Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s… In the last few months of the year the festivities, holidays, and activities steadily build. Many complain about the stress of the holiday season and say they look forward to the calm of January; however, it is common to experience some let down, sadness, and loneliness in the wake of celebrations, family, and friends. Don’t let January steal your joy.
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Schedule time with friends. Now, in the relative calm, is the perfect time to plan one-on-one time with friends and catch up, or perhaps with that someone new you met at a holiday party that you would like to get to know. Restaurants should have more availability and traffic will be refreshingly decreased. Create an excuse to wear those new things Santa left under the tree, and get out of the house.
New years is right around the corner, meaning everyone is determining their New Year’s resolution. What will yours be? For most/many, it is to lose weight or to get into shape. Here are a few helpful tips for getting you a jump start on your weight loss goal:
1. Start small. Make realistic, attainable goals. You want to stay motivated, so by setting and meeting small goals will keep your fire burning and you will feel strong to take on another more challenging goal.
2. Try to eat out less often. Unless you are personally preparing your food you truly have no idea what or how many calories and fat you are taking in.
3. Incorporate exercise into your routine. If you’re not ready for daily exercise, doing some every other day would be great, especially if you never exercise.
Today, Molly Wangsgaard, Corporate Dietitian and Program Development Manager for Jenny Craig, Inc., joins us as the featured guest blogger for the final time. Throughout December she shared her insights on surviving the holiday and impending new year in a healthy and enjoyable manner.
It’s that time of year when many people make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, eat more nutritiously or become more active. Unfortunately for many of us, by the time Valentine’s Day rolls around, these goals are but a distant memory.
Often this occurs because we set goals that are too ambitious or too vague, or because we fall victim to the “all-or-nothing” mentality that suggests we’ve “failed” if we lapse just once.
This year, make kinder, gentler and more realistic goals. Create an action plan of healthy habits you’d like to learn, with reasonable milestones for achieving them. And treat the process itself as a journey where you discover more about yourself along the way.
We all know that New Year’s resolutions have an extremely high rate of failure. Life change is tough work and many people set very ambitious goals. Life will get in the way one way or another. Too often people allow slip ups or breaks to discourage them to the point of giving up, and by March we’re back to life as it was the previous year. How can you successfully take advantage of the new beginning of a new year?
One of my favorite examples is the story of a woman who drank sweetened tea throughout each day, until her doctor diagnosed diabetes and instructed her to drastically limit her intake of sugar. Going from a tablespoon of sugar per glass of tea to unsweetened tea could be a change drastic enough to cause distress, defeat, and hopelessness. One sip and she’s likely to think unhelpful thoughts like “I can’t do this” or “I’ll never get used to this,” and resign herself to drinking her sugary tea. Instead, I would encourage her to swipe just a few granules of sugar off the top of her tablespoon before adding it to her tea.
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