Merry day after Christmas. I hope you got to spend the weekend the way I did, surrounded by family and food. In this case I was with my Alli's family. This goes to strengthen my point. I've been spending Christmas with wife's side of the family basically for the past 10 years.
We hosted our first Christmas this year. Other than location, not much changed though. The food was pretty much the exact same; there was the addition of a delicious apple crisp.
This happens on my side of the family too (we do Thanksgiving with my side). People may bring a new food but the traditional foods never get replaced. People even take over recipes when family members pass away. Alli makes her grandmother's "knot" cookies every year.
This brings me to my point. As we come up to the new year, lots of you will have weight loss goals. In the search for advice some of you may come across memes or (even worse) nutritional/fitness experts who say things like "food is only fuel" or "food is just for nourishment".
Don't listen to them. People who say things like this suffer from one of two things:
- they've unfortunately never spent any time with friends and family surrounding a table full of food and laughing their asses off
- they're stupid.
I guess there's a third possibility in which they check both boxes. The point is if you want to lose weight and, more importantly, keep it off then you need to have a good relationship with food.
Treating food as simply a fuel source means you'll skip out on hanging out with friends or you'll be the miserable, hungry cousin at the next family function. Neither of these situations lead to weight loss. As a matter of fact they usually lead to you alone eating a pint of ice cream and hating yourself. Again, this doesn't lead to weight loss.
So if weight loss is one of your goals for the new year, then you need to learn to enjoy food without over doing it. You need to learn be around food without being tempted by it. You need to learn to appreciate food for what it is (fuel) and the experiences and enjoyment that it provides.
What are the foods you look forward to at every family event?
