Finding Balance with your food choices this Holiday Season

Ahhhhh, the festive season! There are so many delicious foods and drinks to choose from, you can feel like a kid in a candy shop!


The holidays come with constant temptation, like ever-present baked goods and eggnog. It’s made worse by work parties, family gatherings, lack of sleep, financial pressures, and buying just the right gifts. If you’re not careful, all this can add up to a lot of stress!

The impact of stress on health is often overlooked, and is the very reason we don’t don’t recommend starting a health kick like a diet, detox or juice fast at this time of year. The holiday season simply may not be the best time to start committing to healthier choices.

Not only will a newly introduced healthy habit be hard to stick to with all those indulgences so readily available, but the stress of the season and the disrupted sleep patterns will make it even more challenging to outwit the hormones leptin and ghrelin that regulate appetite.

How to have your cake and eat it too

The holidays are full of delicious traditions, like the mince pies your mom makes from scratch every year, or the special cake your grandma makes that’s full of margarine. They certainly aren’t healthy choices, but they do feed the soul and take you right back to your childhood. It’s at times like this that food holds value far beyond its nutrition.

Here are our tips on how to find some balance this holiday season:

• Have a bit of everything that defines the holidays for you, because they only come once a year.
• Decide what’s worth it, and what’s not. The store bought cookies may not be worth it, but a slice of grandma’s special chocolate cake might be.
• If something isn’t worth it, just say “no, thank you” and move onto the next conversation. Don’t leave room to be pressured or guilted into eating things you don’t want to.
• Have a steady supply of pre-prepared fresh fruits and vegetables in the fridge so you can make good choices the rest of the time.
• Don’t indulge in anything that disagrees with you. Bloating and sluggishness are rarely worth it.
• Eat until you’ve had enough, but try not to over-indulge. Remember there’s always plenty of opportunities for leftovers!
• Don’t feel guilty about your food choices. Eating is not about making ‘good’ or ‘bad’ decisions. There is simply healthy food, and less healthy food. When the holidays are over, you will go back to eating more of the healthy kind. Right?

Enjoy yourself this holiday season, and don’t feel bad about your choices. For most of us, a few days of indulgence will not destroy all our hard work.

Share with us your favourite Holiday food on Instagram @TruehopeCanada