To Enjoy Yourself or Not

That is the holiday question

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season and spending it with family, friends, or alone if that’s what makes you happy (let’s be honest, sometimes a little alone time during the holidays is to be desired).

While I hope you are enjoying yourself during this time, I hope you aren’t enjoying yourself too much. Or rather, enjoying yourself too much in the wrong way!

Research has shown that we have a tendency to gain the most weight in our calendar year around the holidays. See the chart below:

This isn’t so surprising considering that it has become common practice to turn a one or two-day holiday into a month-long celebration full of drinking, eating junk food, and not getting to the gym. A recipe for weight gain.

I brought this up yesterday on Instagram and was met with a bit of resistance from some folks saying that we should enjoy ourselves during the holidays and not be worried about gaining weight.

I agree!

We should enjoy ourselves during the holiday. I know I enjoyed some of my mom’s homemade cooking and some of my father-in-law’s whiskey-filled Irish cream. I think this is a natural and healthy thing for us to do during the holidays and it sure beats the hell out of bringing Tupperware to the holiday dinner party.

But while we should enjoy ourselves, we should also be sure to keep ourselves in check. Enjoying ourselves during the holidays does not have to mean spending the next 5 days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve drinking cocktails, eating sugar cookies, and snoozing our alarm to the gym each day.

Enjoying ourselves can look like having a day or two where we treat ourselves and give in to some temptations, followed by getting back on track with our diet and getting our butts to the gym for some exercise.

In my opinion, this is the ultimate “treat” we can give to ourselves. We give ourselves a day or two to not feel guilt around the decisions we are making because it is a single day and it will not be what causes our weight to spike like in the chart above. But when we follow that up with getting back on track with our health goals, we are also treating ourselves to feeling better, being more confident, and having a smaller hole to dig out of with our new year’s resolutions.

Ultimately, I think you should do what you want this holiday season because it’s not my job to tell you what to do. But what I can say is that from my experience, giving your personal health a little TLC during the next 4-5 days will be something that future you will be happy about.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Irvin

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