Anticipating Weight Loss After The Holiday Madness

As the holidays approach we often find ourselves in anticipation mode. We ponder the difficult terrain ahead: holiday parties, food based gifts, new year’s, with sugar, flour, and alcohol everywhere. We can’t even go to the grocery store without a free sample of that creamy, cheesy, sugary thing being thrown in our face (by our own hand). It’s a free for all!

Since the holiday landscape consists so much of this, we look ahead — right past the holidays to the  a world of healthy eating, weight loss, and a less difficult environment. It’s called “a new year’s resolution”. This anticipation would be fine except our minds tend to take this as an opportunity to store up for the impending fast. We become bears eating as much as possible before the long winter ahead. Sound familiar? The problem is that we are not bears. We aren’t going to starve for the next 3 months. We are going to gain a few pounds and then go back to the regularly scheduled program.

So what to do? How about really looking at the holidays instead of avoiding them? How about seeing where and how we can practice during the month and being ok if and when we can’t. How about moving out of anticipation, fear, and agitation and into a place of looking forward to those 1 or 2 or 3 meals that allow us to enjoy what this season has to offer. If we do this our mind is happy to pass on the crummy office cookies. We are in the present knowing that we will not miss out on anything with no pending doom. We can remember that the new year is simply an opportunity to continue our work of evolving ourselves into the person we wish to be.

May we all be present this holiday season.
Brandt