Podcast: One Easy Hack to Make the Holidays Healthier
It's so easy to overindulge in holiday treats and feel disappointed and frustrated that we've overdone it and blown our health and wellness goals. Today's episode focuses on one powerful but simple thing you can do to enjoy treat food without going overboard.
Transcription of Podcast
Please note this transcription is generated by software. There may be some errors. I hope you find it useful.
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I hope you are feeling amazing, amazing, amazing. Okay.
The Holidays Are a Great Time to Forget About Health and Wellness
Today let's talk about the holidays. I cannot believe that it is nearly the end of November. It's nearly the end of the year. How is it? That time has just flown by so amazingly quickly, and now we have fabulous holiday season.
And you know what? I love holiday season, but it is so easy to. All, all the pie, all the cakes, all the candy, all the, everything that is there. Hands up. If you feel this way, that even if you feel, Hey, do you know what? I'm kind of healthy, but holidays just really knock me off track. You are not alone. It is, it is just so easy to go to another party, to have another glass of wine, to have more chocolates because they're there.
It's So Easy to Eat Treats That Are Offered to Us
They're on offer, and as a society, this is what we do. We had some friends around for dinner. On Saturday. Oh my goodness. We haven't seen them in three years. Well, not properly. I've seen them around town, but they haven't been around. We'd normally have them every Christmas they'd come round. But thank you to Covid.
We haven't seen each other for years and years, so it's been three years since we saw them. And it was lovely to get back and it was nice. We had a healthy dinner, you know, it was a celebration, but. They bought candies, they bought biscuits, they bought all kinds of things, and it was lovely because we don't eat those things very often, but it's so easy to eat them.
So let's have a think about some really, really easy things that you can do to help you get over this hump without getting super, super derailed.
Healthy Eating and Living Isn't Just About the Holidays
Now, the first thing I am going to tell you is I love this quote, which is, it's not, I. What you eat between Christmas and New Year's. Now, I know that if you live in America, your holidays go on for a little bit longer than the one week that we have here, but the quote still holds.
It's not important what you eat between Christmas and New Year's. It's. Between New Year's and Christmas that counts. And what that's basically saying is it's okay to let go a little bit. If you're eating healthily and doing all the healthy things the rest of the time, then it doesn't matter if you splash out a little bit, which is why I don't feel bad about eating more candy and more biscuits and all of those things because I know that I have super strong habits in all four of my pillars, and it's easy for me to get back on track.
Do You Eat Healthily And Lead a Healthy Lifestyle Normally?
But here's the real kick. Do you have strong habits in all four pillars? Let me just recap the pillars in case you've forgotten them. Healthy living, sorry. Healthy eating. Loving healthy eating exercise that lights you up. Delicious, healthy sleep and your mindset, which includes your stress levels, your emotions, your relationship with yourself, and food.
Dr Orlena's 4 Pillars of Healthy Living
- Healthy food you love
- Exercise that lights you up
- Delicious, healthy sleep
- Emotional wellness (stress levels, emotional eating, your relationship with yourself)
Now if you are good, if you've got strong, healthy habits, if you're generally looking after yourself and leading a healthy. then great. But the vast majority of people aren't, or at least there is room for improvement. And the problem is that over the holidays you get pushed even further down that track of not looking after yourself now.
So it's important to think about the holidays because I always say you can never polish the perfect, the perfect never happens. It's if you can stop yourself. Totally off track then you have done much more in damage limitation than polishing. The per the perfect, the perfect never ever happens. And I talk about more, more of this in the workshop that I recently did.
Did You Go to the Healthy Happy Holidays Workshop?
If not, you can grab the replay here: https://www.drorlena.com/healthy-holidays
I did a workshop last week. . And what we really worked on in that workshop is this idea of I am somebody who takes care of myself, somebody who looks after myself. I am somebody who prioritizes my own health and wellness. And we did an amazing exercise to help you believe that a little bit more, because the problem is a lot of people believe it, four or five out of 10.
And you can see that if you don't really believe something, you are not going to. As if that happened. Now that workshop is amazing. It got really good reviews. Somebody said, I hate I missed the workshop, the live workshop, but I'm watching The replan is so good. Thank you for doing this. And somebody else said, I loved this workshop.
There was so much. I was looking over my notes and there's so much here. So if you didn't attend that workshop, you can sign up and it will send you out the replay. And I do really think this is a really important. exercise to do because it is the foundation of everything and it's a tool that I use with my clients all the time.
Are You Someone Who Prioritises Your Health and Wellness?
This idea of I am somebody who prioritizes my health and wellness, and it really helps you to be able to take decisions whether they are mundane decisions should. . Should I eat this cake? Should I go for a walk? Should I sign up to go to the gym? Should I join Dr. Orlena's Healthy Coaching package? Yes, absolutely you should.
But you can see all of those decisions if you make them from the place of I am somebody who prioritizes my own health and wellness. You are going to be making more healthy decisions. So if you missed that, you can still sign up. It is dr le.com. Oh my goodness slash I'll put the notes, I'll put it in the notes, but it's healthy dash holidays and you can sign up and it will send it out along with some healthy recipes as well.
So that's the main work that we did in that workshop, but we also looked at other things as well, and I'll go through some of them here, but I don't want it to be a total repeat because you don't wanna listen to both.
Eating Slowly Can Help You Avoid Putting on Weight
Now, one thing that I would say about the holidays, one really big thing, Is mindful eating.
Eating slowly now, like everything, eating slowly is a habit that you need to get into. So it's fine for me to say it now and you'll think, okay, great. I'm gonna eat slowly and you'll do it for about a day and then you'll forget. But why is eating slowly really, really important? There was a recent meta analysis.
Mindful Eating Can Help You Not Get Metabolic Syndrome
That's when they look at loads and loads of studies and looking at, you know, the speed of eating affect. Metabolic sorry. Metabolic illness as in getting diabetes and things like that. Blood pressure, stuff like that. And the answer is yes, it does. If you eat slowly, it helped reduce your metabolic syndrome, the people who got metabolic syndrome met.
So metabolic syndrome is essentially the term that they use to describe a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. So all the nasty consequences of not eating healthily and. Metaanalysis, they said that if you ate slowly, you had a significantly reduced rate of metabolic syndrome, so high blood pressure and insulin resistance.
And on the other side, if you ate quickly, you were up to 73% more likely to develop obesity. So that's just by eating slowly. That's just mindful eating. And mindful eating, I always say is one of those things that's really easy to talk about. And less easy to actually do, of course, unless you are in the habit.
Eating Slowly Is An Easy Healthy Habit to Adopt
But it's just about slowing down, taking your time, eating, so sitting down when you're eating, I see so many children. walking out of school and they walk out of school here with like chocolate croissants and things and not the good chocolate c croissants from the, from the bakeries, but you know, those, what I call plastic chocolate croissants that come in rappers and last for three months before they actually go off because they, I dunno what they do to them, they turn them into plastic.
But you know, just walking along, eating those things as opposed to sitting down, really paying attention to what you are eating and. Really easy thing to implement. It's a small thing to implement, but it just means giving yourself a little bit more time. One thing that I always advocate in my family and for other people is this idea of take a small portion and.
Eat it. And then if you want more, just have a little break before you want more. So have a pause. My children are also keen to rush into dessert or rush into the next eating thing that they just don't slow down. They're a bit like penguins who just, you know, eat their fish hole. Whereas if you take a break and say, okay, yes, you can have some fruit after your main course, but let's just calm down.
Let's just have a rest. Let's clear the plates away and then. Get the next things out or you know, if they want a second portion of something, just wait a few minutes. Allow your body to catch up with your brain or your eyes. As my mom says, used to say to me when I was little, your eyes are bigger than your tummy, and it's so true.
We're so trained to eat with our eyes. and our brain has anticipated, oh yeah, I'm gonna eat this. It's gonna be great that we don't listen to our bodies and we don't go, oh my goodness, I'm full. How about I stop eating? But you can retrain yourself to do that. So my message for you today, my big message is slow down.
Do This One Thing To Make Your Holidays Healthier
Enjoy your food, enjoy your holidays, but eat slowly.
Take your time to eat it so that you can stop when you feel you have had. Your body will tell you that if you listen to your body, it will tell you so. For example, yesterday for dinner, we had my husband made lentils and spicy cauliflower, and it was delicious.
We still had some of the candy, the bomb bonds left over from the night before. So I ate my lentils and spicy cauliflower, and I love spicy cauliflower. It's absolutely delicious. Then after I'd eaten that, I felt full up. And I thought, well, we could have a bomb bon, but actually I feel full up. I don't want to eat a bomb bon now I will save my bomb bon for another day and eat it at some other time when I feel like I have more space.
As opposed to feeling, oh my goodness, if I were to eat something else, now I'm going to pop. And being full of lentils and spicy cauliflower is not a bad thing. Yes, I feel totally satisfied after my meal because I enjoyed my meal and it happened to be healthy. Goodness. So I know that I am saying this a lot, but slow down.
Enjoy your. And that is my main message for you today. Now remember to go and sign up for that workshop because it really will help you make shift. And there were other things that we talked about as well, but I think the main thing is making this shift of really growing this belief that I am somebody who takes care of myself, and that will really help you to make short term decisions and long term.
Now if you are interested in joining in joining My Healthy You Healthy Family program, at the moment, I have restructured how I do it. And so what I was doing was having a payment plan where you could break down your payments, but I've taken that away now and I'm going to do a three month. So the main program is Lifetime.
Wow. Amazing. I know. Lifetime support of group coaching. So that you can always have support, always feel that you can get back on track. Have that accountability, have my expertise, helping you to lead your healthiest life. Now what I have done is made a three month program because I know that a lot of people are super excited about the prospect of it, but it feels like a big jump to go from nothing to lifetime.
So what I've done is staggered it so that you can join for three months and then obviously if you want to carry on, you can do that as well. But it's a sort of try it for a short period of. And then be totally wowed by the transformations you have and want to carry on. So if you are interested in joining the Healthy You Healthy Family Program, right now.
There is an amazing bonus on if you book a call by the end of this week, so the 25th of November, you don't have to have the call by the 25th. You need to book the call. So next week, I know that I have lots of time in my calendar, so come and book a call for next week or this week. This week is perfect too, and we can talk about what it will look like for you.
To make those changes and have the support, the accountability, the expertise, helping you so that it's easy and fun so that you get this amazing transformation, like the amazing women who are already in that group. So book a call to find out about the bonus, to find out how you can be supported in getting to your healthiest you, and really, really enjoying it and making 2023.
Your amazing year and we'll be talking more about 2023 in the next coming weeks. Have a fabulous week and I look forward to chatting to you. Bye-bye.
