5 Key Ways to Sabotage Your Health During the Holidays

The holiday season is here! This typically means an increased exposure to cut-out sugar cookies, sugar-laden pumpkin pie, decadent chocolate boxes and wine. If that weren’t enough, your schedule may be filled with holiday parties where they serve trays of overindulgent foods that light up the pleasure center of your brain and translate to less than desirable health outcomes. 

Please do not panic!

Here’s the thing: It is entirely possible to enjoy the holidays without excessively indulging in high glycemic foods and alcohol, but that also does not mean depriving yourself of all of the delicious foods and beverages that you love. 

Today, I’m sharing the most common ways that you may be sabotaging your health during the holidays, so that you can be aware and choose differently. 

1. You Let One “Bad” Choice Determine the Rest of the Choices

One meal or one day is not going to break your progress. Instead of accepting a downward spiral from Thanksgiving to the New Year, remind yourself that there is plenty of time to focus on your goals right now and finish the year strong. 

If you spend the entire holiday season eating less optimal foods, skipping your workouts and drinking too much alcohol then you aren’t going to feel good and you’ll be that much further from your 2025 goals. Do not wait until January 1st to get back on track. Do not try to “get the most out of being off track”. 

For the next four weeks, focus on habits that will carry you into a healthier 2025. Start now and avoid the holiday slide. Make yourself feel proud of how you finish out 2024. You can absolutely do this!

2. You Skip Meals to Save Up on Calories for Later 

Many of our clients regularly skip breakfast or lunch because they perceive that they are too busy OR because they are saving up their calories for wine, pizza or cake later in the night. 

If you want to improve your health, you have to make time for eating meals and stop believing the lie that a calorie is a calorie. When you skip meals to save up your calories for later in the day, it backfires 98% of the time. You will usually eat or drink more than you would have if you had a meal prior to the indulgences. Eating regular meals help you regulate blood sugar and hunger hormones, feel more satiated and naturally feel a higher level of control when you are around the wine, pizza and cake. 

Also keep in mind that large caloric deficits do not work for most people. Undereating and over exercising can lead to over activating your sympathetic nervous system. This can lead to increases in cortisol, increases in blood sugar (through gluconeogenesis), and a breakdown of muscle. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone so chronically high cortisol can lead to a breakdown of muscle and pull amino acids from them which means less ability to store glucose which makes it much easier to gain body fat, experience inflammation and become insulin resistant. 

At the bare minimum, stop skipping meals! And try eating several non-starchy vegetables before you head to a party or holiday gathering. If the party you attend doesn’t serve many vegetables then that’s fine! You loaded up in advance! Loading up on vegetables that contain fiber helps slow down gastric emptying and the breakdown of carbohydrates in the small intestine which leads to lower surges in blood sugar levels. This process helps to increase compounds that signal to the hypothalamus that you are satisfied. 

3. You Don’t Fully Believe How Much Food Can Transform Health

Here’s something that I heard recently that really resonated: A lot of people say they prioritize their health but if this is truly a priority to you, show me where in your calendar and in your budget that it’s a priority. And I’m not just talking about at the start of the new year–I’m talking about consistently every week and during the holiday season. 

If people truly understood how much food impacted health, they would never find ways to make excuses for not fueling their bodies well on a consistent basis. When I understood how important reading was for children’s development, I prioritized reading books as often as possible.  

Dr. Mark Hyman recently shared in a senate testimony: “The data are clear: food – not medication – can reverse type 2 diabetes. Eating whole real food is not simply helpful in preventing disease, it is the most effective treatment for the most costly and debilitating diseases facing Americans. 

And yet, our funding reveals an obvious priority asymmetry: we pay around $1 billion for nutrition services a year for type 2 diabetes and an extra $85 billion in additional medications for patients with diabetes … an 85-fold difference that represents a lost opportunity to invest in reversing a curable disease that costs America $412 billion a year.

The solution is not more access to health care, better disease management, or lower drug prices, all necessary but not sufficient. The solution is addressing the root cause. 

In other words, it’s time that we turn off the sink. Utilizing the science of lifestyle and functional medicine, we can address the root causes of illness. 

That is because lifestyle and functional medicine uses food as medicine to prevent, treat, and even cure chronic disease. In other words, food need not only be the cause of what ails America – it can be the cure, too. This isn’t theory – it’s fully documented science.” 

If I were a doctor, the FIRST thing I would recommend for ANY PATIENT with ANY CONDITION is a structured anti-inflammatory nutrition protocol. Why? Because when nutrition is addressed as the foundational intervention it can 1) reverse an astonishing number of clinical conditions beyond type 2 diabetes, 2) simultaneously make people feel so much better (more energy, mental capacity, positive mood, etc.) and 3) extend lifespan. This includes reversing type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, heart disease, cancer, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, dementia, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, hashimotos, crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, infertility, PCOS, rheumatoid arthritis, insomnia and every other sleep disorder, anxiety, depression, acne, eczema, hives and more.

4. You Give Up on Yourself too Soon 

The difference between people who succeed and people who struggle is that people who succeed don’t give up on themselves when they are met with opposition or when they get off track. They don’t blame themselves and cycle into patterns of feeling shame and guilt. They train themselves to see failures as learning opportunities and continue. 

To add to that, people give up on a nutrition protocol within a month because they don’t see drastic changes on the scale in the first 30 days. First things first: 

Stop using your weight as the primary measurement of your success. Success can also be measured by decreasing inflammation, lowering blood sugar, having regular bowel movements, feeling energized, creating health and improving the quality of your life. These can be much more powerful measurements. Also–you could be improving your body composition (building muscle and losing fat) without seeing a change on the scale. 

A second point: Stop expecting overnight success. In the last seven months I have focused on optimizing my health and hormones and improving my body composition after back to back pregnancies to Irish twins and gaining close to 50 pounds. I’ve been reminded of the mental stamina it takes to be consistent for 7 months and to continue even when you don’t see an immediate payout. It’s not easy but it is worth it. Time will pass whether you invest in your health or not so keep investing! 

5. You Ignore the Importance of Sleep 

This holiday season, be sure to prioritize sleep whenever you can. Poor sleep is linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, reduced attention span, poor memory and irritability. Sleep loss has also been shown to impair glucose metabolism and increase levels of insulin, which increases your risk of Type 2 Diabetes and is also associated with obesity, hypertension and heart disease. 

A few years ago I gave a lecture at the National Sleep Disorder Conference highlighting to all of the physicians, NPs and nurses an extremely profound connection…

• Better Nutrition = Better Sleep (blood sugar balance, nutrient status, inflammation and other factors influence sleep regulating hormones that help with sleep onset and quality). The more ultra-processed foods you eat, the more likely you are to experience chronic insomnia. 
• Better Sleep = Better Nutrition (research shows that inadequate sleep alters your hunger hormones, driving you to eat more high glycemic and processed foods the next day). If you want to decrease your appetite and feel satiated and less tempted by processed foods, be sure to get enough sleep this holiday season! 

Final Thoughts

If your goal is to have energy, reverse any conditions or symptoms, prevent diseases that your parents were diagnosed with, model healthy choices to your kids and get healthier in your 40s than you were in your 20s then stay focused on the long game. Even during the holiday season. Enjoy less optimal foods occasionally but remind yourself of why you want to stay as consistent as possible. And seek out examples of people who are living proof of consistently investing in their health year round because this makes a huge difference!