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The gifts have been unwrapped.
The holiday feasts have come and gone.
Work and school are back in session.
Life is returning to normal.
Now it is time to enter holiday recovery mode!
I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, but I am sure you are also wondering how to bounce back after a few weeks of less than ideal lifestyle choices.
Don’t get me wrong, “letting your hair down” from time to time is necessary and good for us. There is a time and a place to celebrate, relax, take your foot off the gas pedal and truly appreciate what life has to offer.
What I tend to observe in myself and my clients when these breaks occur is:
1. Movement is a lot less than normal.
2. Workouts and exercise are greatly decreased.
3. You eat more calories that you need.
4. You drink more alcohol than normal.
5. Your sleep is not good and your circadian rhythm is disrupted.
6. Your stress is generally higher than normal.
Again I want to stress that this is all OK…AS LONG AS IT IS TEMPORARY.
When the things I listed above are done chronically, over time it will start to negatively affect your health, so it is important that after the holidays we return to our normal routines. To guide you in your journey back to normalcy I have put together 6 things you can do to bounce back from the holidays.
1. Holiday Recovery Starts With Reflection
I have news for you, we are less than 1 year away from being right back in the holidays and you are going to have to navigate the same situations again. While everything is still fresh in your mind it is a good time to reflect on what went well about your holidays and what didn’t. What wins did you have? Where did you fall short? Write it down somewhere so next year you know what to do again and what to do differently.
2. Don’t Dwell On It
Maybe the scale is up.
Maybe you didn’t get in a single workout.
Maybe your sleep was crap.
Now that you have taken some time to think about what did not go well over the holidays it is time to let it go. There is no need to beat yourself up about it and make yourself feel bad, it is over, there is nothing you can do to change it. The reason why it is good to reflect on it is to learn from your mistakes, so that next year you can try to avoid them and do something differently. It is not to make you feel bad and provide motivation to be unkind to yourself come January 2nd.
3. Don’t Go For The Extreme Approach
It is very common for people to kick off the new year with extreme changes. Detoxes, cleanses, super restrictive diets, lofty goals that are completely unreasonable, people like to beat themselves up for all the indulgences of the holidays with extreme lifestyle changes. The problem is the extreme approaches are unmaintainable and is why most people will fail to stick to them even to the end of January.
4. Get Back To Your Routine
Instead of starting some new extreme lifestyle practice, the goal should be to get back to your normal routine. Your routine before the holidays may have not been perfect but it was probably better than what you were doing over the holidays and you know it is something you can stick to. Set the goal for the month of January to just bet back to what you were doing in October.
5. Get Rid Of The Holiday Food
One surefire way to sabotage your diet is to let all those holiday treats hang around for the next month.
GET THEM OUT OF THE HOUSE, NOW!
The best thing you can do for your diet is to construct your food environment for success. This means having easy access to whole natural foods and removing all the hyper-palatable processed foods. You had your time to enjoy them, now it is time to say goodbye to them till next year.
6. A Successful 2025 Holiday Season Starts Now
The 2 or so weeks between the end of December and the beginning of January will not make or break you. Even if those 2 weeks are a dumpster fire when it comes to your health, if the other 50 weeks in the year look even half-way decent it is meaningless in the grand scheme of things.. If you want to be able to enjoy your 2025 holidays with less worry about your health then you need to put in the work over the next 50 weeks, so start now!
If you would like some help with what exactly to work on over the next 50 weeks I offer a FREE lifestyle assessment. To get your free assessment fill out the questionnaire here and I will provide you customized action items you can work on to set yourself up for a successful 2025.