Ah January, here you are.
With your promises of fresh starts, your good intentions and your freezing cold weather.
If you’re anything like me then you probably start January every year feeling a bit bloated, tired, very poor and filled with good intentions. In fact, you’re looking forward to early morning runs in the icy cold and lots of salad.
For 2 or 3 days anyway.
It’s tempting to start a New Year with the urge to change everything. However, while Christmas and New Year tends to be a time of gluttonous debauchery and spendthriftery that would shame us any other time of year, there are some positive behaviour changes we tend to make over Christmas that it might just be worth hanging on to.
I’ve picked 4, that I’m sure I do more over Christmas, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other people do too.
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Treating every day like it’s special
I bet on Christmas Day you ate off your best china and drank from the crystal glasses. Perhaps you just got dressed nicely and ate at the table when you weren’t even leaving the house. Maybe you made sure your pyjamas were all matching and colour coordinated. Or maybe you just lit your best smelly candles so the house smelt nice.
You should do that all the time. Really.
Making yourself feel special in little ways should be an everyday thing. Everyone deserves to feel good, and there’s no sense in sitting around waiting for someone else to do it.
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Staying in touch with friends and family
I’m terrible at staying in touch with people, and I spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it too. In fact, I’m so awful that I don’t even remember to send Christmas Cards and I have 3 years worth that I’ve bought in my decorations box *gulp*
At Christmas and New Year though we do often find ourselves renewing friendships in other little ways. We send New Year texts, special Twitter thank yous and we might find ourselves “liking” more Facebook statuses. We tend to reflect and think about all the people we love and how we’d like to see more of them.
Well KEEP IT UP! This year I’m trying to make plans for how I might actually get to SEE some of those people this year, instead of missing them at Christmas and then getting caught back up in the hurly burly of every day life.
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Buying good food
I bet at Christmas you also bought the Taste the Difference Cave Aged Extra Mature Cheddar, instead of one of those huge rubbery blocks. You might have bought a box of fancy decorated Belgian Chocolates and I bet you bought real, extra thick, luxury double cream instead of Elmlea.
If you buy the fancy cheese that actually tastes nice you’ll need less of it, eat less of it, and ultimately consume fewer calories and lose weight. But you won’t feel deprived, you’ll feel like it’s a treat. Happy people don’t comfort eat entire family sized pizzas and then despise themselves for not sticking to their lettuce leaf and ice water diet. Well, not every day.
Moderation is key, of course it IS possible to consume an entire box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting, I know, I’ve done it. Hopefully the treat element, and the cost, will help you with your moderation. You couldn’t afford to do it everyday, where as a daily bar huge bar of Dairy Milk could easily be within most people’s budgets!
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Eating proper meals
Most people eat 3 meals a day over most of the Christmas period, and a lot of them are eaten sat at a table that’s spent the rest of the year covered in piles of mail.
Christmas gluttony is bad. An awful lot of people also spent Christmas eating an entire chocolate orange in one sitting and wondering where that tube of Pringle’s they got out as a mid afternoon snack could possibly have gone. If you want to feel less bloated in January then skip the snacks and junk, but hang onto those good eating habits you acquired through December.
Stews, chillis, steaks and fresh veg are far less depressing than a prawn salad and less likely to leave you reaching for the takeaway menu. Eat them sat at the table and actually concentrate on your dinner and you’ll find yourself wanting to snack less and losing even more weight.
