How to Avoid Overeating During the Holidays

We can all tend to “over” a lot of things during the holidays.

Overeating, overdrinking, overspending….oftentimes because the holidays can be overwhelming.

When things are overwhelming during the holiday season, you can start looking to food as something that will help to ease the stress. Drinks too.

Even when you don’t feel overwhelmed, the joy of the season can be enough to lead to overeating and overdrinking.

In fact, there was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that concluded that the average person in the study gained 0.37 kg (just under a pound) of weight during the holidays.

There were 195 participants in the study and they were weighed for 3 different periods: pre-holiday (late September through mid-November, holiday (mid-November through January), and post-holiday (January through March).

The holiday weight gain was much more significant compared to the pre- and post-holiday weight gain.

So what is it about the holidays that makes you want to overindulge?

For one, you are surrounded by the sight and smell of cookies, pecan pie, cheese and crackers, stuffed mushroom caps, bacon-wrapped scallops, all the delicious things.

Plus, you want to share in the festivities with friends and family, so it’s easy to lose awareness of just how much you are eating.

Eating should be an enjoyable aspect of any holiday, but it shouldn’t be a cause of negative results like guilt, not feeling well, or even weight gain.

So, I want to share with you how to avoid overeating during the holidays, so the only “over” in your holidays this year, is “overjoyed.”

Don’t Show Up at A Holiday Party Hungry

It only makes sense to come hungry to a holiday party where there will be plenty of delicious food, right? If you’re trying to avoid overeating though, this is the worse thing you can do.

When you see and smell all the tasty food, your brain is triggered to perform an action. That action is to eat. When there is an abundance of tasty smells and sights, you are more likely to eat an abundant amount, especially if you’re hungry.

When you arrive hungry, your brain’s goal is to just eat so you can satisfy that hunger need. You end up eating foods you might not have chosen otherwise.

The ease of which the food is available makes it easy to overeat as well.

• Related: 5 Clever Ways to End Overeating
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When you’re at a party, the food is already prepared, and strategically placed in bite sizes on plates to make it easy for you to eat. It’s typically displayed in an area close to where everyone is sitting or standing too.

This sets you up to overeat, because you are more likely to perform the action of eating, when the food is easy to obtain.

So, the combination of the triggers of delicious sights and smells, the easy access, the abundance, and your hunger, will make it almost impossible to avoid overeating.

• Related: How to Conquer Your Eating and Drinking Urges

If you take away one of these though, you can increase your chance of success and avoid overeating.

Since you can’t really control the sight, smell, or display, or location of the food, you have to control your level of hunger prior to arriving. If you take away the hunger, you are then making it a little less likely to overeat.

What I like to do is, eat a smaller, healthy meal prior to going to a party, so I’m no longer hungry, but not full either.

That allows me to indulge and enjoy some foods at the party, while not overindulging and eating way more than I wanted or needed to. I find that because I eat beforehand, I tend to only choose the foods that look the most delicious to me, rather than trying a bit of everything.

Avoid the Breakroom at Work

It’s the time of year when your colleagues start bringing in desserts to work. Whether it’s leftovers or boxes of chocolates or other treats they’ve gotten as gifts.

So nice of them to share the holiday joy with their colleagues, isn’t it?

Not really.

They bring them in for everyone else, because they don’t want to eat the unhealthy treats themselves.

So you end up seeing them every time you walk by the coffee machine at work, or every time you go in the breakroom. It makes it that much more difficult for you to avoid overeating during the holidays.

What can make it more difficult is when your colleagues are eating the treats in front of you, or even telling you, “oh you should go get a few of those delicious cookies that Cathy brought in before they’re gone.”

• Related: Sugar Addiction and How to Stop the Cycle

Although it’s impossible to control what other people are doing, you can at least control what you do. You can avoid walking into the breakroom frequently (or at all), and also see if you can take any detours to avoid seeing the tempting treats by the coffee machine.

In my former career as a Physician Assistant, I worked in both the office and the hospital, so would see all kinds of holiday treats. Early on in my career, especially when I was very stressed, I would go for the cookie (or three). It quickly became a habit on days I was feeling stressed.

I developed much better eating habits since then though, so stopped being tempted by those treats. This took practice though. The more you practice, the easier it becomes, I promise.

Bring Food Gifts to a Food Pantry or Homeless Shelter

It’s inevitable, you’ll probably get a food gift from someone this year. Meaning, a gift basket full of packaged, processed, sugary, fatty, salty foods. Or, a platter of cookies that you really didn’t need.

You can either throw them out, give them to someone else who probably doesn’t want to be eating them either, or donate them.

This year, I recommend trying to donate them by giving them to your local food pantry, church or homeless shelter. If they are unopened, packaged foods, they’re more likely to be accepted.

You can even take it one step further and tell your neighbors, friends, and family to bring over their unwanted food gifts too, so you can make one trip to drop off all of it.

It’s a win-win situation.

It helps you to avoid overeating during the holidays, and you get to do something nice for someone else who doesn’t otherwise get to experience much holiday joy.

Decide Ahead of Time

When you decide ahead of time what you’ll eat at a certain holiday function, then you’re using your pre-frontal cortex to make the decision, rather than the primitive brain.

Your pre-frontal cortex is the part of the brain that allows for decision-making that supports your future well-being. This is kind of like the “adult” part of the brain.

Contrast that with the primitive part of your brain, which is more like the child who acts more “in the moment” and will tend towards instant gratification, rather than future well-being.

• Related: How to Eat Mindfully, for Busy Women

When you decide ahead of time (at least a day before), you are making a decision of what you’ll eat from a place of caring about your near or far future health.

Then, when the next day comes and you are faced with making a decision, your brain will remind you of what you already decided. You may not follow through every time, but the more you practice it, the more you will follow through and be successful at it.

Add in Some Exercise

Overeating means eating more than your caloric needs are for the day. When done frequently, this can lead to weight gain.

Another way to avoid overeating during the holidays is to increase your caloric needs. What I mean by that is, increase your activity level, so that you actually need those extra calories you are consuming.

That way, if you are eating more than usual during the holidays, you are more balanced. If you’re eating more, but also burning more, there is a good likelihood you won’t be in enough of a calorie surplus to cause weight gain.

Unfortunately, the holiday season is during the colder weather (for those of us in the north), so it may not be as appealing to go out for a walk or jog. There are other ways to get exercise indoors though, even if you don’t belong to a gym. You just have to be creative.

A way I boost my motivation to go for long walks or even a run in the colder weather is knowing that I’ll warm up quickly and then be very comfortable for most of the walk or run.

I’ll even sometimes make hot tea to bring with me for a long winter walk, which helps substantially during that first half mile when you haven’t quite warmed up yet.

Final Notes

Something else to keep in mind to help you avoid overeating during the holidays is that food will never make you feel better for longer than a minute or two.

If you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed, sad, or lonely, food will only add more negative emotion because once the short-lived pleasure wears off, the guilt or disappointment begins.

Another thing is that if you use food to add to the joy of the season, know that you can still enjoy it just as much without overdoing it. When you purposefully choose what treats you’ll eat during the holidays, you are more likely to really savor them.

Once you start practicing the above tactics, you’ll start creating a habit of healthier holiday food choices. You’ll re-train your brain and start to easily avoid overeating during the holidays.