this can only grow if you step on the scale afterwards and you notice that maybe you gained some weight. So this is actually often why the concept of a New Year’s resolution is so enticing with weight loss because we’ll subconsciously see it as an opportunity to make up for the quote unquote mistakes over the holidays. And I want you to know that this is a dieting mindset and it’s not sustainable. It’s going to lead you to not losing weight for the last time.
If you are seeing the new year and setting these goals as a way to make up for the holidays, that is not what we want you to do to lose weight permanently and stop dieting for life. You must make a commitment to do things differently here this week between the holidays and New Year’s has to be gone about in a different way because it’s going to prime your success with these weight loss goals in the new year.
And the first step to doing that is right now together here addressing your post-holiday guilt or those emotions properly so you don’t react to them in non-useful ways. So the very first thing that you want to do here in this time is to acknowledge the low stakes of the holiday season. And I’ll explain what I mean by this. So it’s not the holidays that will ever cause you to gain weight overall in your life.
It’s how you eat the rest of the year. That’s the problem to really solve for. So if you’re finding that you’re ruminating or hyper focusing on how you ate over the holidays, that span of time is not what impacts your overall weight loss. The stakes are very low in terms of how you chose to eat during the holidays, which can be a relieving concept to acknowledge the stakes aren’t that high y’all.
But the uncomfortable thing you may need to acknowledge here is that how you eat the rest of the year when it’s not the holidays is actually what you need to be solving for. I think that shaming ourselves on certain days of the year or during the holidays for how we ate, I really do believe it’s a coping mechanism from the brain because if we hyperfocus on shaming ourselves for a relatively short period of time for how we eat, it prevents you from taking full responsibility for the results you do have because of how you eat the rest of the year.
And it’s important to know that your brain will play tricks on you in a way to keep you stuck. It’s what it does. And so I want you to really consider this. How is ruminating and hyper focusing on how you ate over the holidays distracting you from where your real work is?
And this is why do not set a new year’s resolution to lose weight for the last time as a way to make up for the holidays, because that’s still focusing on the holidays. How you ate during the holidays is not what creates your lack of weight loss or where your area of work is. It’s how you eat during your life, your day-to-day moments with food and the decisions you make with those moments. The stakes are very low over the holidays. It’s less about the foods you choose to eat and how you eat them over the holidays.
Those decisions you made can’t break your success with weight loss for the rest of the year. What matters more in this moment is how you react to how you ate during the holidays, what you do next. So first, you need to acknowledge with yourself the facts of these low stakes.
So you can acknowledge that what determines your overall weight loss result is how you eat the rest of the year. Next, you wanna understand how you’re feeling during this time. So the title of this episode is Post-Holiday Food Guilt, but Maybe Your Experiencing Discouragement Disappointment. There’s a whole host of flavors of emotions you may be experiencing, and it’s important to understand about these feelings that your post-holiday emotion surrounding food or your weight don’t have to do with tangibly where you’re at with your progress.
So it doesn’t have to do with your abilities to eat healthy. It doesn’t mean you have anything to make up for or that you need to prove anything to yourself. All it means if you are having these emotions is that you’re having thoughts, sentences in your head that are producing emotions like guilt, shame, or discouragement in your body. That is the only thing that is happening here, and it’s individual for every human.
But here are some examples that you may be experiencing or can relate to thoughts like I shouldn’t have done that I should have known better. I’m capable of more may produce guilt thoughts like I failed, I messed up. I never learn, may produce shame and thoughts like I’ll never get this right. This always happens, nothing works and produce discouragement and know that these aren’t hard and fast rules. What thoughts create? What type of feeling will depend on you individually.
But just check in now with me during this episode. What thoughts are you having about how you ate during the holiday season or maybe your post-holiday weight? Find them and determine what they are. Be honest with yourself. Be willing to look at those sentences and determine what those sentences are. And then I want you to check in with your body emotionally what feeling is produced when you notice those sentences, when you think those thoughts that is going to be the human experience that you will want to hold space for objectively and understand during this week between the holidays and New Year’s.
Next, you want to make sure to establish emotional safety. So in the own Your Eating Habits program, this is something that you learn to master and it’s a big part of lowering your stress and lowering your cravings with food. So here I want you to consider establishing emotional safety with these post-holiday emotions. And the key thing to remember is that these post-holiday emotions are completely safe for you to have. They only exist in your own thoughts, the sentences in your brain and emotions or the vibrations in your body.
So that’s the only manner that these thoughts and feelings exist. So for instance, the sentence in your head, I failed, which may produce shame, doesn’t mean anything is crumbling or actually negatively occurring in your outside world. Sure, maybe you gained some weight, maybe you realized you overate during the holidays and you wanna do it differently next time.
But nothing has gone inherently wrong that you need to solve for in this moment. There is no emergency occurring. There is nothing you’ve done that you can’t work on or come back from the thought I’ve failed. The finality and severity of that thought doesn’t actually exist in your outside world with food or weight. It’s all solvable no matter where you’re at now. So establish this type of emotional safety no matter what the thought and emotion is, narrate the experience properly.
So in this example I shared, it might be I’m having the thought I failed, I’m experiencing shame and nothing has gone wrong. It is safe for me to have this human experience. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to decide objectively what you’re going to do next. So I want you to start thinking usefully about next year and what you’re going to accomplish, how you’re going to lose weight for the last time.
And this is the most important part, because post-holiday guilt can often lead to New Year’s desperation and urgency to lose the weight and eat healthier. If you commit to naturally healthy eating and permanent weight loss in 2024, you will accomplish it. But desperation and urgency where you’re reacting to your post-holiday emotions will not get you there. It is not proper fuel for your goals. So make sure to acknowledge this post-holiday guilt or whatever emotion it is usefully.
And then after you’ve done that and the feeling has passed a bit objectively, determine logically what you’ll decide to do next moving forward. Do not commiserate with a brain that wants to stay in self-pity, guilt, or shame. Notice those emotions, hold space for them, move through them usefully, and then decide what you’re going to do next. Maybe that means you evaluate everything you learned about yourself as an eater during the holidays and you make observations.
Maybe that means you sit with yourself and firmly decide how you’re going to do things differently next year, but not from desperation, from true commitment. Maybe that means you join us in own your eating habits in the new year and take this problem solving to that optimal level. But notice the energy of moving forward from your post-holiday guilt, or any poste emotions. This is what builds your self-trust. And to become a naturally healthy eater is to become a woman who trusts herself to move forward and take action through any food setback, including your holiday eating.
That is the skill that will make your permanent weight loss success inevitable. So do not brush your post-holiday gill under the rug. Be willing to sit down with it and hold space for it. See it as an act of luxurious self-care where you give yourself the time to move through this experience.
Your eating habits and weight loss results will thank you. I hope this walkthrough was valuable to you in this space of time between the holidays and New Year’s. If you are ready to commit to naturally healthy eating and permanent weight loss in 2024 and you wanna ensure you have the most effective resources and support available, get inside the own your Eating Habits program. You can prepare for our upcoming own Your Eating Habits enrollment by joining the wait list at cat rents.com/waitlist.
When you join this program, you’re choosing to be a part of the most effective supportive experience for permanent weight loss. So women truly create insane results using this process. They work the process, build the skills of naturally healthy eating and lose weight for the last time. So again, you can join the wait list and get ready for the upcoming enrollment@catntus.com forward slash waitlist. I’ll write my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I will see you in the new year.