Wellness Holiday Tips

Celebrate the Holidays in a Healthy Way

The holidays are a time to celebrate abundance, friends, and family. It’s also a great time to maintain your health by practicing holiday wellness. All of these celebrations are fun, but they may begin to compound and impact our overall well-being. Here are some Wellness Holiday Tips that will help you during holiday entertaining. Follow our suggestions, and you won’t have to make a New Year’s resolution for a strict diet program – you’ll already be on the road to a healthier you!

During the holidays three main areas often have a significant impact on a person’s well-being: Eating, Exercise, and Stress Management. Below are five wellness holiday tips to help you finish up the holidays feeling good and increasing your overall wellbeing rather than feeling like you need to play catch up.

TIP #1 | BE MINDFUL
‘Tis the season of scatteredness and chaos! Increase your mindfulness this holiday season. As our schedules become busier with holiday shopping, decorating and parties to attend it is easy to feel overwhelmed. In this holiday craziness, it is common to find increased levels of stress and overeating. It is also easy to put our self-care on the back burner just trying to get through the season. When we slow down the pace and allow our minds to focus on the present moment, we can support our highest well-being and get more done with less anxiety and frivolous eating. Put the diet programs and weight loss programs on hold and simply practice mindfulness and healthy eating for the holidays.

TIP #2 | MAKE SELF-CARE A PRIORITY
This is the time of year when it is easy to make ourselves be the least important, but it is the time when we must make sure we are taking the time for self-care. We must watch the foods that we are eating and ask ourselves if what we consume is for our highest good. Are we eating because we’re hungry or just eating to eat? Sometimes we are dehydrated and simply need to make sure we are drinking enough water. Be sure you are snacking on healthy foods and not snacking on things that are dense in chemicals, sugars, and saturated fats. Think about how good you feel after eating nutritious meals and snacks.

TIP #3 | EMPHASIZE PROTEIN AND FRIENDLY FATS
Practicing healthy eating for the holidays is vital. Holiday wellness is simple when we do simple things like emphasizing protein and healthy fats. The more we eat of these two types of foods, the more satiated we will feel making it less likely to overeat. When we eat calories that are low in nutrition and high in sugars and unhealthy fats, not only are we consuming empty calories but eating foods that impact all parts of our well-being in a careless and depleting way. Snack on wonderful and delicious things like Nature’s Eats Nuts, Nature’s Eats Seeds, and Nature’s Eats Healthy Trail Mixes. They will satiate you, and you’ll feel great!

TIP #4 | WATCH YOUR ALCOHOL
‘Tis the season to be jolly and drink. The opportunities and reasons to drink increase as we get closer to the holidays. Healthy eating for the holidays helps our overall wellness, but so does drinking less. The holidays become a time for social events, and many of those events come with adult drinks. The opportunities for drinking alcohol tend to be around every corner at this time of the year. You may instead want to find ways for natural stress relief that will contribute more to your overall well-being.

Although a little alcohol may not have a huge impact, when we consume too much it can affect things like taking us off our diet programs, adding unnecessary calories, affecting our moods, not getting good sleep, as well as leaving us feeling a little more run down and tired.

TIP #5 | FIND TIME TO EXERCISE
We must take the time to get physical activity in whether it is running, going to the gym, or maybe practicing yoga. By waking up each day and reminding yourself that it is a priority you will make the time. If you can only squeeze in 20 minutes of exercise per day, it is important that you still take the time to do so as part of your holiday wellness plan. Exercise is also a natural stress relief and can help you manage stress during this busy time of year.

Whether you follow and implement all of our wellness holiday tips or just one, it’s the little things we do that make the biggest impact on our lives. Holiday tips are just an easy way to be aware of our behaviors and choices to help us support ourselves in feeling our best during this joyful time of year.

Written by Lisa Saremi